To expand your Universe, look in the mirror (and watch EEAAO)
Yesterday, I saw Everything Everywhere All At Once, my first major movie in theaters since before the pandemic. I read a rave review from Seattle’s The Stranger, and an artistic local friend of mine was gushing about it, so I decided to check it out.
Here’s a preview:
If you’re turned off by futurism or science fiction, don’t worry, most of the movie takes place at a laundromat and most of the action takes place in the 80s-style interior courtyard of an IRS building.
After seeing the movie, I immediately gushed to my friends on Facebook:
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE is one of the most incredible movies I’ve seen. It was nothing I was expecting but managed to cover all range of emotions with a ton of humor, some of the weirdest ideas I have ever seen, some very relevant lessons on life, and all beautifully filmed. The family members each gave amazing performances, and this was the funniest Jamie Lee Curtis performance I’ve seen (as the evil IRS tax auditor). I highly recommend checking it out 💗
This is the kind of movie that can really get you thinking. The more open-minded I have become in life, the more my brain seems to make surprising connections with everything I run into. This morning, with the movie fresh in my mind, a crab (of all things) led me to draw some interesting connections with EEAAO.
It started by reading about the depths of Wikipedia in the New York Times, a page that digs up strange and interesting facts from Wikipedia. I skimmed their Instagram feed and spotted this image of a crab walking on the surface of a Möbius strip:
Credit: Möbius strip — Wikipedia
You probably made a Möbius strip as a kid by taking a strip of paper, twisting it once and attaching the ends. When you follow the paper with your finger or draw a continuous line on the surface you discover that seemingly magically, the paper has only one side. Throw a crab on the surface, as above, and we can see that “an object in a möbius-strip-shaped universe would be indistinguishable from its mirror image.”
OK, OK, we don’t live in a Möbius-shaped universe (that we know of), and we can’t prove that other universes do exist, but the concept of multiple universes has been on my mind since high school when our closest family friends were visiting in 1998 and highly recommended I check out the movie Sliding Doors.
Early in the movie, the lead character, played by Gwynith Paltrow, is fired from her job and heads home early. She barely misses the train home and finds out there are no more trains coming. Then, with a sparkle of movie magic, we rewind the scene and with the tiniest tweak of destiny, she makes the train this time. From there forward we get to see what her life is like if she makes the train and if she doesn’t, and they sure are different stories.
As a kid, this idea of one tiny decision having such a big impact on life was pretty mind-opening.
Everything Everywhere All At Once takes this idea to the next level, exploring the idea of infinite choices leading us to where we each are today. But in EEAAO, with the advent of new technology, our minds can now jump to any of infinite universal possibilities (including a hilarious universe where we have hot dogs as fingers — they even explain how this happened genetically!)
Universe jumping may only be science fiction, but we have more power than we realize to control our own universe. We may only actually get to experience one universe, and we only actually get to live one path through that universe, but we are 100% in charge of that path.
From the moment you wake up, you’re in charge of what you do with each minute of each day. You decide when to get out of bed, what to wear, who and what you pay attention to, and whether or not to work. Your justification for each of those decisions is something you decided to believe. Even when circumstances seem limiting, you’re still in charge of how you treat other people and that has a perhaps the largest potential impact on the direction your universe takes.
Take a look in the mirror
In EEAAO, Michelle Yeoh plays an immigrant owner of a family-run Laundromat. Her character’s universe is pretty much the worst it could be. She and everyone around her are unhappy and her family’s business is at risk due to tax issues. It’s pretty easy to relate to her universe if life doesn’t seem to be going your way. But something strange happens at the very beginning of the movie and ultimately frames the entire movie without saying a word.
In the opening scene of the movie, the camera focuses on a small round mirror. We briefly see a strange view of the family all smiling in the mirror and then the first hint at a glitch in the universe presented by the movie: a thud causes the mirror to change angle and the camera begins to zoom into the mirror.
I admired the camera technique as it zoomed further and further, through a doorway and eventually up to the lead character sitting at a table covered in receipts she was trying to sort out for the IRS. I thought to myself, that’s funny, we are still looking in that mirror because the camera never cut, but everything looks right, nothing is written backwards.
Does this whole movie exist within the mirror? Why and what does this mean? Ironically, this was front of mind for me having recently watched this PBS video about mirrors from the YouTube series Be Smart:
Could the entirety of Everything Everywhere All At Once have taken place inside of the mirror? The introduction seems to imply so, and as the crab on the Möbius strip shows us, we can’t really tell the difference between this side of the mirror and the universe on the other side of the mirror.
If the whole movie takes place inside the mirror, the conclusions it draws are a reflection of the power of looking into the mirror. Without spoiling it, by the end of the movie, the lead character has learned to truly look inward on her life and her relationships. She now sees herself and why she has been unhappy.
By getting a glimpse at the bigger universe and the infinite outcomes her life could have led to, she sees that she is in charge of her own destiny and everything in her world. While her daughter tried to convince her that nothing matters, she can now see that the opposite is true:
Everything matters.
Everything. Everywhere. All At Once.
All it took was a nice long look in the mirror.
