When I was 13, I asked to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
I was plagued with debilitating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), forced to write every single letter against a ruler, determined to be perfect. It messed with my seventh grade mojo.
The perfectionism, in turn, fragmented my sleep schedule. I spent countless hours, stomach on the floor, struggling with my math homework, with a mechanical pencil on the ruler. Parabolas? Forget it. OCD coupled with sleep deprivation and overmedication led to an anxious, early teenage taste of nihilism—perhaps the worst kind.
When my mother came to visit, we were in her car in the hospital parking lot and I told her about it. Head whirling with brain fog, I tried to explain that nothing mattered and how that pushed me to a mental limit. She has it.
She first told me that when she was 25, almost the age I am now, life was too much for her too, and she tried to leave it. She saw me, understood me and sat there with me – a golden moment between generations.
That glowing memory surfaced a few weeks ago, when my roommate and I went to see “Everything Everywhere All At Once”—a sci-fi action-adventure about the emotional implications of the multiverse—at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in the United States. Manhattan’s financial district.
Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) is a Chinese-American immigrant who just wants to throw a Chinese New Year’s party at her family’s failing laundromat, but a sweet-tempered alter ego of her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), arrives to warn her that it’s multiverse is in danger. So Evelyn learns to “verse jump”—jump between parallel universes to access abilities from other versions of herself—then realizes that the dark force threatening the multiverse is inextricably linked to her estranged daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). ).
Evelyn follows a nihilistic alter ego of her daughter through infinite universes and tries to figure out why she is in pain. Then she is transported to a cliff. Two rocks – one brown and one dark gray – lie side by side, overlooking a ravine and mountains in the distance. It’s quiet for a while. Then captions appear – white for Joy, black for Evelyn. This is apparently one of many universes where the conditions were not suitable for life to form.
“It’s fun,” reads Evelyn’s text.
“Yes”, is the text of Joy. “You can just sit here, and everything feels really… far away.”
“Joy,” Evelyn’s rock says, “I’m sorry I ruined everything…”
“Shhhh,” Joy’s rock says. “You don’t have to worry about that here. Just be a rock.”
“I just feel so stupid…” Evelyn says.
“God!” says Joy. “Please. We’re all stupid! Little stupid people. It’s like our whole deal.”
Later, Joy asks Evelyn to let her go. Evelyn nods slowly and whispers, “OK.” In our universe, Evelyn releases Joy’s waist. In the rock universe, the brown rock slides off the edge of a cliff and rolls down. But then, in one world, Evelyn turns back to Joy.
Maybe, Evelyn says, ‘something that explains why you went looking for me through all this mess. And why whatever happens, I still want to be with you. I will always, always want to be here with you.” The dark gray rock shoots to the edge of the cliff and tilts over it, rolling after her daughter.
The scene shattered me and glued the pieces back together. And it reminded me of the importance of understanding intergenerational trauma — when the effects of trauma are passed down from generation to generation — and addressing it.
‘Everything everywhere at once’ wrote the directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, on Twitter, “was a dream about reconciling all contradictions, understanding the biggest questions and giving meaning to the dumbest, most profane parts of humanity. We wanted to reach out in all directions to bridge the generation gap that often crumbles into generational trauma.”
When breakthrough 31-year-old Stephanie Hsu took her mother to the LA premiere, her mother cried. Then her mother, who is from Taiwan, pointed to the screen and said, “That’s me.” For Hsu, it was an aha moment: Her mother was related to Evelyn’s character, who faces her own trauma in her relationship with her father, Joy’s grandfather or Gong Gong (James Hong).
“Life is so messy and life is more than a two and a half hour movie,” Hsu said in a video interview from New York. ‘Life is long, if you’re lucky. We don’t get a script that helps us succinctly metabolize our grief.”
When she first saw the screenplay, Hsu couldn’t believe what she was reading: the mother-daughter relationship was so poignant and relatable. She knew deep down how complicated and precious that relationship was. And the transfer of energy from the screen to the audience, she said, is very real.
“When you break open like that, you can’t help but look inside yourself and say, ‘Okay, that hurt me, and I need to look into that,'” Hsu said. “‘Something in me wants to heal, and something in me wants to take that leap of faith.'”
Hsu thinks that’s what art is for: to keep space for trauma and to provide purification. There is a generation of women, she thinks, whose idea of strength depends on poisonous masculinity, bravado and impenetrable toughness.
“Our generation and the younger generation are now exploring different types of strength and what it means to be strong when you’re compassionate,” she said. “And how empathy and radical empathy and radical kindness are actually a tool as well.”
Peggy Loo, a licensed psychologist and director of the Manhattan Therapy Collective, saw the film on the Upper West Side. She believes the film can serve as an exercise in imagination for those who have experienced trauma.
Trauma can shrink the imagination, she said, if your main reference points for life’s possibilities came from traumatic experiences. To heal, we must be able to see beyond what we have known and been exposed to.
“There’s this: ‘We know who we are, we know who we want to be,'” Loo said on the phone. “And then the gap between the two. How do we get there?”
For Loo, part of the film’s strength lies in its sci-fi genre, which requires the viewer to suspend reality to keep up with the plot. It’s the perfect counterpoint, she said, and a great way to spark the imagination.
Rather than neatly tying up loose ends as movies usually do, “Everything Everywhere” realistically mimics what change can look like, by letting the protagonist make mistake after mistake.
Wil Lee, 31, is a software engineer from San Francisco. “Not to be reductive,” he tweeted“But Everything Everywhere All At Once is this season’s generational trauma slamdunk movie.”
The way it fluently weaves three different languages — Cantonese, Mandarin and English — he continued, is a good reflection of how much immigrant households actually communicate.
“It shows the language barrier as a core component of this intergenerational misunderstanding,” Lee said in a telephone interview, adding, “The gap is so great that you struggle to even find the right words to explain yourself to your family. .”
In an early scene, when Gong Gong arrives at the laundromat, Joy tries to introduce her friend, Becky (Tallie Medel), to him for the first time. Joy fiddles with her Mandarin and Evelyn jumps into Cantonese and introduces Becky to Gong Gong as Joy’s “good friend.” Joy’s face falls.
When Shirley Chan, a 30-year-old freelance illustrator based in Brooklyn, watched the film in Kips Bay, it felt like the universe was deliberately sending it its way, she wrote in a Letterboxd. ratingto let her know that her own efforts were seen and to give her the courage to live as her most authentic self.
A week before she saw the film, Chan came to her immigrant mother in Cantonese and spoke honestly for the first time about how her upbringing affected her. Some of the Cantonese dialogues, Chan wrote, were eerily almost word for word what she said to her mother.
“But in my real life, where this long jump doesn’t happen,” Chan said during a phone call, “I can see the moments when she tries it, like asking me if a friend I’m talking about is my girlfriend or telling me she’s happy.” is with my career.”
Pop culture sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen sees universality in the specificities of ‘Everything Everywhere’. Anyone can relate to a dysfunctional family, regrets, transformation, laundry and taxes.
Evelyn is “like our parents, but seen through our lens,” Yuen said on the phone. “If our parents could evolve, Evelyn would be.”
I asked my own mother to see the film, and she did, in Chicago’s West Loop—her first time in a movie theater in two years. She sent me a screenshot of an explanation (I also needed an explanation) with one line circled in black:
“When Evelyn reveals that she always wants to be with Joy wherever they are, it’s the beginning of a healing process for both characters.”
