I believe Everything Everywhere All at Once spoke to so many of us (and won a record number of Oscars), because it speaks of a predicament most of us are intimately familiar with: The attempt to navigate a society in which deconstruction is a stronger force than construction, and nothing feels particularly meaningful.
For a good number of us, especially the “us” that live in secular worlds, this is a society we can identify with. We grew up in a zeitgeist in which cool people engaged with the culture around them by deconstructing it. At a young age, we started asking hard questions around the morals our elders held. The movie explores this in the context of immigrant children, whose experiences of modern American society clash with the values their parents hold dearly. However, I am confident that each of my readers experienced this, immigrant or not. Whether it was religion, national identity, or some other ideology, we found icky things in the values our parents wanted to transmit to us. In fact, I am so confident in the prevalence of this phenomenon that I don’t even find it necessary to explain it in detail. In short, many of us grew up being critical of the value systems we were born into. We coined big words to designate each ick: Patriarchy, Homophobia, Xenophobia, etc. Whichever it was, we felt the urge to break them down whenever we had the agency to do so. And as we grew up, we obtained said agency.
And I believe this was a necessary moment in culture. There were giant trees around us, planted generations ago by our ancestors, and their shadows kept us from seeing the sun. We felt that until these trees moved out of our sight, we could not gain the vision we needed to navigate the forest. So we went around cutting down the trees, opening up the sky one critique at a time.
But, after the destructive force of critique became a mainstream tool in culture, many of us came out feeling a bit empty handed, a bit… empty. Nietzsche named this "negative nihilism", but most of us are more familiar with the term existential crisis. Why am I here? Why is any of us here? What am I meant to do with my life? Without any guidance, we found it difficult to measure value. If there were no moral grounds, on what basis could we make decisions? Though problematic, the ideologies we were born into gave us frameworks to limit and solidify our interpretations. Without any frameworks, everything was possible, and therefore nothing was. The name of the movie shows the experience of a nihilistic teenager attempting to interpret the world: It feel as if everything is happening everywhere, all at once.
I am under no illusion that we should return to the ideologies of past generations. In fact, I am not even sure if it is possible to revive stories that we perceive as so thoroughly debunked in our secular circles. We had good reason to cut down the trees that no longer helped us live meaningful lives. But here is the thing — with no trees, we are at risk of ending up in a desert. This was demonstrated in a phenomenal moment in the movie, where the two main characters find themselves in a parallel universe in which all that exists is two rocks in a deserted landscape. This is the risk we carry in the present moment: We may find ourselves in a barren desert, where the sun no longer helps us navigate the world, but it blinds us.
Our early ancestors looked up at the sky and wondered what was going on up there. Plato says it is this feeling of wonder that started philosophy on its course. They wondered, and so they started telling stories that both relieved and regenerated their curiosity. These stories no longer feel accessible to us, but the sky is still up there. So today, we find ourselves in a predicament: We are infinitely more knowledgeable about what is going on in the skies, and yet we are unsatisfied. Perhaps, we need to start telling some new stories. Perhaps, it is time to plant new trees.
[Obligatory David Foster Wallace content: This video essay by Will Schoder explains DFW’s thoughts on why irony is not as cool as it seems. It is my favorite video on all of Youtube. The Problem With Irony]
I too have considered how thoroughly we, through pursuit of academia and higher education, to 'better' our lives have relentlessly intellectualized and analyzed values, beliefs, and traditional paradigms of thought through our scientific frameworks and modern ideologies. I personally am exhausted on deconstructing and agree that its created am emptiness or even barrier from the beauty, honor and depth of creation and the essence of just 'being'. I feel like it's also complex, in that I'm not so sure we should toss out all the values of our ancestors- I don't believe that all the stories have truly been debunked, but it depends of course on which stories were talking about. I believe that there are stories told to us by those in power (and persuaded by particular sciences that are funded and shared in a mainstream way) that influence us on what to believe and what to discount as rubbish non scientific silliness.
I have not seen the movie but your review of it has me interested to check it out.
Really great insight you have here and I appreciate the conclusion to plant new trees...