the order of everything
"everything everywhere all at once" and the power of maximalist film
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who call themselves “Daniels,” follows Evelyn Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh, a woman who is bogged down by painful mundanity as a result of her life choices. Evelyn believes that her decision to marry her sweet, but decidedly un-serious husband Waymond, played by Ke Huy Quan, has backed her into a life of laundry and taxes. On either side she is flanked by her disappointed father, played by James Hong, and her alienated daughter Joy, played by Stephanie Hsu. Evelyn learns that she can access other Evelyns, from versions of her life where she made different decisions, and use their knowledge to defeat a great evil. All at once, Evelyn is a kung-fu master, a famous singer, a rock and many other things. Daniels don’t hold back on the absurdity of what they depict, while also providing nuance and stakes in every world they create. In a world where Evelyn has hotdog fingers, she also has a tender romance with Jamie-Lee Curtis’s character Deidre Beaubierdra. Put simply, this film contains a lot. Everything Everywhere All At Once is a maximalist film.
Traditionally, maximalism is an aesthetic judgment. Maximalism is excess. Maximalist art is a lush space brimming with whimsical abundance. Skeptics regard maximalism as too busy, or the result of a creator's ego unchecked by simplicity. Maximalism exists opposite minimalism. Minimalism is refined, subtle, and rarely criticized. Why would we want all of that stuff anyway? Get it out of here! It’s distracting! In filmmaking maximalism goes beyond aesthetics. It resides in every choice a director makes. In film, maximalism exists in a variety of tones, themes, and genres squished into a single screen. Maximalism determines brisk edits, juxtaposes layered characters, and animates complex world-building. It exists in everything that can fit, and pushes for more. Successful maximalist film argues for everything that's included, every addition feels self evident and intrinsic to the storytelling.
Maximalist film does something more, and it is the reason that Everything Everywhere All At Once is such an incredibly emotionally affecting film. Maximalist film is a philosophical tool, one which demonstrates the absurdity of order. Here, “order” is used the way Michel Foucault discussed it in The Order of Things (1966). Order is simply the way that we have made things to be. It is the social, political, economic, and philosophical realities of language, of life, of being. Order is the result of human categorization. We are compelled to order, and to reject it. It is absurd and yet, it is. Maximalism is the vivid recreation and rejection of this order. To demonstrate how maximalism does this, and understand the triumph of Everything, we must go back to examine other influential maximalist works.
A movie often considered the first maximalist film is the French silent epic Napoleon (1927) directed by Abel Gance. In this film we can see maximalist techniques in both the editing, by Marguerite Beaugé, as well as the direction of the film, and how they are used to critique order.
The film presents an eccentric retelling of the origins of Napoleon, played by Albert Dieudonné, as he rose through the ranks, survived the French Revolution, and moved to invade Italy. Gance implements a variety of innovative camera techniques to create a visceral experience for the viewer. Cameras were tied to swinging pendulums over buzzing crowds, fastened to the backs of horses hurtling to battle. Gance and Kruger had the footage tinted, double-exposed, warped, and the result was an electrically colored, sometimes kaleidoscopic film. This plethora of presentations provides criticism of the political world Napoleon navigates, his order, and careens this order from inanity to severity. The fluidity of Napoleon’s positionality as we follow him through his life is mirrored in its frenetic presentation. In sewing together jagged multi-colored shots from angles previously unexplored, Gance creates a visceral experience for the viewer, which evokes both horror and hilarity.
We can flash forward, and away from French cinema to Brazil (1985) directed by Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Time Bandits (1981). Brazil demonstrates the importance of magical realism in maximalist filmmaking critique of order. In Brazil, order is a bureaucratic totalitarian society, which protagonist Sam Lowry, played by Jonathan Price, rebels against, first in his imagination, and then in reality. Gilliam uses magical realism to blur the lines between dreams and reality.
As Sam toils to uncover the truth about a small but consequential injustice against the backdrop of a graying, detonating city, he breaks to imagine himself flying above a lush earth, towards a floating woman he hasn’t yet met, played by Kim Griest. In his dreams he has long beautiful curls, a painted face, and large angelic wings, while in reality he wears an identical gray suit everyday. The scenes in reality are bleak and drip with black comedy, while the scenes in his imagination are simultaneously goofy and meaningful. In aligning these two worlds, the fantastical and the droll, Gilliam shifts between genres and tone, showing that each is equally absurd and real. As the mystery unfolds, and Sam is pushed further and further to reject that Orwellian order, his dreams seep into his reality. When he faces his demise, it is ultimately his dreams which buoy him. Here, maximalist film continues its interrogation of the order of things, while offering up a second smaller, but still important thesis, that we are what we are, and what we dream.
Moving even further into the present, there is Moulin Rouge! (2001), the jukebox musical directed and co-written by Baz Luhrmann. Moulin Rouge! is a pinball machine of tone. It leaps genres as performances careen from campy to devastating. The visual style is dazzling, busy, bright and dull. It is a maximalist film through and through. Moulin Rouge contains another maximalist technique, the use of cultural references.
In a maximalist film, not everything has to be new. These films are so filled to the brim with ideas that any number of them can be borrowed from other properties. In Moulin Rouge! the soundtrack borrowed popular music of the MTV generation, and put it in new contexts where it could achieve bigger laughs and greater heartaches. The story also borrowed from other media, the characters from the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, La Traviata, cabaret and vaudeville, as well as historical figures like visual artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, played by John Leguizamo. It buried culture that many had an understanding of in an enormous pile of other references.
The result is a criticism of the order of culture. What is trivial and what is not. Luhrmann puts the mindless and popular beside the historical and important. In doing so he raises a question about what kind of media we should be regarding seriously, as well as the answer: all of it. It is all capable of producing emotion, and evoking heartbreak.
Everything Everywhere All At Once, serves as the culmination of ideas from Gance, Gilliam, Luhrmann. It uses its direction, magical realism, and references to put forth the height of maximalist film’s critique of order.
In Everything the order of things goes beyond the culture, political system or divides of a time, imagined or otherwise. The order Everything simultaneously recreates and rejects, is one we place on ourselves. What we tell ourselves is true about our lives and what we’re capable of. Like people in any oppressive political system, we find ourselves ruled by order, regret, and imagining some different life. Daniels puts these lives side-by-side, showing the audience what is and what isn’t, and blurs these distinctions through magical realism. Maximalism is the decomposition of order. This is then compounded by the relentless switching between, moving from life to life. Some of these lives are familiar to us, evoking other works like Carol (2015) and Ratatouille (2007) and so on. The quick cuts between the impossible, imaginative alternatives, and finally the sense of loss the audience feels, as we crave the order back. It is all so absurd, so true and so painful. And then, Everything ends without restoring order. Daniels reject the impulse. In doing so, Everything Everywhere All At Once leaves its audience in a dream-like state, charged with the new feeling that, for once, order is irrelevant.