The Oscar Winning movie, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is a parable of life and survival in the age of infinite possibilities
Blinking my way out of the movie that this week won seven Oscars, I knew it was something special: more than a hyperkinetic action film, a sci-fi yarn, or a family drama. It says something about the experience of living in a modern world that offers us ways to be everything, everywhere, all at once.
The movie uses the idea that many parallel universes exist because every life choice creates a new universe. Science says … Actually, I have no idea what science says about this, but it doesn’t matter. This is science fiction, and the movie is a metaphor for how we actually live in the age of the internet, social media and virtual reality. They aren’t just technologies. I’d say they’ve created entirely new ways of being. But if we can know anything, be anywhere and inhabit an online persona with superpowers and kung fu skills, then, truthfully, who are we?
The film focuses on a Chinese-American family: a stressed out mother, a badgered father and a daughter called Joy who’s searching for her identity. She’s confused, overwhelmed. Our sun is ‘just one out of trillions of suns,’ she says. And ‘all of that exists inside one universe out of who knows how many.’ Feeling small and stupid, Joy morphs into a supervillain – we’re deep in the realm of sci-fi metaphor now – who creates a black hole that will destroy everything.
The movie also draws on philosophical ideas that, I think, include the Chinese Buddhist teaching that, if we look deeply into any phenomenon, we’ll find it’s connected to the whole of existence. We’re interconnected. William Blake says something similar in his image of holding infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour. Everything is here, in this moment, they’re saying, if we know how to look, and, on some level, we already have the answers to the questions that perplex us.
For Buddhism, our interconnectedness is the key to unbounded compassion, and we believe that this is the only outlook that brings true, lasting happiness.
That compassion is at the heart of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once – in the love that unites the family, for all their problems.
Joy says: ’Here, all we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense.’ Her mother replies: ‘Then I will cherish these few specks of time.’
