A surreal journey through a multiverse of decisions made by one character, reflecting on the concept of co-existing multiverses in different places and times.

The Movie

The movie “Everything, Everything All at Once” is definitely surreal in its format, jumping all over the place to communicate the idea of the multiverse of decisions made throughout one’s life. This movie focuses on one character’s journey; each individual since the beginning of time itself has a unique multiverse of decisions and consequences, according to quantum theory of co-existing multiverses in different places and times, but are only fixed when observed (ie the thought experiment of Erwin Schrödinger’s cat)  .

Thus in the end it was entirely about the universe she wanted to reside in, which was not repeating the mistakes (as she saw them) of her parents, that due to her own hurt and stubbornness she was in fact repeating,

Thus the nub of the movie, the chance to see and experience the results of infinite ‘what if’s’.

The mundane start, with everyday pressures of balancing time, money and family of just one person in the billions alive in the present, (let alone the past and future), further enlarges (to our limited imagination) the infinite size of the multiverse she was about to cross. 

All the actors in her world remained, as it was her world, thus ours would have different influencers and actors to play out our story. She was in fact and would always be the hero of her own journey (ie messianic). The idea of enlightenment was explored by the husband she always wanted, but later realised why she married the man she did, namely to balance her initial fast thinking primary reaction (ref; Kahneman ‘Thinking fast and slow’) to fight like a dragon mother that Chinese women in their 40’s are often stereotyped as being. But this has nothing to do with the other characters, it’s purely her story with everything circulating around her, within her universe, everyone else is an actor responding to her decisions, reminds me of the hard to follow, but brilliant movie “Synecdoche, New York,” directed by Charlie Kaufman, an incredibly surreal journey into the life, times and draining disappointments of a playwright, who has the opportunity to write, direct, produce and star in his own play entirely about himself, gradually realising the futility of it all and life’s simple but often consequently devastating decisions, acted out before him.