Seeing Double: The Spectacular Incomprehensibility of “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

BY DANIEL YU ‘26

I left “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and decided I would never be a writer.

It was April. The weather in New York was just beginning to turn, and I stepped out from the theater onto the sidewalk feeling like something in my chest had been wrung out and left to dry. It was a feeling I had never encountered before: that a piece of media captured my experience so specifically, so truly, that I had nothing left to say. I wondered briefly if this was the feeling that my white friends had all the time. Then I wondered how I would explain it.

“Everything Everywhere” defies summary. “A multiverse movie — no, not like that,” I find myself saying. The trope feels inadequate, unworthy of the film’s self-awareness, insufficiently descriptive of its surreal creativity. But “a love story,” “a film about parenthood/migration/assimilation/trauma,” “a gay movie,” “an Asian movie” all seem equally inadequate. The film is at once all of these and none of them.

Even the plot itself, in all its absurdism, is difficult to fashion into linear narrative. Daniels (the co-directing duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who share the best name out there) move effortlessly from trope to trope, world to world, tone to tone. It is part science fiction movie, part comedy, part adventure, part drama.

This instability in genre is accompanied by an instability in character: as is the nature of the multiverse, characters are split into different selves, with different personalities belonging to different ‘realities.’ Several months after I see “Everything Everywhere,” my father tells me about the time his job sent him to South Africa during Apartheid.

“They didn’t know what to do with me,” he says, shaking his head. “White or ‘colored’ — half of them sent me to one category, half to the other.”

He is using the past tense, but I understand he is talking about the present.

It is not a new idea that Asian-Americans exist on the margins of Asianness and Americanness; the myth of the perpetual foreigner, white-adjacent but never fully white. There is scholarship on this matter. There is also my professor who, six weeks in, is still calling me by the only other Asian student’s name. I like to sit in class and pretend that I am him, 6’3 and on the rowing team. I wonder how I exist inside my professor’s head, taking up too little space to even warrant my own body. Instead, I share one with Adam, who is 10 inches taller than I am and looks nothing like me.

After all, there is also a lot of body-sharing in “Everything Everywhere.” Joy/Jobu, Waymond/Raymond; even Raccacoonie operates another’s limbs. The various consciousnesses that inhabit the body have no hierarchy, no truth. Evelyn begs Jobu to give her her daughter back — until she learns she cannot kill Jobu without killing Joy.

Back ‘in the real world,’ Joy herself is undergoing a sort of doubling: there is her life with her parents, her Asian self, and life she is constructing with her girlfriend, her queer self. Just as Joy is first herself and then Jobu and then Joy again, she finds these two selves cannot exist at once. She oscillates between them, the lines blurring, the two halves closing in on one another and then drifting apart. Switching from language to language, genre to genre, she exists in the threshold between these worlds.

It is sunset in Chinatown and I am sitting in the darkening park with my friend Evan, who is Chinese and has jokingly nicknamed me “halfie,” a reference to my mixed heritage. Another splitting.

He is telling me about the girl he likes, how he took her to the dance and they made out. As I nod, I wonder if he senses another halfness in me, another splitting barely papered over by my squared shoulders and set jaw. How my voice rises with uncertainty when I tell him I don’t have a girlfriend. How I call him “bro” in every other sentence, practice what I’ll say in my bedroom at night, the words a low rumbling in my chest, the rhythm just off in a way I can never quite place.

How my body — the movement of my hand, the lilt of my voice — betrays me. The femininity lurking in the beats between sentences, talking to men yet another dialect I never learned. Sometimes I am so full of contradictions I wonder how I will survive.

And yet we do — Joy and I, Joy and Jobu. In the end, Jobu herself is not destroyed. The film’s climax is told in flashes across time and space, reality after reality where Evelyn chooses her daughter. We are told the whole movie that, for Joy to be saved, Jobu must die. But the truth is that, for Joy to truly live, Jobu must live, too. Evelyn must see that her daughter’s other ‘self’ is not a threat to her daughter’s true consciousness, but is instead equally human. Equally Joy.

In this sense, the film defies conventional narrative arc. Instead, it is composed of several different narratives, which make little sense on their own but cohere together, each one finding tension in another’s climax, fulfillment in another’s resolution. These worlds — these selves — are simultaneously contradictory and interdependent. They do not negate or dilute one another; they are the conditions of one another’s possibilities.

This is the strange and wonderful liminality of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Perhaps a white film critic would expect Evelyn to renounce her old ways and apologize for her intolerance, saying she was wrong to have put the weight of her expectations on Joy. That she will never again criticize, that she will understand. Certainly, white narrative convention would demand it. Part of the drive towards assimilation is towards comprehensibility, where every question can be answered, each part of your history picked apart and laid open on the ground for consumption.

But this film operates in the in-between spaces, in those gray and hidden thresholds between love and negation, redemption and hurt. For me, it is enough that Evelyn holds her daughter, both of them crying, standing in the parking lot together. For me, it is enough that they are together, even for a moment.

“What a fascinating movie,” my father says. It is June. We are walking down the sidewalk past rows of parked taxis, the sun having long set, the theater’s lights glowing behind us. Then, he asks: “Is it about us?”

I don’t trust myself to speak. I watch our reflections pass in the dark glow of a taxi’s window, and I can almost mistake my face for his.