Of the two big cinematic, multiversal adventures that hit cinemas last May,
I think it s safe to say that one has eclipsed the other. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of
Madness was a thrilling, well-performed, romp replete with some classic Sam Raimi flourishes,
but Everything Everywhere All at Once was well, it was Everything Everywhere All at Once. In
the months following release, even a lot of Marvel fans begun pointing to Everything Everywhere as an
example of what the Doctor Strange sequel should have been, how it should have used this multiverse
conceit. And while I do agree in a lot of ways the A24 film was a lot more creative, narratively,
visually, thematically, in approaching this multiversality there is a moment in
the Marvel film which I keep coming back to. (clip STRANG E: where is this? AMERICA: Home.)
We don t spend long in this place. We don t even really visit there while the film does see Doctor
Strange and America Chavez hopping between a few dimensions, this is just a memory, a memory of
the universe America is from. And yet? I think this one of the most crucial moments put to film
in this current age of the multiverse because we re seeing a text brushing up against the
very edge of what is possible or rather, what is possible for a blockbuster like this to imagine.
What are the limits of the multiverse? At first glance, that question might seem paradoxical. Isn
t the whole point of this conceit that nothing is out of bounds? That somewhere out there,
every possible timeline, every possible configuration of potentiality is playing out,
is there for us to see? Well, you might think so, but that isn t really what we ve seen. The
multiverse as a concept is nothing new, but in the last few years it s become mainstream,
becoming an increasingly central part of much new media, particularly (though not exclusively,
in TV and film perhaps most notably forming the backbone of Marvel s Phase 4 and acting as the
core of the aforementioned, Oscar-nominated Everything Everywhere. We ve also seen Sony
and DC fore instance leaning more and more on the concept, and over the past year or so, it seems
the very notion of cinematic continuity itself has become a mere adjunct of the multiverse. With
all this new multiversal focus, though, you may well wonder why is everything still so similar?
I m not talking about the different continuities, the different Spider-Men,
X-Men, Batmen now designated elsewords . Most of these settings weren t initially conceived
as multiversal, as different, divergent timelines. I m thinking more about the spaces we travel to,
or whose inhabitants visit us. I m thinking about the worlds we see in Everything Everywhere,
within which these alternate Evelyns are found, the snatches of difference we see in Loki and What
If?, the alternate realities Strange and America jump to in their flight from the Scarlet Witch,
and the homeworlds of Spider-verse s variants. In these settings, specifics change characters make
different choices, technology becomes sleek and futuristic, traffic lights switch their colours,
fingers become hot dogs but the worlds these things are happening in are just so very
normal. We re offered a few fleeting glances at different worlds, really different worlds,
but it s impossible to ignore that without fail, the main bodies of these works of
multiversal fiction recoil from real difference, and content themselves with superficial difference
masking an underlying sameness. What, then, is the essence of this sameness, where are its outlines,
and why do they seem so firm? Well to answer that we need to talk about capitalist realism.
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism . That
quote s been attributed to a few different people: Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Zizek, H. Bruce
Franklin but perhaps the first person to really investigate this idea, to dig into how capitalism
s managed to camouflage itself as the default, as a non-ideological ideology, was Mark Fisher,
in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism. Fisher s concept of capitalist realism describes this,
the way late capitalism, particularly in the decades since Thatcher and Reagan,
has enmeshed itself so thoroughly in the mind of the capitalist subject that not
only has it become accepted as the only viable political and economic system, but that even
imagining an alternative has become impossible. I want to suggest that this is the essence of
that multiversal sameness. That this is why it s so rare to see another universe that doesn t
boil down to New York but better tech because imagining anything really different but still
modern, still human is now all but beyond our ability. We do see glimpses in these projects
of unfamiliar worlds, but they re either non-human or utterly peripheral. Instead,
the vast majority of the worlds we ve seen in this recent bubble of multiversal
media, practically all of the ones which have any real bearing on the stories being told,
resemble our own, resemble late capitalism, just wearing different masks, or painted in different
colours. The result of capitalist realism is an inability to envisage any modern human society
that doesn t look more or less like ours. So the distributed bureaucracy of sorting out your tax
return becomes a symbol of inevitability, and it s easier to pitch, it s easier to watch, it
s easier to believe a world of hot-dog people than a world not driven by market imperatives. Because
if we are seeing different worlds, alternate timelines, that is what we should be seeing.
Capitalist realism describes the way we take this system for granted, the way capitalism s simply
become understood as the natural, inevitable end-point of human social, economic, and political
development. Of course, it isn t. Historians such as Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood have
shown that the emergence of capitalism wasn t a foregone conclusion, that the eventual development
of capitalism, after thousands of years of human commerce, was driven by the particular,
distinctive system of social property relations in the early modern English economy. Capitalism
denies its own contingency, modern society no longer effectively opposes, questions, or
even really perceives the political system which controls it but it isn t a given, it never was,
and so there s no historical reason that fiction which explores the different possibilities of
human development should presuppose its presence. It s forgivable in stories set in alternate
timelines which only recently diverged from our own - but that isn t all of them. Everything
Everywhere, of course, imagines a world where humanity developed from hot-dog fingered apes,
and yet the modern day is identical. Spider-verse introduces a pig version of Peter Parker,
who s from a world of anthropomorphic animals that developed exactly as ours did. These examples
are humorous ones, are riffing on alternate timeline tropes but the non-porcine examples
operate the same way. Everything is on the table, everything can be different, even how
many dimensions the dimension has, except for the socio-political system in which these alternate
humans live. Individually, there s no problem with any of these worlds, but surveyed as a whole? The
multiverse trend is the perfect indicator of just how limited our culture s imagination
has become because what we see is a glut of media, oriented around a concept which should
be anathema to this capitalist realism, instead displaying just how ingrained it really is.
Even Everything Everywhere, supposedly the most imaginative multiverse project, isn t able to
imagine an alternative. In a fairly important moment, that film does create a different space, a
space in which its characters can decompress from the economic and social strains of modern life but
the only way it s able to do this is to locate this space in a timeline where humanity never
existed. Look, I like the googly-eyed rocks scene, of course I do, but it s telling the film has to
go this far, has to abandon humanity altogether in order to escape the pressures of capitalist
modernity. This is why that America flashback in Multiverse of Madness stuck with me because here,
finally, we see something else, we see human life in another form, different but recognisable.
I don t want to oversell this moment, but it is interesting, right? The fact that this film
seems aware, on some basic conceptual level, that human life can exist outside the bounds
of capitalism. We can see dim sparks of this awareness elsewhere in the text, too
(clip AMERICA: food s free in most universes, actually. Weird you have to pay for it.)
. To be clear, capitalism isn t simply the condition of having to pay for food but I imagine
it s a fairly good multiversal litmus test. Unfortunately, though this is pretty much as far
as it goes. Though the film does appear to grant that alternate human lifeways, beyond our world,
our world but sleek, our world but incursion, are possible the closest Multiverse of Madness, billed
as a wild exploration of a chaotic, zany infinity, comes to imagining them is a line of dialogue and
a 10 second memory a memory which for various paratextual reasons I ll maybe lay out later in
a Patreon endnote might not be so potent a vision after all. Far from representing some dormant
multiversal potential to push beyond capitalist realism, then, to revive the ability to imagine
humanity beyond capitalism I think in moments like this, we see the limits of the multiverse
we see that the only spaces these projects can imagine, or trust their audiences to believe,
are close analogues to our own, we see they might gesture toward wilder, liberating possibilities,
but that they can never meaningfully inhabit them. Even in media driven by the conceit that
anything is possible, everything exists out there somewhere capitalist realism isn t conquered,
it s reinforced. And I do mean reinforced not merely surrendered to, because in acquiescing
to these borders of what s realistic, what s believable, these projects begin to take an active
role in the propagation of capitalist realism. According to Fisher, one of the ways in which
this capitalist consensus is maintained can be seen in the difference between reality and
the real. This is a distinction inherited from Lacanian psychoanalysis, so, y know,
woof, but to simplify: reality is the way we understand the world, and the real is the world,
the thing we re trying, often failing, to see through reality. To quote Fisher,
the real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures
and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. One of these fractures for example is
the way our capitalist reality responds to the threat of climate change all that s possible,
all this reality can do in the face of a crisis which lays bare the fantasy of infinite growth
and resources upon which the system depends, is greenwash, is incorporate environmental concerns
into marketing strategies. As Fisher writes, environmental catastrophe features in late
capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too
traumatic to be assimilated into the system . This is all fairly abstract, but what I want you
to take away here is the idea that reality , as in, what is considered realistic, the way things
are is, on some level, a mythology, a constructed, naturalised mythology that we subconsciously use
as a key to interpret our unknowably complex existence. With that in mind, consider what we
ve been discussing. Consider a sequence of media properties purporting to explore, to imagine,
the multiverse, to visualise a series of fabulous other worlds, where things are wildly different,
where different choices were made, the butterfly effect in full force but which really just display
funhouse reflections of the mundane. This, we re implicitly told, is all that s available to
imagine, to inhabit, to explore. By proposing this multiverse conceit, and proceeding to
use it in such a limited way, this reality, this mythology of what is believable, what is possible
and what is not is affirmed, again and again. Each time smears on another layer of concrete,
hopeless capitalist realism. Look, you guys have all seen that Disco Elysium screenshot, you ve
heard that corrosive power of capital is such that any critique of capital is eventually subsumed by
it, so by now this whole general paradigm should be a familiar one but all the same,
it is bleakly ironic that in the mainstreaming of the multiverse, alterity itself has been bounded,
in the way we ve taken the idea of other worlds, of every other world,
and used it to recreate our own, again and again. Multiversality had the potential to
reveal the limits of this capitalist reality, but the opposite ended up happening that reality
came to define the limits of the multiverse. And even if you re not convinced that this is
something worth thinking about Isn t it just kind of boring? To meet variant after variant who s
homeworlds are instantly familiar, to see these stories of flight, of jumping haphazardly from
one reality to another, and never feel truly disoriented, to never see a vision of human
existence fundamentally different to our own? Look, none of this is to say that nothing like
this has ever been done comics, for instance, have made more ground here than live-action
multiverses. Fisher s pervasive sense of capitalist realism is still present
here - most of the non-capitalist words we see in the Marvel print multiverse are either dystopic,
ruined societies operating in the fragments of our world, or recognisably historic, atavistic
throwbacks to life before late capitalism, and it s generally the same from other publishers
but I think it s fair to say that before the past few years, before the multiverse went mainstream,
this limitation was less severe. So the point here isn t multiverse bad,
the point isn t even that this manufacturing, this propagation of the capitalist reality myth is the
sole function of the cinematic, the mainstream multiverse but it is A function, one that must
be confronted and the first step toward that confrontation is, surely, awareness. Awareness
of where the limits of these multiverses are, why they stop there, and what that stopping affirms.
Maybe this video will age like milk. Maybe Everything Everywhere s inspired the next
great multiverse story, one more able to imagine and inhabit alterity. Maybe the Spiderverse sequel
or that Flash movie will pull something out the bag, shock and wow us all with a vision of the
multiverse that leaves the familiar well and truly behind. The Ant-Man 3 PR train s included a quote
about the Quantum Realm being Marvel s Dune and even if the Quantum Realm isn t technically a
different universe that feels, vaguely, like a step beyond the mundane worlds we ve been shown
previously. Personally, I hope it does age like milk I d love to see these projects get weird, get
new. But if it doesn t? If the next few years of multiversal blockbusters continue in this mould,
then maybe just bear this video in mind, and remember that these limits don t extend into the
real that other ways, other worlds, are possible. Thanks for watching. Let me know what you thought
below, leave a like if you re feeling generous, and hey if you ve got any mates you think d find
this video interesting, maybe shoot them a link. I d also like to shoutout my much-appreciated
Patreon supporters onscreen now, especially Ryan Emerle thanks, guys! And I ll see you all soon.