Revisiting Everything Everywhere All at Once After I Lost My Mother
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
Warning: this article includes themes of losing a loved one which may be triggering for some readers, as well as major spoilers for Everything Everywhere All at Once. Reader discretion is advised.
The power of film is that you will have a different experience every single time you watch a motion picture; even — and especially — if you have seen a particular work before.
This past Monday, I revisited the beloved multiverse spectacle Everything Everywhere All at Once. Third watch. This was because of an event that happened shortly before. In case you somehow missed it, the film won seven Academy Awards on March 12th, including Best Picture. It was nice to see what all of these accolades said about this feature film by the Daniels. However nice this experience may be, it’s not solely because of the whole Oscars thing. That would be dishonest to claim.
The reality is that the event I am bringing up isn’t even the Academy Awards. The night before the Oscars, my dear mother, Annette Babiolakis, passed away after a fifteen-month-long battle with brain cancer. She was one of my best friends who supported me through and through with any endeavour I partook in. She even shared my love of film (you can read more about that here). The world forever changed for me March 11th, and I’d be lying if I said things felt normal again almost a week later. I’ve accepted that this void will forever linger. My mom was there for every milestone in my life. She hung on as long as she could for her family. It is agonizing that she was taken away from us.
I wanted to put on a film to forget the pain I was feeling — at least temporarily. In case you couldn’t tell by my creation of a film review and editorial website, I find a lot of escapism in cinema. Fun films distract me. Challenging works help me compartmentalize my abstract thoughts. I popped in my copy of Everything Everywhere All at Once and intended on hurting less. Just for a little while. I could focus on all of the things the film won Oscars for (direction, writing, acting, and editing). I reanalyzed a film I had seen twice before already. I just wanted the pain to soften.
It actually stung tenfold.
By the end of the film, I was bawling; unable to form words; experiencing a pain in my chest. I couldn’t stop trembling for a good half hour.
It’s important to revisit the film first. Everything Everywhere All at Once is for sure a multiverse, multi-genre affair, but at its barest form it really is about a damaged family needing to reconnect from one another. We follow the matriarch, Evelyn Quan Wang, who owns a failing laundromat with her husband Waymond. They are hosting their family (including her father from China, and her estranged daughter, Joy) and customers for Chinese New Year, so old wounds are bound to reopen. Joy brings her girlfriend Becky, who Evelyn states is her “friend” to her father; she later insists that he is of an older generation that won’t understand the LGBTQ+ community.
Besides, Evelyn is focusing on another issue: the IRS is threatening to seize the family laundromat. Evelyn left China and started a new life in America with husband Waymond (who is finding the courage to serve his wife divorce papers, oddly enough). Their life hasn’t been easy, and it continues to get harder. Now, they may face the worst outcome of all: losing everything. If getting their livelihood foreclosed isn’t bad enough, now the whole multiverse thing begins with a Waymond from another timeline (the Alpha timeline) taking over this universe’s Waymond to tell Evelyn that everything is going to end because of Jobu Tupaki: an omnipotent being that wants to destroy all life and existence. Jobu Tupaki actually is Joy from the Alpha timeline, who was pushed too hard by her mother (Alpha Evelyn) and had her very being shattered and capable of experience the film’s namesake (everything, everywhere, all at once).
I’ll gloss over the rest of the film because it’s not really important for this article, but the key plot point is that Evelyn (from this timeline) tries to reconnect with her daughter (through Alpha Joy, aka Jobu Tupaki). Does Evelyn want to save the existence of all things? Sure, but her main priority is that she wants to rescue her daughter: to heal her from all of the pain she is experiencing, and the dread that consumes her. It’s not that Evelyn was never not a mother to Joy. She had her own strict ways of connecting with her daughter (including commenting on her weight out of love and worry, despite how hurtful it would come off). She was learning to be a different kind of mother to Joy. She just wanted to connect with her.
What Joy shared with her mother is nihilism: a lack of care for all things, and the acceptance that nothing matters. At one point, Evelyn tries to view the world from Joy’s perspective, and many timelines start to fracture and come crumbling down. What winds up helping is husband Waymond’s counter argument: if nothing matters, we make them matter. By love, we can care about anything. To bring up another Oscar winner from last year (The Whale), lead character Charlie quips towards the end of the film that he gets the sense that “people are incapable of not caring”. Why do you think that is? In The Whale, Charlie concludes that through striving for a personal reason to exist (chasing that proverbial white whale). In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Evelyn learns what Waymond has accepted: bad things will always happen, but it is up to us to create good.
Evelyn realizes the best way to get through to her daughter, she must make her realize that she matters; that all things and beings matter. After repairing the timelines she destroyed, Evelyn struggles to finally fix her own timeline with her actual daughter. She attempts to approach her father and reintroduce Becky as Joy’s girlfriend, not sugarcoating her as just a “friend”. This isn’t enough for Joy, who barges out of the laundromat. Evelyn initially accepts that Joy is hurting too much and just wants them to go their separate ways for good, but then she remembers Waymond’s advice: goodness has to be made.
Evelyn stops Joy, and it seems a bit strange at first: as if Evelyn is going back to her old ways (she begins by commenting on Joy’s weight again). What we find afterward is that Evelyn is trying to prove that she always loved Joy, even if she didn’t show it in the best ways. She also states that Joy herself was also guilty of not creating goodness (by not calling or coming home unless she needed something); they both were in need of making things matter (for themselves, and for others).
Then Evelyn concludes with the following declaration:
”Maybe it's like you said. Maybe there is something out there, some new discovery that will make us feel like even smaller pieces of shit. Something that explains why you still went looking for me through all of this noise. And why, no matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always, want to be here with you.”
Joy reciprocates by stating that her mother, who is fully capable of living in any timeline and of doing anything now, is limiting herself: in this timeline, “all we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense.”
Evelyn responds: “Then I will cherish these few specks of time.”
I cried. I cried so hard. The first two times I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once, I identified with the family dynamics (who wouldn’t?) and the idea that destiny places us with the family that we get, for better or for worse. I’ve been blessed with a loving family, and I wouldn’t want my dealt cards changed any way. I knew I related to the theme of parents and children finding their ways back to one another, because pretty much everyone would (there’s a reason why this film has resonated so heavily with millions of viewers, even with all of its oddities).
However, this time was different. I specifically saw my mother in Evelyn. Not because she was losing me as a son or anything. That was never the case. It was right in that ending moment. This notion that a mother would go to any timeline, universe, or reality for her child. I know this applies to most mothers, but my mother was the strongest person I had ever met. I don’t care if I sound biased. She beat cancer once back in 2001. She battled for fifteen months again. I could go through every single thing she triumphed over, but that’s not the point. The point is she made all of these challenges seem like they didn’t matter. She found joy in everything. As if she gained powers from other timelines, she always made each crisis easier by finding love and hope. Even during the darkest times. Even when she was on the losing end of brain cancer.
I can never see her in this timeline anymore. And yet I feel like she is still out there protecting me, loving me, and connecting with me. In the way that Alpha Waymond talks about a universal uneasiness that we all share (in the film, it’s because of Jobu Tupaki destroying the fabric of all things), I feel the opposite, as if my mother is out there. As much pain as I’ve been feeling, there’s a stillness as well. Perhaps this is because I know my mom is no longer suffering her lengthy fight against cancer, but that also doesn’t erase the agony that I feel knowing that I can never hug her, hear her, see her, feel her, and experience things with her again.
I cried even harder when I thought more about Everything Everywhere All at Once. I don’t completely subscribe to the theory that there are parallel universes that mirror our own out there, but I don’t see why it is impossible either. For a moment, however, I fully believed in it. It made me feel like there are many universes out there where my mom survived this battle (I will choose to ignore the other timelines, naturally). There are realities where she is happy, healthy, and here. Still here. That doesn’t bring her back, though. That doesn’t bring her back. Still, for a split second, I felt that she was safe.
The final thought I had was my mother’s love that will forever echo through my life. I knew what Evelyn said was true because my mom was the exact same way. She did whatever it took to be with us kids. She lived through hardship to catch those specks of time where life would make sense. She helped us make sense of the bigger picture. She loved us no matter what. She gave up everything to be there for us. As Evelyn finally connected with Joy and helped her see the bigger picture, I finally felt like my mom was here again telling me that she loved me. That she was here for me. That we were going to go watch movies and shopping and on our walks again. She was here again.
And then she wasn’t.
What the Daniels pull off with Everything Everywhere All at Once is the creation of a gigantic shift whenever family dynamics get shuffled or destroyed. When we live through turmoil or experience friction, it really does feel like the end of everything. What the film also reminds us is that the fixes here are simple: we just have to reconnect again. In the same way a Waymond from another universe would have been happy just doing taxes and running a laundromat with Evelyn, I’m content with the ups and downs I’ve experienced when my mom was by my side. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I was always loved by my mom, and I felt it every day. My mom will never come back, but I have to find the positive: she is no longer in pain. She did whatever it took to connect with me. I will live my life reconnecting with her in any way, via all things that remind me of her (or of us together).
It all sounds silly, I’m sure. Then again, so is Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s such a bizarre film that affects most of its viewers because it recognizes that life is as strange, unpredictable, hilarious, and fun as it is awkward, upsetting and difficult.
To quote another work, Bojack Horseman: “Time’s arrow neither stands still nor reverses. It merely marches forward.”
Everything Everywhere All at Once didn’t display any of its universes through time travel, because the film subscribes to the same ideology: time heals all wounds. We must push through turmoil in order to see the other side. Revisiting the past cannot do us any good. My mom was a fighter. She would want us all to continue forward and keep on living.
I will do so.
I will also never stop searching for her in anything that reminds me of her. She will always be next to me, whether I feel her presence during a meal that can’t compare to her cooking, a song that she would sing that I regret telling her to stop singing to (I wish I didn’t pride my awkwardness over her joy as a teenager), a sunny day that radiates her spirit, or a film like Everything Everywhere All at Once that brings her back to life again. Even if just for a split second. I’ll take whatever specks I can get.
I will always love you, mom.
You’re in everything.
Everywhere.
All at once.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.