“Everything Everywhere All at Once” An unprecedented multiverse movie that breaks the curse of “family” *Note! Contains spoilers.

Bagels and drum-type washing machines as symbols of emptiness

Complicated multidimensional cosmology aside, Job Tupaki can be said to be an alter ego created by Joy, exhausted by her estrangement from her mother, out of despair. The bagel with everything on it is a symbol of Joy's sense of emptiness, and the reason why it looks like a black bagel is because the shape of the bagel has the connotation of "zero" or "nothingness." Furthermore, the motif of a black circle, reminiscent of a black bagel, appears on the screen in various shapes.

For example, the drum-type washing machine at Evelyn's laundry shop is also a variation of the black bagel. Just as the center of a bagel is hollow, when you look into a drum-type washing machine in operation, there is nothing in the middle because the laundry is spinning around the outer circumference of the drum due to centrifugal force. At the beginning of the movie, Joy comes to her parents' house and suddenly looks at the washing machine to find the laundry spinning round and round. Don't miss Joy's gloomy expression at this moment. It is implied that a bottomless void will swallow up Joy and Evelyn.

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(*The following contains spoilers for the main story)

In the middle of the story, Joy-Job Tupaki's true purpose is revealed. It's not about "destroying the entire multiverse" as Alpha Waymond (Waymond from another universe) warned. It is almost impossible for him to commit suicide because he wants to share the feeling of emptiness that torments him with his mother, Evelyn, and annihilate it together. However, long before Joy's despair, there is a depiction of Evelyn staring into the same void.

In the IRS elevator, Evelyn's brain is scanned by Alpha Waymond and she sees flashbacks of her past memories. In one scene, a young Evelyn sits on the floor of a laundry shop, staring blankly at the spinning drum of a washing machine. Even though she had just opened her shop and still had hopes for her marriage, Evelyn may have already felt that she was losing control of her life.

Negative inheritance from parents to children is one of the main themes that runs through this work. It is not just the feeling of emptiness that has been inherited. Evelyn grew up with a father steeped in Asian patriarchy, feeling indebted to him for not being the heir apparent. Now that she has become a mother, she has become the same patriarchal authority figure as her biological father, and is acting in an authoritarian manner to control Joy's life. The negative chain of events repeats itself, and Joy, too, becomes increasingly unable to feel the love of her parents.

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