On the hole at the heart of Everything Everywhere All At Once.
There’s something very wrong with the world. Something just out of reach, not easily defined. You can feel it too, can’t you? You’ve felt it your entire life. Evelyn Wong feels it. Her clothes don’t wear the same way twice, institutions are crumbling. Even her coffee tastes wrong. Neo feels it too, like a splinter in his mind, driving him mad. More than any initing incident, it’s this vague but powerful feeling that sets the events of both The Matrix and Everything Everywhere All At Once in motion. And it’s their relationship to this idea that defines their core themes.
The two films share more than just this bold starting point. This year’s Best Picture wears its debt to the Wachowski sisters’ film on its sleeve. As one of the directors of the movie put it, “This movie is one hundred percent a response to The Matrix, obviously.” From the structure of the film to its action choreography, Everything Everywhere All At Once pays tribute to the Matrix. Nowhere is this connection more clear than the Daniels’ extended office-block action scene. As Evelyn ducks behind cubicles at the IRS it’s hard not to think about the early scene in the Matrix where Neo is chased through his workplace, Morpheus’ voice on a cell phone guiding him.
The sequences are both getting at the same thing: The all-to-familiar setting of a bland corporate office space, with all the drudgery and frustration it carries with it, contrasted with the mystifying introduction to a fantastical new world. The old, broken world of the office, shattered by the bold new ideas of the movie.
The big difference between the two movies’ approaches is that, after the Matrix’s sequence, Neo escapes the office block and dives into the new world, scaling skyscrapers and diving into the depths of post-apocalyptic tunnels, never to return. Everything Everywhere All At Once, on the other hand, never really leaves the IRS. Despite Evelyn’s mental trips to the fantastic lands of Raccaccoonie and Hot Dog Fingers, the action all takes place inside Evelyn’s home or the IRS building. After the end of her movie, Evelyn still has to return to that drab office building, and file her taxes all over again. This interiority isn’t just one of location, it’s also one of character. Almost every person Evelyn interacts with throughout the multiverse is a variant of someone she already knows, either one of her family or Jamie Lee Curtis’ IRS agent. Rather than the terrifyingly alien Agents from the Matrix, Evelyn’s ultimate antagonist is the equally terrifying, but ultimately familiar Jobu Tupaki, Evelyn’s daughter. Even the premise tends towards solipsism: the different worlds she visits are often weird and fantastical, but the key component in each is always Evelyn’s individual choices. Whether she stays with Waymond or leaves him, how she treats her daughter, or even whether she exposes Raccaccoonie.
The individualistic nature of Everything Everywhere All At Once’s multiverse isn’t an accident or a fault, it’s a major part of its thesis. When Waymond gives Evelyn her Red Pill/Blue Pill choice in the elevator at the beginning of the movie, it’s not about choosing truth over fiction, knowledge over ignorance, it’s about the simple act of choosing. Left or Right. Action or Inaction. In fact, the act of Evelyn even considering that choice, her hesitation when faced with it, creates a universe in which she chooses to act. As made clear again and again in the movie, the ability to choose is Evelyn’s most powerful weapon. In contrast, Neo’s choice is just the beginning. He is just agreeing to “see how far the Rabbit Hole goes”. The decision he is asked to make, between his former miserable ignorance and real answers, is really no choice at all. As the Merovingian says, choice, in the world of the Matrix, “is an illusion created between those with power, and those without.”
This crucial difference between the two movies’ themes comes from a core disagreement at their heart. While both movies posit a nebulous “something off” with the world, they fundamentally disagree about what that “something” is. Everything Everywhere All At Once tells us explicitly. The problem is The Everything Bagel. And the Bagel is Nihilism. The taste of coffee, the crumbling of institutions, the lack of trust, all of it stems from nihilism seeping into our world, and people submitting to it.
The Matrix is a little more circumspect with its answers. “The Matrix”, it tells us, is a system. It’s “a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.” It’s “the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” The problem is not nihilism, or the generational trauma that causes it. The problem is the entire system. The capitalism that uses people as disposable fuel, the soldiers and police that enforce it, the media that tells us everything is how it’s supposed to be. The problem is not the thing that’s stopping you doing your taxes, the problem is the IRS.
With these differences in mind, the reason for Everything Everywhere’s insular structure becomes clear. If the problem is nihilism, the solution is for individuals to refuse to give in to it. If Deidre isn’t helping Evelyn because she doesn’t empathise with her, the solution is kindness. If the IRS’ tax code doesn’t allow for the nuance and complexity of Evelyn’s life, the solution is not a new tax code, but help navigating it. In contrast, Neo’s solution is to destroy those “rules and controls, borders and boundaries” Only then, for the Wachowski’s, is true choice possible. The final lines Neo speaks, “Where you go from here is a choice a leave to you”, show that individual choice is important to them, but only once the system that keeps people confined is exposed and torn down.
Even though these two viewpoints seem fundamentally opposed, the movies work in dialogue with each other. As Daniel Kwan said, his movie is a response to the Matrix. It’s more than just an homage or a riff, but a direct call-out. Key to this rebuttal is the choice to frame Everything Everywhere All At Once around filing taxes. While The Matrix frames the taxes as a stand-in for the System, Daniels’ movie treats them as very literal, and very real. Taxes, in Evelyn’s world, are something that have to be done. Despite The Matrix’s revolutionary furor, raging against the system, Neo can’t change the facts of Evelyn’s world. No matter how she feels about it, she has to file taxes. The Wachowskis propose burning down the system and forging a new world, but the Daniels respond that we have to figure out how to live in this world, with its unjust and brutal rules and boundaries, first.
The Daniels’ movie, however, overstates its case. When faced with a world “born into bondage”, Evelyn’s answer, to “cherish every speck of time” that we have on this earth, feels empty. In a world as fantastical as the ones these movies present, we should be able to dream not just of complacency and fleeting happiness, but of freedom. When compared directly with The Matrix, Everything Everywhere All At Once can’t help but feel a little condescending, a little like it’s telling you off for dreaming of a better world. It doesn’t quite tell you to stop trying to change the system and just be content, but it isn’t far off.
