Everything Everywhere All At Wes

In July 2023, Dean of the Social Sciences and Professor of Religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein received an unusual request: Would she contribute an essay to the screenplay book for Everything Everywhere All At Once? Unbeknownst to Rubenstein, one of her books had been an inspiration for the Oscar-winning film and the directors were eager to hear her thoughts about it. Here, Rubenstein unpacks some of the theories behind the film and her subsequent conversations with co-director Daniel Kwan about the infinite possibilities of time, space, experience, and longing.

“You’ve seen the movie?” It was a charming, ridiculous question. Of course I’d seen the movie. Everyone had seen the movie. “Wow,” continued Daniel Kwan, co-director of a film that had won more awards than Wikipedia could keep track of. “That’s super-humbling.” 

If you’ve seen any productions by “Daniels” (the name adopted by the filmmaking duo of Kwan and Daniel Scheinert)—Swiss Army Man, “Turn Down for What,” or the madcap multiverse drama Everything Everywhere All At Once—you’ll have seen the way their action advances unexpectedly. People wash up on shores, crash through the ceiling, jump worlds through paper cuts. Kwan dropped into my inbox with just as little warning, asking if I’d write an essay for the bound edition of the Everything Everywhere screenplay on the ethics of the multiverse. Turns out a book I’d written on many-worlds cosmologies (Worlds Without End, Columbia University Press, 2015) had been a useful source as he tried to make sense of the multiverse. My nerdy little book, helping make that smash-hit of a movie. You could have knocked me over with a hot dog finger. 

“I loved everything about it except the hot dog fingers,” I confessed, thinking back to that piano scene where Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) attempts to seduce Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) with Oscar Mayer appendages. That world is one of dozens Evelyn visits as she tracks down Jobu Topaki (Stephanie Hsu), a nihilist mega-villain who turns out to be Evelyn’s daughter. 

“Fair enough,” Kwan laughed. “The only way Daniel and I know to be serious is by being absurd.” 

When it comes to the multiverse, absurdity is a common theme. The very possibility that there might be innumerable other universes “out there” inspires some deeply weird ideas. Like an infinite number of spatially infinite universes (hang out with that idea for a moment). Or a universe that constantly splits into slightly different copies of itself. “How about a universe that is simply an empty dodecahedron?” writes mathematical cosmologist Max Tegmark. Or “a universe . . . populated solely by billiard balls . . . [or] an empty universe with 666 spatial dimensions? . . . In the [mathematical] multiverse, all these alternative realities actually exist.”  

While quantum physics and cosmology have produced numerous versions of the multiverse, literature tends to focus on two. The first literary multiverse plunges us into a world markedly different from our own—think Narnia, Wonderland, Oz—and then returns us home, transformed. The second explores the “splitting” worlds that arise when a character decides either to buy a cup of coffee or make it at home, to take a job in a cubicle or on a cattle-ranch, to follow their lover across the seas or stay home where it’s safe and familiar.  

Although one might name a few proto-examples of this second, “what if” multiverse (A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life), it is largely the product of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, originally set forth by Hugh Everett in the late 1950s. Every time a particle is fired at a screen, the whole universe branches into some in which the particle lands here, others in which it lands there, and a few in which it lands in some other, unlikely places. For Everett, the macroscopic world would have to behave according to the same rules as the microscopic world. That means there is a world “out there” in which you decided to attend a different northeastern liberal arts college from Wesleyan, another in which you headed for a massive research university, and another in which you dropped out of high school to become a software prodigy. What if you could meet those other versions of you? Would it change anything about the life you’re living now? 

In a conversation hosted by the Center for the Arts in November 2023, Kwan and I talked about the limited ethical usefulness of most multiverse stories. I can name half a dozen books in which a female protagonist agonizes over the different husbands she might have won in other worlds. Kwan can name two dozen films in which a superhero accesses parallel universes to expand magnificently the scope of interstellar war. The thing I love about Everything Everywhere is that it takes these two tropes—love and war—and dials them both up to absurdity for the sake of breaking through to something else.  

For me, this “something else” emerges in the culminating scene of the movie, when Evelyn confronts each of her enemies with the compassion of a multiversal messiah. Seeing all their possible timelines at once, Evelyn gives each assailant the thing that will bring them peace—a wedding for one, a chiropractic adjustment for another, a fulfilling sex life for a third. And she does all of this in the thrilling, knock-out rhythms of a martial arts movie.  

“Daniel Scheinert and I grew up on all the old kung fu films,” Kwan told a packed Goldsmith Family Cinema, “but we were also both pacifists. And that contradiction was really uncomfortable for us to sit in.” So there Kwan sat, in all the discomfort that a love of action movies can produce in an ex-evangelical peacenik, and out came a genre I proposed we call “kung-fu empathy.” Kwan grinned and added, “nicecore.”  

In these hyper-accelerated, algorithmic times, Kwan told us, an ethic of peace and reconciliation can only get across in a seemingly contradictory casing. “Kindness is a slow burn,” said Kwan, “and empathy is kind of invisible.” The genius of this film, which is also the only ethically interesting thing about the multiverse, is its ability to break out our thinking to the stuff that this world makes invisible and impossible. 

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is the author of numerous books on the intersections of science and religion. Her essay “Another Way” appears in the official A24 screenplay book for Everything Everywhere All At Once, available in bookstores and on the A24 website.