How “Everything Everywhere” helps to heal generational trauma
When I was 13, I asked to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
I was racked with debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder, forced to write each individual letter against a straightedge, hellbent on perfection. It was messing with my seventh grade mojo.
The perfectionism, in turn, shredded my sleep schedule. I spent countless hours, belly on the floor, struggling with my math homework, pressing mechanical pencil to ruler. Parabolas? Forget about it. OCD combined with sleep deprivation and overmedication led to an angsty, early teenage flavor of nihilism — arguably the worst kind.
When my mom came to visit, we sat in her car in the hospital parking lot and I told her about it. Head swirling with brain fog, I tried to explain that nothing mattered and how that was pressing me toward a mental brink. She got it.
She told me, for the first time, that when she was 25, close to 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 incandescent memory surfaced a couple of 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 Manhattan’s Financial District.
Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) is a Chinese American immigrant who just wants to host a Chinese New Year party at her family’s failing laundromat, but a suave alter ego of her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), arrives to warn her that the multiverse is in danger. So Evelyn learns to “verse jump” — hop between parallel universes to access skills 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 nihilist alter ego of her daughter through infinite universes, trying to figure out why she’s hurting. Then she’s transported to a cliff. Two rocks — one tan and one dark gray — sit side by side, overlooking a ravine and mountains in the distance. It’s silent for a while. Then captions appear — white for Joy, black for Evelyn. This, apparently, is one of the many universes where the conditions weren’t right for life to form.
“It’s nice,” reads Evelyn’s text.
“Yeah,” reads Joy’s text. “You can just sit here, and everything feels really … far away.”
“Joy,” Evelyn’s rock says, “I’m sorry about ruining 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!” Joy says.
“Please. We’re all stupid! Small, stupid humans. It’s like our whole deal.”
Later, Joy asks Evelyn to let her go. Evelyn nods slowly and whispers, “OK.” In our universe, Evelyn lets go of Joy’s waist. In the rock universe, the tan rock slides off the edge of a cliff, rolling down it. But then, in one world, Evelyn turns back to face Joy.
Maybe there is, Evelyn says, “something that explains why you still went looking for me through all of this mess. And why no matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always want to be here with you.” The dark gray rock scoots to the edge of the cliff and tips off over it, rolling after her daughter.
The scene shattered me, then glued the pieces back together. And it reminded me of the importance of understanding intergenerational trauma — when the effects of trauma are passed down between generations — and addressing it.
“Everything Everywhere All At Once,” wrote its directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, on Twitter, “was a dream about reconciling all of the contradictions, making sense of the largest questions, and imbuing meaning onto the dumbest, most profane parts of humanity. We wanted to stretch ourselves in every direction to bridge the generational gap that often crumbles into generational trauma.”
When 31-year-old breakout star Hsu took her mom to the LA premiere, her mom cried. Then her mom, who is from Taiwan, pointed to the screen and said, “That’s me.” For Hsu, it was an aha moment: Her mom 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 2 1/2hour movie,” Hsu said in a video interview from New York. “Life is a long time, if you’re lucky. We don’t get a script that helps us succinctly metabolize our sadness.”
When she first saw the screenplay, Hsu couldn’t believe what she was reading: The motherdaughter relationship was that poignant and relatable. She knew in her bones how complicated and precious that relationship was. And the transference 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 into yourself and say, ‘OK, that pained me, and I need to look at that,’” Hsu said. “‘Something in me is wanting to heal, and something in me is wanting to take that leap of faith.’”
Hsu thinks that’s what art is for: to hold space for trauma and offer catharsis. There’s a generation of women, she thinks, whose idea of strength hinges upon toxic masculinity, bravado and impenetrable toughness.
“Our generation and the younger generation is now exploring different types of strength and what it means to be strong when you’re compassionate,” she said. “And how, actually, empathy and radical empathy and radical kindness are also a tool.”
Sociologist Nancy
Wang Yuen, who specializes in pop culture, sees the universality in the specificities of “Everything Everywhere.” Everybody can relate to a dysfunctional family, regrets, transformation, laundry and taxes.
Evelyn is “like our parents, but seen through our lens,” Yuen said by phone. “If our parents could evolve, that’s who Evelyn would be.”
I asked my own mom to see the movie, and she did, in Chicago’s West Loop — her first time in a movie theater in two years. She texted me a screenshot of an explainer (I needed an explainer, too) with one line circled in black:
“When Evelyn reveals she always wants to be with Joy, no matter where they are, it is the start of a healing process for both characters.”