I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is maximalist and labyrinthine, beautiful and manic. In every sense, it lives up to its title. It is everything everywhere all at once, gorgeous in its chaos. It is the technicolor heart of a supernova. It is entropy and the messy splendor of human life, an everything bagel of what feels like the Daniels’ very hearts externalized and put to the silver screen.
I desperately want to talk about it and I may do so in a few months once everyone who should be watching it —and this is all of you— has watched it, but for now, all I can say is I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an older Asian woman allowed to flirt with her husband, to kiss him because she wants to, to see the desire in her eyes grow in his. Not until now.
And that is staggering to think about.
Growing up, I didn’t really hear my parents say I love you. Not to me. Not to each other. (I have one dimming memory of being about three and my mother bringing home a cake to celebrate her wedding anniversary. I think she told my father she loved him. I know they were happy together. It is my only memory of them being happy together.) They —my mother, especially— communicated their affection in the way they would work themselves down to the bone. My mother kept food on the table, kept the wolves away from the door. She made sure that there was a roof over our heads, that we were safe, that we would always be safe. Her love language was the promise that there would always be a tomorrow.
I didn’t learn to tell people I loved them until I read something online — it was someone talking about how you should always say I love you, how you don’t know if it’d be the last time you see someone. How easy it is to attend a funeral and think endlessly about how you never complimented someone enough, how you never took time to tell them what they meant to you, why they meant so much to you. No one ever sits at a funeral thinking, “Man, I never should have said ‘I love you’ so much.”
Even then, it felt weird. It still feels a little weird. To be openly affectionate and to speak honestly about my feelings. I grew up, after all, being told that true love is keeping each other alive.
Don’t get me wrong. Love is absolutely that as well. But I wonder what life might have been like had I been told it is also more than that: that love was the daily work of choosing each other again and again and again, that you do not have a right to the love you’re given. That love is a privilege to be earned and that the work of love is always worth its labor. That love should be beautiful.
As such, I’m astounded to see Everything Everywhere All At Once and the dysfunctional, middle-aged relationship at its heart. How it is treated as a thing as important and precious as first love, something to be fought for and preserved, something to fight monsters for.
I am astounded too by its portrayal of East Asian mother-daughter relationships, by its lessons, by the way it prescribes so much power to female friendships, by how willing it is to illustrate the messiness of humanity. Everyone here is a little broken, but as Leonard Cohen puts it, that’s where the light gets in.
Mostly, I’m staggered by how Michelle Yeoh gets to be funny and beautiful and run-down and ridiculous and powerful all in the same movie. In a weird way, it feels like permission.
I recently read Jennifer Marie Thorne’s gorgeous Lute, which is coming out in October, and it feels like the perfect book to mention in tandem with Everything Everywhere All At Once. Where the latter is unapologetically and triumphantly loud, Lute is a much more delicate affair, with writing that somehow succeeds at being both dreamily bucolic and terrifying.
Described as a cross between Wicker Man and Final Destination, it is absolutely all those things, but also its own mesmerizing beast. I sped through it in hours, fascinated by the main character and her creche of secrets, by the island of Lute and the superstitions knotted through its soil. It is one of those books that opens slow and then builds momentum, until you’re tearing through the pages, propelled forward by the knowledge that something inevitable and terrible is to follow.
Until you hit the end that is.
I’ll be thinking of that ending for a long time.
Anyway. That is all you’re getting this week. I spent the last seven days scrambling in circles, dealing with lawyers, and then the fact that pipes in the corridor leading up to my apartment burst and was —and still is!— leaking waste water into the carpet. I’m absolutely goddamned spent.
I hope your week was better than mine. As always, a cat photo.
I've been eagerly awaiting Everything Everywhere All At Once, and it was finally announced that it will be in a cinema near me on April 28th. Absolutely cannot wait.
I also hope this upcoming week is better for you and balances out the waterlogged grind this one was for you.
Oof!
I really hope this week is kinder and gentler for you!