Like I said, it’s the gift that keeps on giving, so today I’m going to talk even more about what by this point I can safely call my favourite movie of all time: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. (I have already written about it twice, here and here.) In case my ramblings haven’t yet inspired you to see it, I’ll explain: this is but one of many stories about the multiverse that have come out these past few years. From Rick and Morty to Spiderman, it feels like the idea has been popping up more and more. But why? What’s the appeal? Certainly, there’s the fact that we love to see some crazy sci-fi stories, and the ideas of time travel or visiting other planets is perhaps a tad overdone. However, I think there’s likely more to it. I’m no sociologist or psychologist, but consider what the past four years have been like, or even better: think about the last ten. Think about how much the world has changed—how crazy it seems to have gotten—since Donald Trump was elected to now. We had four years of the orange man, a pandemic that brought the world to a halt, inflation and affordability crises, mass migration, cultural civil “war”, brutal wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine—and most of that is just the past five years! Let’s face it: if you watched the news daily, you would probably be thinking things are fucking crazy. And to be fair, I’m not denying that they are. All I’m saying is that with all of this madness in the air, it is tempting to think about a world that was otherwise.

Enter the infinite multiverse, where every conceivable outcome is, as Jobu says, a “statistical eventuality”. There is a world where I lost all of my hair at 15. There’s a world where Elon Musk is the same, except he’s named “Elon Tusk” and has the tusks to match. There’s maybe a world where the Beatles didn’t write any of their music, and a struggling British guitar player from the 2010s did it instead. There may even be a world where we have hotdogs for fingers. These are absurd examples, of course, but hey! Maybe those worlds are out there somewhere. Still, let’s get more personal. What if there was a world where you had the job of your dreams? What if you were a billionaire who invented the iPhone, or a world leader? What if you were with the love of your life, or you had that chance but screwed it up instead? Would your life maybe be better or worse? The concept of a multiverse invites such questions because those lives—those versions of you—who made different choices are out there. In other words, the multiverse invites the question of what could have been.

This is the universe—or should I say, “universes”—of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. The main characters are exposed of their alternate selves across the infinite eventualities, of which they are but one. They get to see that they could have made different choices and how it would have turned out. In some, they ended up wildly successful. In others, they were struggling just to pay the bills. But common to each possibility was a set of problems that they had to deal with. The best scene to illustrate this is that of a successful Evelyn talking to a successful Waymond, who was her ex-love interest. In other universes, they wound up married. Not without any problems, of course, but no life is without problems. And for the successful Waymond, that problem was that he was still in love with Evelyn, but a loving life spent together was no longer in the cards for her. So, he said:

I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.

Waymond to Evelyn

It’s funny. Among all the radically different versions of these characters, it’s easy to wonder how we can group them together and call them the same. Who is Evelyn, or who is Waymond, when all of the Evelyns and Waymonds are so different from one another? Of course, they’re not the same people. How could they be? They made different choices, maybe for the best, or for the worse. Still, perhaps we can know an Evelyn or a Waymond because it is not anything they have done that defines them. Near the end of the movie, you lose track of who’s who and where exactly they’re from. Only sometimes is it patently obvious. And I believe this is because the writers knew that a person is more than the sum of their actions, their feeling, or their experience. Maybe what matters most, then, is who they are deep down to each other by which I am not referring to anything as basic as a label, like “husband” or “wife”. Maybe what’s in common is that, in whatever lives they have lived, they have touched one another deeply. In that respect, like Waymond, I would have liked laundry and taxes, as well.