Everything, Everywhere, All At Once: Adventures in a quantum zen paradigm

Watching this wonderful movie, I was immediately struck by the way it expresses a quantum reality and a way of presenting meaning that recalls Buddhist narratives, especially the zen depiction of time-being expressed by the13th century zen teacher, Dogen. The day after I watched it, with it's ideas still spinning in my head, I sat down and began writing this hurried, straight-to-the-page, description of the film as seen through this lens. I share it here, not in the attempt of a critique or film review, but as a way of sharing how the film might open doors into some of the more complex ideas that arise in Eastern thought: such as the notion of 'emptiness', the difference between this and nihilism, time-as-Being (and Being as time), karma and the relationship between 'ultimate' and 'relative' reality. The film makes these Buddhist ideas vivid, playful and human. ;-)

A woman – Evelyn - sits in a cluttered room, surrounded by the detritus of a mundane life: laundry and taxes. Hers is a world of complicated relationship; divorce papers, a confused elderly father, a disaffected daughter and the culture clash represented by Evelyn’s inability to communicate – and

validate - her daughter’s gay relationship to her traditional Chinese father.

Meanwhile, down at the tax office the intransigent IRA officer played by Jamie Lee Curtis is about to serve sentence on the family. The Wangs appear to have been cheating the system and the IRA is about to come down on them with the full force of its authority. Divorce, bankruptcy and general disaffection seem to be the subjects of the film’s drama.

Then the film abruptly changes tone. In the IRA office elevator, Evelyn’s feckless-seeming husband, Waymond, informs her that she is not the washed-up catastrophe she feels herself to be. Instead, she is a supreme agent of movement across Multiverses. And she has the capacity to defeat immanent threat to the Multiverse world by joining him in her ability to access the full spectrum of human skills in its defence.

The logic of this paradigm is quickly sketched in. The Multiverse is a quantum model of the time-space continuum, a simultaneous, infinitely branching network of possibilities, whose divergences rest upon the tiniest junctures of human decision. As an illustration of this, we see Waymond courting Evelyn with the invitation to a new life in America and everything that follows from that choice: immigrants in America; setting up the laundro-mat business, pregnancy, a daughter, a life of domestic details.

Crucially, Waymond explains, by accessing the multivalence of the Multiverse, one can access the skills and talents learned in other dimensions of the space-time continuum, the agility of the marshal-artists, the lung-capacity of the opera singer, the dexterity of the chef or the human-sign holder.

Since the fundamental nature of reality is quantum chaos, it’s anarchic possibility can only be accessed by breaking through the illusion of linear ‘sense’. In the first half hour of the movie, Evelyn keeps repeating, “but this doesn’t make sense”, ‘You’re still not making sense’. When the motivation to escape capture from the IRA is intense enough, Evelyn is able to break through ‘sense’. We know this because we see other participants in the Multiverse access their infinite human possibilities through actions of absurdity that break sense apart. “You have three options in this moment,” Waymond tells her: “you can tell the IRA officer you love her, you can fall asleep or you can break your own arm”. The humour of the film is also an expression of its wisdom; the “crazy wisdom” of the Tibetan Buddhist kind, or the Dadaists or the surrealists. We cannot perceive anything beyond our conventional senses so long as we remain in a sense-defining world. Evelyn first achieves access to the Multi-verse only when she is able to break through the reality paradigm that tells her the only possible emotional response to the IRA officer is a combative one. When she gets down upon her knees and finds an authentic expression of love: ka-boom; she’s through.

It’s here in the Multi-verse world that Evelyn first sees how the branching ‘sliding doors’ logic operates, as life upon life accumulates multiple realities branching from the infinite possibilities of human choice. Had Evelyn decided not to follow Waymond to America, there follows the life realised by the decision to stay. Here, she trains as a world-class martial artist. Fame, glamour and success follow. Back in Evelyn’s world, she turns to Waymond and tells him, “My life would have been better if I hadn’t chosen you.”

The film’s initial proposition appears to be simply that there are better lives and lesser lives; good and bad choices that produce more or less better outcomes across the Multi-verse. Waymond tells Evelyn, “This is the perfect universe for you to achieve your full potential. Because you have nothing, you can become everything” suggesting that only from a place of psychological desperation, with ‘nothing to loose’ will Evelyn fully be able to surrender to all the possibilities of the Multi-verse world.

However, it’s also at this stage in the film that the central emotional and philosophical complexity that drives it forward is introduced. The threat to the Multi-verse of which Waymond has spoken is ‘Jobu Tubaki’, an alternate-reality manifestation of Evelyn’s daughter, Joy. Jobu Tubuaki, we learn, is a former student of Eveyln’s in another reality dimension, a student whom Evelyn pushed too far in her capacity to experience the multi-valent world.

The multitudinous simultaneity of existence is conceptualised in the movie as a spinning black bagel: an absurdist allusion to the quantum black hole or the mystical access to the ‘dazzling darkness,’ the chaotic void of pure kinetic potentiality that underpins the- world-as-form. It’s a kind of play on the old Buddhist joke ‘what did the Dalia Lama say to the New York hot dog vendor? Make me One with Everything.’

The black bagel, Jobu Tobaki whispers in Evelyn’s ear is bread and gluten and pastrami and sesame seed, it’s ‘made of everything’. This ‘everything-everywhere-all-at-once-ness’, this chaotic multiplicity of life and meaning has collapsed into nihilistic relativity for Jobu Tubaki: Every-thing-ness is the flip-side of No-thing-ness. In a world of Everythingness, singular meanings cannot be found. Thus life, Jobu Tubaki has concluded, amounts to meaninglessness. Jobu Tubaki’s descent into profound nihilism has long been identified by Buddhist philosophers as the dangerous cul-de-sac of the insight into ultimate Inter-connection, sometimes termed ‘Emptiness’. As a result, she is the antithesis of joy, her namesake in the Evelyn laundro-mat reality. By positing Jobu Tubaki as Eveyln’s nemesis in the Multi-verse, we are given to understand that the key existential task of the movie is to find human meaning within the void of quantum chaos, to exist as a self within the self-cancelling logic of perpetual relativism.

At this point in the movie Evelyn is still holding to the safety of a singular self, “but I’m Eveyln” she keeps saying. Yet as the movie progresses Evelyn begins to experience the beauty of her infinite human possibility, not only the full spectrum of talents she has the capacity to access, but also the spectrum of love.

Evelyn is continually drawn back to the seductive reality of Eveyln as glamorous marshal artist, the life seemingly lived without the choice of following Waymond. (The film is, of course also playing with meta-fictionality: the fact that art itself plays across multiple possible realities and across multiple hierarchies of narrative and authorial omniscience. Here is a film in which Michelle Yeoh appears both as a ‘character’, dowdy Evelyn, and also as a version of her so-called-self – the famous, glamourous, marshal arts celebrity and also someone who watches herself on the movie screen, someone with multiple other dimensions, all as humans are. We’re all actors in the theatre of life, as Shakespeare said).

Yet, later on, we see this glamourous version of Eveyln meeting the version of Waymond that manifests within this multi-verse, a Waymond more successful and confident and one still capable of seducing and loving Evelyn. As they talk under the glittering city night lights, Waymond tells her “I would always have chosen you. Even if that meant a life of laundry and taxes.”

By now, (at least) three characters are circling across Evelyn’s multi-verses; the multiple versions of Waymond, Joy/Jobu Tubaki and, in one of the most seemingly absurdist realities the Jamie Lee Curtis IRA woman as Evelyn’s lesbian lover in a world where everyone has hot dogs for fingers. The film seems to imply that lives continue to cycle through one another, much as Buddhism suggests that human beings exist within ‘karmic circles’ where the causes and effects of our actions-as-energy produce ripple effects across space and time, and where relationship possesses a kind of magnetic principle: with individuals drawn together and drawn apart through the forces of these energies. Put simply, we can see Waymond as a kind of ‘soul mate’ across multiverses, whilst Evelyn and Joy/Tubaki have more complex energetic dissonances to resolve. Is Evelyn able to find a way to both match Jobu Tubaki’s vast cosmic perspective without becoming mentally undone by it and to thereby rescue Jobu Tobaki from existential annihilation? Is Evelyn able to convince her daughter that connection is worth it?

The film also carries subtle narratives on race, gender and sexuality. There’s an implicit recognition that we’ve all been everything everywhere, so why all the bigotry, prejudice and othering? (The kind of causal homophobia and racism set up in the opening scenes of the film). In its call-backs to the reality dimension with the other face of Jamie Lee Curtis, this time seemingly as Evelyn’s lesbian partner, the hot dog hands are symbolically suggestive of the inability to make contact, to connect and find intimacy, perhaps in a world in which this is made impossible in other, more literal ways than those Joy, as a lesbian woman, experiences. Their hot dog hands touch, but fall limp, unable to clasp one another, to hit, to hold, to embrace.

Waymond has hinted at the underlying logic of human interconnection and essential similitude when he announces that the eternal conflicts across the multi-verse (between IRA officers and tax payers, between police and civilian, between men and women, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters) could all be resolved if we could “just try to be kind”. And Waymond is the film’s messenger of just this sort of kindness. Twice he is able to talk the IRA officer down from vindictive action “just by telling her what’s going on”.

As Evelyn increasingly accesses Jobu Tubaki’s levels of polyvalent existential perspective, she gains empathy. She understands Waymond’s love and Joy’s despair. Sitting next to the Jamie Lee Curtis IRA officer, she shares a smoke with her and turns to tell her, “you were always worthy of love”. This understanding seems to echo back from her intimacy with the Jamie Lee Curtis character in another dimension, the world in which she perhaps knew her inner heart: a world in which she was the antithesis of the rigid bureaucrat, a piano-playing lover of Debussy, of cats and of women, but where her true worth and value may have been tragically unseen.

As the film builds to its denouement, the mother-daughter relationship, figured as the ‘existential nihilism versus meaning’ question, moves to centre stage. The film seems to emotionally ‘land’ in the central silent scene where Joy and Evelyn share another multi-verse reality existing as two rocks in the desert. This is the still centre of the film, the place where the chaos becomes quiet for a moment and communication shines as text in the vast white space of an empty sky. Even rocks are part of the sentient whole. Physics is the law of attraction and repulsion. Evelyn moves towards, Joy moves away.

We begin to understand that Evelyn may have exceeded Jobu Tobaki in her cosmic understanding. She gains the zen-like aura of absurdist detachment. She no longer cares for outcomes in the various realms, not even her immanent bankruptcy at the hands of the IRA. As a rock, she jumps towards Joy. We see Joy’s “hey you can’t move!” to which Evelyn responds, “there are no rules!” Evelyn is beginning to understand the radical implications of free will. The googly eyes that first appeared as joke appendages in the laundro-mat are now affixed to various foreheads like a cosmic third eye. A pair adorn the ‘Eveyln rock’, signalling its consciousness. One sits between laundro-mat Evelyn’s eyes, merged visually with the ‘black hole’ of the bagel; the chaotic cosmic centre point of nothingness/Allness. In this eternal breadth of vision, Evelyn is able to perceive the poignant futility of human experience. Divorce. Bankruptcy. Violence. It doesn’t really matter across the relativity of infinite space and time.

And yet.

It does matter. The thread of connection between Eveyln and Waymond is an expression of the constancy of human love – there’s a beautiful sequence in which Eveyln recalls all the moments with her husband; delighted at finding the remote in the sofa, playing a silly tune on the laundro-mat bell; kissing her, touching her pregnant belly. Meanwhile, two women try to touch each other’s faces and cry, a movie scene shows the dance of two Indian lovers. These moments mean something.

Even if they don’t mean everything for all time.

At the end of the movie Evelyn is simultaneously facing Jobu Tobaki as she stares into the void, drawn into the darkness of meaninglessness and also facing the joyless Joy, angry with her mother for failing to see her, to connect with her and recognise her authentic existence.

Evelyn’s final task is to convince Jobu Tobaki/Joy that connection is worth it. Joy is ready to walk away. The rock falls from the precipice. But Evelyn calls Joy back: she is both willing to let Joy go if she must (wisdom is always willing to let go). But she also communicates to Joy that the fact of human choice is the greatest act of love in the Multi-verse.

There are things that human beings need, the film seems to say: things we have wanted and were unable to find- a cast of characters have their karmic knots resolved by Evelyn’s intervention: if that man could only save his pet racoon, if this one could smell his wife’s scent again, if this woman could feel beautiful, then perhaps the quantum logic (Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”) of time and space could resolve. Instead of repelling one another, we find coherence in the simplest of human choices.

Evelyn tells her daughter what she has long needed to hear: across all the possibilities of a human life, across all the multi-verses, no matter where else or who else I could be, I choose to be here, with you, as you are.

In answer to nihilism, Evelyn offers the affirmation of simple human connection. Nihilism is deterministic. But love is a choice; the essence of free will. Yes, we live lives pitched across the waves of the Void. Yes, beneath all this is Chaos, Eternity, the dark un-doing of death; the place where there is no story, no narrative, no ‘sense’. And yet from this springs the whole human drama, across space and time; beings with a thousand faces. But these human beings are not just confetti from the void. Human lives have meaning because we choose to value things, not least we to attach to other human hearts.

“These moments may be small and infrequent” Evelyn tells Joy, “but they mean everything”. And, in the end, that is enough.