Day 69:14Everything Everywhere All at Once is a profound meditation on Asian American nihilism, says prof
Anne Anlin Cheng says Everything Everywhere All at Once is a clear reflection of immigrant and Asian American experiences, with a powerful message to offer in the face of centuries of systemic racism and alienation.
But it also presents something "more specific than general nihilism," according to the cultural theorist and English professor at Princeton University.
The comedy-drama written, directed and co-produced by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert took home a record-breaking four Screen Actors Guild Awards, and has been nominated for 11 Academy Awards.
The film will have a shot at best picture, actress in a leading role (for Michelle Yeoh), actress in a supporting role (for both Jamie Lee Curtis and Stephanie Hsu) and actor in a supporting role (for Ke Huy Quan), among others.
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Cheng, who's a big fan of the movie, says it deftly uses the metaphor of the multiverse to challenge stereotypical portrayals of Asian Americans in film — confronting what she calls Asian pessimism in a wacky and chaotic style.
"It sort of interpolates the viewer, the spectator, so that we're being put in the same kind of place of disjointedness," said Cheng. "We had to navigate every single new scene the way the characters in the movie had to navigate every single new world."
"I think the chaos really sort of acts on the viewer and makes us complicit — makes us implicated and sympathetic in what's going on within the plot."
Cheng spoke with Day 6 host Brent Bambury and says the movie suggests that in the face of pain and despair, the answer is not violence, but connection. Here's part of that conversation.
What does this film mean to you personally?
Watching this film at the end of the pandemic — at the height of the anti-Asian sentiment that's going around across not U.S. cities, but also I think in Canada and Britain — it was really moving. I was actually in tears at the movies.
I found it to be such a profound meditation on Asian-American nihilism or pessimism.
I found this message, in the end, incredibly surprising and moving.
It's such a strange surprise in terms of the way it tells its story, because it starts out as a domestic drama about the mundane conflicts in people's personal lives. Then it explodes into a kind of multiverse that we associate with Marvel movies. What does the device of the multiverse do in Everything Everywhere?
It seems to me such a perfect metaphor for what immigrants go through. The challenge of navigating geographic, temporal, spatial, social and psychological displacement. And if that isn't [the] multiverse, I don't know what is.
I actually think the move between the mundane and the quotidian and the complex is sort of like science fiction. It's a really important statement about the ways in which discrimination and alienation can operate.
We can talk about alienation as sort of like socio-cultural category waste, but it really is lived out in the everyday. I find this sort of shifting between the small and the big, the micro and the macro to be ... an important message in the movie.
The movie does, as you say in your Washington Post essay, play on a lot of stereotypes about Asian Americans. There's a family laundromat, there's kung fu mysticism and model minority and tiger moms. But you say it uses the multiverse to blow them up. How does it do that?
I think one is that all of these stereotypes could exist at the same time.
Michelle Yeoh's character is a tiger mom, the sort of disappointed daughter to the immigrant traditional Chinese father, the businesswoman, the failed wife, all that stuff.
The fact that she could be all those things — and the fantastic singer in one universe and a kung fu master in another — really sort of suggests that we are all types of various kinds, and that to be able to occupy all those places is both a challenge of being a minority, but also a challenge of being a person.
WATCH | Everything Everywhere All at Once trailer
[You write that] Everything Everywhere engages with the idea of Asian American pessimism. How does the film engage with it?
I think we maybe in general, as a culture, have heard more about Afro-pessimism, which is a term that was coined by some African American scholars.
I am borrowing from that because I think it's really important to understand racism in America as more than simply Black and white.
By Asian pessimism, I'm referring to centuries of anti-Asian sentiment in America from colonial times to this day. The sort of reemergence of the Yellow Peril at various points of history, depending on national security or war or economic downturn or whatever.
It's a kind of discrimination, racism and xenophobia that has existed in America for centuries, but also very little acknowledged.
How is that manifested in the film?
I think it's manifested most powerfully and most ironically in the figure of the daughter. And I say ironically, because her name is Joy and she is anything but joyous.
Joy is carrying all of the angst of being a teenager, about being the daughter of an immigrant, of being a non-straight young woman trying to be the perfect daughter, but failing.
She's bearing all that negativity that I think expresses Asian nihilism.
The everything bagel that has a gravitational pull of this black hole that is nihilism.
LISTEN | Decoding Everything Everywhere All At Once:
Front Burner26:09Decoding Everything Everywhere All At Once
The other thing that happened to me during the movie was it was very difficult because in my home institution [school] there have been, in the last three years, five student suicides. They have all been Asian American students. Nobody wants to talk about that.
The nihilism in the movie, which is fictional and wacky and maybe a little humorous at times, has a very serious reference in a real world that is haunting a lot of Asian-American subjects today.
Were you reflecting on that rise of depression, and on the suicides in your department at Princeton, while you were watching the film?
Yes. Asian American mental health is so rarely discussed. Asian American is the most stereotypically associated with caretakers or medical professionals like nurses and doctors and caretakers.
But they are not often the subject of questions about mental health. That neglect seemed to be extremely telling and sad that it is being addressed in a movie of all places.
Are you invested enough in this movie that it will mean a lot to you if it takes home the best picture?
There's a surface pleasure of seeing a film about Asian Americans get some recognition.
I think that because there's such a profound message about nihilism, about depression, about how to find your way out of that, that I am really glad that it's finding its way to a larger audience.
I don't really care so much about awards, but I do think having the movie seen by people is really something that I find very important.
Segment produced by Mickie Edwards. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
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