‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ and Being There


You want to know why ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ (EEAAO) resonated so much with so many people? You want to know why the film won so many awards and was beloved by so many critics? You want to know why EEAAO is a masterpiece? It engages sincerely with its absurdity, proposing that absurdity pushed to the extreme (becoming maximalist in execution) can only be responded to with a minimalistic sincerity. And this is the essence of Meta-Modernism: A careful balancing act between postmodernist deconstructionist irony and modernist optimism and sincerity.

Jobu Tupaki has stopped here and has missed one small part, a part many miss with nihilism: if nothing makes sense then everything makes sense. Then if everything makes sense nothing makes sense, then, oh wait — You see how we can easily end up going in circles. The logical conclusion of the conflicting truths is that they are somehow both true. The axiom doesn’t make sense and yet that’s what EEAAO suggests. Everything is nothing and vice versa. If you put everything on a bagel, then what are you really left with? A bagel. To resolve this dichotomy, we need to follow the reasoning to its logical conclusion, something that even Evelyn failed to understand.