repurposing the unfinished: lessons on failure from everything everywhere all at once
Welcome back to my commentary on the film Everything Everywhere All At Once, directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, or “The Daniels.” In the first post in this series I shared a synopsis of the movie, and I also discussed the impact of distraction and how it shows up within relationships in the film. In this post I’ll process a key scene in the film and the way it made me think about the concept of failure.
Just a quick re-cap of the plot points that are most pertinent to this post:
The story is framed around the Wang family: mom Evelyn, dad Waymond, and adult daughter Joy.
This film is one that explores the multiverse, so there are multiple versions of each of the characters from different universes. New universes are born when we make choices that impact the direction our life takes, where choosing option 1 is one universe and option 2 becomes another.
Our Evelyn may be the key to defeating an omniversal villain called Jobu Tapaki.
In the main universe of the film, Evelyn and Waymond own a coin laundry that is being audited by the IRS.
spoilers & triggers
My discussion of this movie will reveal spoilery points from the plot. It’s an emotion-packed film, so watching it can bring up lots of big feels. There aren’t any specifically universally traumatic issues covered in this post, but if the complexity of family dynamics pushes some buttons for you, please take care as you read.
the scene that lingers
Sometimes when you watch a movie, you just know a particular scene or line is the scene, the line. Like in On the Waterfront, the “I coulda been a contender” scene: even if there are other moments in the movie that resonate with you as an individual, when you see that scene, you’re certain that “ooh, this is what Elia Kazan wants me to care about.”
“You’re capable of anything because you’re so bad at everything.”
In Everything Everywhere All At Once, one of the scenes that hits on this feeling for me is when Alpha-Waymond, the version of Waymond from the Alphaverse, explains to our Evelyn why she has so much promise in potentially defeating Jobu Tapaki. “I’ve seen thousands of Evelyns but never an Evelyn like you. You have so many goals you never finished. Dreams you never followed. You’re living your worst you,” Alpha-Waymond says. “Can’t you see? Every failure here branched off into a success for another Evelyn in another life….You’re capable of anything because you’re so bad at everything.”
After watching this movie repeatedly, I still don’t know how I feel about this part of the film. I know this scene is important. I’m just not sure why. But I know I feel something about it, and that nagging sensation seems worth sitting with.
a universe of “failed” evelyns
When I first sat with this scene, watching it over and over again, I thought the crux was about failure. Maybe it still is, I’m not sure. But the place I’ve landed is an existential curiosity about whether I believe failure even exists. Is failure like the concept of time? Just a construct humans came up with to provide structure in a mysterious universe? If each of our decisions has ended in success in another universe, what happens to the version of us that’s formed by choosing the other options?
the whey in the jar: a metaphor for meaning
The way I picture the point Alpha-Waymond makes is like when you have leftover gunk at the end of a project that you have to figure out how to re-purpose or throw away. Like in cheese-making there’s a bunch of whey at the end; should you toss it down the sink or put it in a jar for later? You could find something creative and interesting to use it for. Or it could just be a burdensome nothing, taking up space in the back of the fridge.
Evelyn has made decision after decision that led her here, at an IRS audit for a coin laundry that’s teetering on the edge of its own sort of failure–whatever that means–bogged down by problems that could not be more ordinary. This version of Evelyn is the whey in the jar that you don’t know what to do with. The decisions needed in order to create an Evelyn who is a kung fu movie star in a more glamorous universe resulted in the formation of our Evelyn, apparently the worst Evelyn.
from failure to “not yet”
The thing is, however, the presence of whey isn’t the result of failure: it means you made cheese. So what does it mean that we have this human—an Evelyn formed as the byproduct of the decisions of more interesting and successful Evelyns—who made completely reasonable decision after completely reasonable decision yet still ended up living a story that could be defined as failure?
It seems like the culture in which we’ve been socialized doesn’t have an existential equivalent of whey. Why must our Evelyn be a failure? Why can’t she just be waiting around for inspiration to strike? Success after success for different versions of Evelyn is how our Evelyn came to be. Perhaps this is the point of the scene: because of our culture, we interpret neutrality–or even possibility–as failure. We interpret a situation where someone who has yet to realize their potential as a failure. It’s kind of a punishing lens.
redefining failure
Sometimes when we haven’t done anything wrong, we still end up in a place that feels like we’re being punished for the route we took. Or it feels like even though we’ve done everything right, we still feel like we failed because we look around and the world is uninspiring and gray. But when I think about the feeling of satisfaction resulting from the successful repurposing of byproducts like whey—end results that could be either a burden or a blank canvas—I feel hope and excitement. Even though Alpha-Waymond describes our Evelyn’s life as filled with failures, he still offers us a different way to look at the alternative of success. It’s more like “not yet successful” than “failure.”
I think all of us have made a decision or two that didn’t end up with the most exciting result, so when we’re having a bad day we think “What would I be doing right now if I’d decided differently?” I am on board with the idea that the version of me having a bad day both enabled my alternate self to have a great life and set the stage for my current self to be journeying toward the delayed satisfaction of repurposement. It feels gentler.
a universe apart from success & failure
I like the place I landed in my processing of Alpha-Waymond’s speech about our Evelyn’s potential. But there was a caveat I could hear whispering at the back of my mind as I wrote this post. It still feels so much better and more compassionate to live with the reminder that something good is out there waiting even if the present isn’t going that well. But this little caveat was making me feel cautious about being all-in with this lesson from Alpha-Waymond’s soliloquy. In my last post on this film I discussed distraction and its foil, presence. And in this post, here I am endorsing the idea that our deliverance from self-flaggelation is to remove ourselves from presence in favor of an unrealized future.
Should Evelyn go with Waymond, or should she reject him? A new universe is born when she decides.
It sounds like the lesson is “If the present is uncomfortable, just pretend it’s the prequel to when things actually get good.” I don’t like the idea that the lesson learned is either to dismiss the present moment’s difficulties because something better is coming or continue feeling as though the present moment’s difficulties are a result of our own failures.
Something I say often with my clients is that one of the most important developmental tasks of adulthood is sitting with conflicting truths. Right now I need to sit with the truth that when things are hard, sometimes we need to be reminded that the future is coming, and it has the potential to be great. And I need to balance this truth with another: that putting all of our hope into the future without regard for the present puts us in the position to wish our lives away.
a capacity for joy in the midst of the mundane
Everything Everywhere All At Once really is an exceptional film because it does not ask us to ignore this complexity. In the universe where Evelyn is a kung fu master/movie star, the life-changing decision that led her down this path was choosing not to move to America with Waymond and instead staying in China with her parents. At its face, this universe seems to have worked out better for both Evelyn and Waymond because he has become a handsome, wealthy businessman.
“In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”
CEO-Waymond, however, still carries a flame for the Evelyn he fell for as a child and tells her so. As our Evelyn inhabits the consciousness of Kung-Fu-Evelyn, she tells CEO-Waymond what would have happened had she stayed with him: “You want to know what would have happened? ‘What if?’ We’d wake up everyday, in a tiny apartment over a failing laundromat.” CEO-Waymond responds by saying “In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”
meaning-making from small pleasures
As CEO-Waymond reflects on his belief that he would have been satisfied with a less grand life with Evelyn, we see snapshots of our Waymond as he experiences his life, the same small life that our Evelyn has come to resent. A funny clip on a TV show, the excitement of finding a lost remote control, being silly with customers, joyously tearing newspaper away from the windows of the laundromat he and his wife just purchased. Our Waymond’s life is filled to brimming with small pleasures and sweet moments.
from distress tolerance to capacity for joy
As a trauma therapist, a common goal for my clients is expanding their distress tolerance so that they can continue feeling safe even as a difficult moment comes upon them. It’s an important goal because there’s always something distressing up ahead because that’s life.
But our Waymond demonstrates a capacity for presence, joy, and playfulness that is no less important than being able to handle hard things. What would life be if our only purpose was to keep our heads down and just get through it? Why would surviving challenge matter if the small, good things all around us were superfluous and inessential? Our Waymond, sharing the same universe and tiny apartment with our Evelyn, lives a life of fulfillment. I can’t help but feel inspired to do the same.
more on failure, decision-making, & joy
In this post I tangentially touched on decision-making as it relates to the concept of failure. Decision-making is also a fascinating topic in its own right, and maybe someday I’ll write more about it. But for now, here’s some further reading/listening that came to mind for me as I wrote this post:
The book Thinking, Fast and Slow by the late Daniel Kahneman, who is considered a foremost authority on decision-making. (There is also a pay-walled article from The Wall Street Journal about Kahneman by someone processing the researcher’s decision to die by suicide, which is compassionate thought-piece adding nuance to Kahneman’s legacy.)
An episode of the podcast “Switched on Pop” with snippets from an interview with the late Adam Schlesinger, who penned the song “Stacy’s Mom.” In this podcast episode Schlesinger talks about how writing a one-hit-wonder enabled him to be more creative with the rest of his career. It was an interesting reframe of one-hit-wonders as opportunities for empowerment, rather than meaning the rest of your career is a failure.
The book Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness by Ingrid Lee Fetell, in which Fetell shares the ways in which the feeling of joy is rooted in humans’ evolutionary history as a survival mechanism.
Thank you for reading! I’m Trina, and I’m a therapist in Texas. I wrote this post myself using my own words and ideas. I used AI to help me optimize titles, headings, keywords, and meta descriptions for SEO purposes. AI also gave me some tips on how to share this post on social media. I will always let you know if/when/how I use AI in my blog posts.
If you’re in Texas and looking for a therapist, give me a shout. I’d love to learn more about you and your story.
