"The Queer Joy of Everything Everywhere All At Once" Transcript

[James in a coat on a colorful brick wall background. It is currently tinted pink, but over the course of the video, the tint start cycling through the rainbow.]

Probably a good thing that it dropped sooner rather than later, because Multiverse of Madness had less to do with multiverses and more to do with demonizing women who have undergone debilitating trauma... made by men who openly admitted to having no familiarity with the preceding media and, while claiming to want to recreate the source material, clearly missed the point of said source material. And Flashpoint is... yeah.

Evelyn frequently gets lost in thoughts and daydreams about what her life could have been if only she had made certain decisions differently. Namely, if she hadn't left China to be with her present husband, Waymond, who by the way has filed for divorce. She just doesn't know it yet.

She is, however, confronted by her husband, who takes on a strange personality shift. Waymond claims that he is now "Alpha Waymond", from the Alphaverse. In his home universe, Evelyn is a brilliant scientist who developed "verse-jumping", a technology that can allow a person to access alternate versions of themselves in different universes. Each time someone makes a decision, an alternate universe branches off to accommodate all outcomes of said decision. This verse-jumping allows someone to gain access to skills and talents that they had gained in other universes.

Through her confrontations with Jobu across the variations of the Multiverse, it becomes clear that Jobu doesn't want to kill her mother, while she seems ambivalent toward killing anyone else. Keep in mind, Jobu and/or Joy is a being who exists in all versions of herself simultaneously. She sees no point in batting an eye over anything she does, because everyone she kills in one universe is still alive in another.

She reveals that she was never seeking out Evelyn to kill her. She was seeking out a version of Evelyn who could understand. Joy is an emotionally intelligent lady, and based on Stephanie Hsu's performance, it's clear to me that she can put her mother's actions and beliefs in the context of who her mother is: What Evelyn has dealt with in her life, and especially how Evelyn feels about it.

But in another way that just makes Joy even more bitter. She sees how Evelyn is living her life, and how she is doing nothing to change it. If anything had any value, surely Evelyn would put in a little bit more effort to change, and so this is why Joy feels that maybe a version of her mother could be made to understand exactly what this everything bagel means!

[This appearance of this universe has a posturized "animated" filter over it.]

But in the context of everything, the multitude of infinite possibilities and identities, Evelyn realizes that not one single action she does in any one single Universe actually means anything. There is no ripple of consequentialism. There is no great peril to the world, if she undertakes one solitary decision, because there are an infinite range of versions of herself where the decision was never available in the first place.

Perhaps the message here is that we have the potential to be all things. The more we realize that, the more we move toward love and acceptance of others. That our belief that a choice is finite only ever locks us into certain ways of thinking. In a movie entirely about choice, queerness is not a part of the discussion. It's not a choice. Joy's queerness factors into this film only as far as [it] generates conflict between mother and daughter. Joy's sexuality really only factors into the plot as a straw that breaks the camel's back. Even though this is what we see, characters reference any number of events that strain the relationship between Evelyn and Joy in the past.

Alternate realities do a great deal to foil a character against themselves. Bearing in mind, sequences cut between each other sync up with events.

Figurative actions in one Universe [Evelyn signing divorce papers] are literal actions in another [Evelyn drawing a shiv on her husband].

Figurative actions in one Universe [Evelyn drawing a shiv on her husband] are literal actions in another [Evelyn signing divorce papers].

Based on the dizzying editing flipping between universes, it's difficult to keep track of which universe is which, and which one is the one with the narrative through line we ought to be following. The narrative description of Multiverse fill in a whole lot of plot holes.

Narratively, we, the audience, are shown the emotional beats, how each alternate universe ties into character development in others that have more of a through line. Thematically, the audience is being informed that what happens is less important than how these characters, and by extension the audience, handle their interpersonal relations and self-worth. Who someone is matters more than what someone does. But what's most important is how someone feels.

Because the more seriously we take everything, the more the unserious things like... feelings begin to get left behind. if the stress and importance of life is placed on stuffy things like business, success, stability... what value do Evelyn's dreams and hobbies have? what do Joy's queer feelings even matter... when the Family Laundromat is being audited.

We are reminded that choices diverge universes. But Joy seems to be a lesbian in every Universe, regardless of her or her mother's choices. This is inescapable. The only choice is how individuals react to it. And perhaps, as a society, we need to begin evaluating what really is or is not a choice.

While some may retort that, in some universes, Evelyn is queer, we must also remind ourselves that she belongs to one of the many generations where it was the social expectation for bisexual people, especially women, to force themselves into heterosexual thinking. Over the years, many bisexual people have had to dismiss their same gender attractions because society never really let them explore it.

Queer estrangement exists for this reason, and is quite common, probably taking over from queer disownment. The pendulum has swung the other way. And many of us simply can't reconcile our relations with family. It's nothing so trivial as parents just don't understand, it is rooted in parents refusing to change their understanding. And having lived with them for our entire lives, we see how much they are capable of and we see that their capability seems to end with changing their minds about us. When our personhood diverges from the expectation of what we should be, we really begin to see how much we mean to these people who have meant the world to us. and we watch as the language of "tolerance" leads them to believe that their efforts are enough, and we internalize our emptiness as... ingratitude.

We can either exist in their lives feeling guilty for wishing for more, or we can put distance between us and our family. There's nothing you or anyone can do to change someone's mind once it's made up. After a while, it gets overwhelming. All you can do is control your own feelings and your own decisions, and sometimes it is easier to cut and run... Because others may not have the capacity to understand the difference between their choices and who you are.

If nothing else matters, what does matter is how you feel about others and how you feel about yourself. In a world where everything is fluid and flexible and maybe does or does not actually exist, your feelings are the only things that you can guarantee to be true! truly true! and if the structure of the world is composed of our memories, then the goodness or evil of the world is predicated on your past choices. And whether or not they are choices that you are proud of, or that you regret. and the thing about pride is that there is no real qualification for that. you can choose to qualify your self-worth based on external factors (comparing yourself to others or expectations imposed on you), —