Everything Everywhere All At Once & the Absurdity of Love as Resistance

Despite "Everything Everywhere All at Once's" unrelenting strangeness, the movie's most absurd aspect may be Waymond's incessant optimism against bitterness. Evelyn Wang is a chef at a hibachi restaurant, locked in a constant rivalry with her co-worker. Evelyn Wang is a sign twirler, drawing eyes by spinning an advertisement around her back and neck. Evelyn Wang is a singing sensation, star of the Chinese stage and screen. Evelyn Wang is a woman with hot dogs for fingers. As the main character of the absurdist action movie " Everything Everywhere All at Once ," Evelyn Wang is all these things and more. But when the movie opens, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is simply the proprietor of a laundromat, which she operates with her endlessly upbeat husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). Burdened with a failing business, a disdainful daughter (Stephanie Hsu), and a father (James Hong) who has not forgiven her for leaving China for America decades ago, Evelyn cannot shake the feeling that something is wrong in the universe. The world that once seemed so full of love and possibility has deteriorated in the predictable grind of daily life. [caption id="attachment_75431" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Everything Everywhere All At Once. (A24 Films)[/caption] That grind climaxes when Evelyn visits the office of tax auditor Diedre Beaubeirda (Jamie Lee Curtis). Dressed in frumpy yellow clothes, Beaubeirda sets her disapproving gaze on Evelyn and chastises her for trying to write off the purchase of a karaoke machine, an extravagant expense with no clear connection to the laundromat. “Now, you may only see a pile of receipts, but I see a story,” Beaubeirda explains, gesturing at the paperwork piled across her desk. “I can see where this story is going, and it does not look good.” Beaubeirda may think she knows the story, but no one watching " Everything Everywhere All At Once " can say the same. Written and directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, "Everything Everywhere All At Once" launches from that mundane setting into a madcap adventure across the multiverse, as Evelyn is tasked with thwarting an evil being known only as Jobu Tupaki. With the power to simultaneously inhabit all realities at one time, Jobu Tupaki threatens to consign every universe to a great nothingness, represented by the “Everything Bagel,” a black hole in the form of a baked good. To aid her quest, Evelyn learns how to borrow abilities from her alternate selves when battling the minions of Jobu Tupaki. With the skills of her sign-twirling self, Evelyn swings a shield around her body, blocking the blows of oncoming attackers. With the dexterity of her hot-dog fingered self, Evelyn uses her toes to open doors and make an escape. Drawing from the Hong Kong action films that made her a star, Yeoh gives a full-bodied performance as Evelyn, leaping across the screen through every crazy scenario that Daniels throw at her. To access the mind of her other selves through a technique called “verse-jumping,” Evelyn must do something strange and unexpected. For example, before she can merge with her pop singer self, she must look at Beaubeirda and earnestly declare, "I love you." To become one with her hibachi chef self, she must make bird-like clicking noises. By breaking the expectations of her reality, Evelyn sees other realities and uses them to change her world. While we will (probably) never find ourselves locked in a multiversal war, the idea of “verse-jumping” does have resonance with Christians. After all, we believe in a loving and active God, who cares for the weak and the oppressed, despite the fact of rampant inequality. We believe that all humans have been made in God’s image, even though so many who claim to follow Christ contribute to the systemic racism around them. To follow Christ by seeking justice and loving others is, to the ways of the world, foolish. For that reason, 1 Corinthians describes the message of the cross as “foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Indeed, the basic claims of Christianity are absurd by worldly standards. None of us would imagine that God would take the body of a human, let alone that God would become a Jew in 1st century Judea, a second-class citizen in the place of his birth. None of us would imagine that this God-Human would preach love and acceptance against the oppressive Roman government, that he would even allow the Romans to put him to death. But then again, none of us would imagine that this execution would be God's final defeat over death, stripping away the oppressor's greatest weapon. But as 1 Corinthians goes on to assure us, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” We combat worldly wisdom that puts profits over people and diminishes human life by following the foolishness of God, loving others and asserting human dignity without regard to power structures. In the same way that Evelyn gains a new perspective after saying, “I love you” to her enemy, we Christians gain world-changing power through our absurd love. Late in "Everything Everywhere All at Once," Evelyn’s husband Waymond explains his incessant optimism. Where Evelyn feels overwhelmed by trips to the tax assessor and every cutting remark by her disapproving father, Waymond remains polite and upbeat, despite the reasons to be bitter. “You think because l'm kind that it means I'm naive, and maybe I am,” Waymond tells his wife, without bitterness or anger. “It's strategic and necessary. This is how I fight.” Despite the movie's unrelenting strangeness, with its hot dog-fingered people and extended riffs on the Pixar movie " Ratatouille ," the most absurd aspect of "Everything Everywhere All at Once" may be Waymond's perspective. He's something of a Christ figure, holding to kindness and love as a form of resistance. When Evelyn adds that perspective to her various selves, she finally gains the ability to change the world. When we Christians take seriously Christ's teaching and put our faith in the God who has overcome the world, we redeem our fallen world with our absurd love. Read more in our Movies section You can purchase or stream "Everything Everywhere All at Once" via: Amazon , Vudu , Fandango , and Redbox .

‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ & the Absurdity of Love as Resistance

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