[This post includes plot and ending spoilers for Everything Everywhere All At Once and Swiss Army Man.]
As we all slowly drift away from the media landscape of the 2010s, I’ve found myself obsessed with what might be its most unwavering aesthetic pillar. From the Marvel Universe’s cinematic sprawl, to our final great shared cultural object in the form of Game of Thrones, to the explosion of reality TV, to a set of Best Picture winners that includes films like Argo, Spotlight, and Birdman — our last decade of popular culture was defined by a specific and enduring strain of cynicism. Film and television, particularly American film and television, particularly American film and television that might be seen by anyone outside of tiny arthouse theaters or tight-packed city centers, had to guard itself against the charge of taking itself too seriously. This was the decade that American film and television became afraid of its own potential, and I think a lot of people never want to leave that comfort zone behind.
If the links between those objects feel a little foggy, let me expand a bit on what I mean by cynicism. Cynical art can look like the quippy refusal to ever take itself (or its own emotional stakes) too seriously. It can see constant humor as an escape from its own artistic insecurities. It can look like the consistent desire to subvert the rules of its own genre — to keep an audience on its toes and uncomfortable with their own expectations, and to refuse to offer an ending that might seem too unrealistic to be satisfying. Or, it can look like truth, so acutely and directly that it becomes akin to documentary, doing nothing with the incredible power fiction has of using unreality to cut to the heart of experience. Think for a moment about the landmarks of the 2000s: fantasy epics like The Lord of the Rings, science-fiction folktales like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or deeply earnest works of magical realism like Pan’s Labyrinth and Spirited Away. At the Oscars, the 2000s was the decade of films like Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, and Slumdog Millionaire. It featured the rise of Christopher Nolan, Pixar’s golden age, and made Avatar the highest grossing film of all time. Despite its many flaws, it was a time of utter, cinematic earnestness.
And then, we got self-conscious, and it had to fall apart.
***
Everything Everywhere All At Once is not, strictly speaking, a unique piece of filmmaking. It is the sophomore effort of a pair of directors, Daniels Kwan and Scheinert, who first made Swiss Army Man. As one of the 2010s’ few deeply earnest films, many of EEAAO‘s aesthetic sensibilities can be found there in their nascent forms. Swiss Army Man follows a man named Hank (played by Paul Dano) who begins the film trapped on a desert island and about to hang himself — until, suddenly, a corpse washes up on shore. This corpse, played by Daniel Radcliffe, gives Hank a chance at salvation; it becomes his fully-decked survival toolkit and irreplacable companion. As they bond and travel through miles of wilderness to try and find Hank’s home, it slowly seems to be regaining life. At its core, Swiss Army Man is a film about hope — about the belief that life could be better tomorrow than it is today, and that that reality often comes from the places we least expect. That in itself is not unique; it’s the method: Radcliffe’s joyfully flatulent corpse, that sets it apart from its contemporaries. And its exactly that kind of energy, of refusing to allow something as flimsy as the fear of being laughed at to prevent it from using some absolutely wild imagery, that EEAAO takes and amplifies until it seemed like the entire moviegoing public was unable to look away.
What makes EEAAO such a potent vehicle for the return of cinematic earnestness is multifaceted, ranging from its imagery to its cast to the landscape in which it found itself this past spring. It is, in a purely visual sense, one of the silliest films I’ve ever seen, with scenes in which characters fight with dildos and leap ass-first onto butt plugs to give themselves momentary superpowers. Its core conceit revolves around an “Everything Bagel” — a bagel onto which its main character’s primary antagonist (who happens to be an alternate universe version of her queer, twenty-something daughter) put, well, everything. It reenacts the core conceit of Ratatouille, then spirals it into an animal control jailbreak as “raccacoonie” gets spirited away.
And yet, through every single sequence, every moment of supreme silliness, every horrible pun, EEAAO refuses to play any of its characters’ emotions for laughs. Over and over it places both its stars and its smallest role players into wild, fantastical flights of fancy, but it never devalues the ways they feel about each other, nor the many worlds collapsing all around them. And it’s that, I think, that has made so many people seemingly so deeply uncomfortable with its presentation, and so unwilling to take it approach to meaning-making seriously. The films of the 2010s, the ones we’ve gotten used to for the past ten-odd years, were so afraid of being laughed at for their tiny unrealities that they demanded that we laugh with them first; they were so afraid of being labeled “inauthentic” that they styled themselves as documentaries, lore bibles, or cinematic autofiction: impervious to criticism, yet afraid of taking risks. In the end, they punted their emotional stakes entirely, or they dressed them up as truth, inalienable and indivisible, because who could argue that?
Instead, EEAAO committs fully to its characters; it commits to their humanity, and their existence across many worlds, without simultaneously requiring them to only show the most serious, somber parts of themselves. It presents them as worthy of respect in their entirety, without an outlet for its audience’s doubts and sneers. It fundamentally rejects the compartmentalization of identity: they are everything they are, at every point and every moment, because to be anything less would be dishonest and untrue. They are an antidote to cynicism, because they never kneel before the audience and demand we take them seriously. If we don’t, that’s just our own failing, and might say more about how we see the people in our worlds than about the film itself.
***
In case it’s not already obvious, I have little patience anymore for cynical storytelling. There were some truly great films that emerged from this era and tradition — Moonlight is perhaps the one I think will last the longest, and will remain a stunning achievement long after its particular style of realism fades. Or something like The Social Network, that justified its cynicism with a target well-deserving of its harsh and sharpened knife. But the films I remember most clearly are the ones that bucked that burgeoning tradition — like Interstellar: a science-fiction epic that, via its ending, positioned human relationships and emotion as more powerful than the laws of space and time, or Mad Max: Fury Road: a film that finds simple beauty and incredible catharsis in a post-apocalyptic fight for freedom (and in massive walls of speakers and a bungee-strapped guitarist). I watched so many movies through the mid-2010s, when I was in college and had access to a wonderful student-run cinema and could buy tickets for five dollars a pop. I kept a journal all that time, jotting down every film I watched, what I thought about them, like an analog Letterboxd account that I refused to share with anybody else. And through it all, these were the ones that stuck; these are films that, half a decade later, still make me feel something when I think about them — the ones I don’t have to check my notes on to remember how I felt when I left the theater.
What is fiction even for, if not the ability to use a world that never could exist to illuminate the one that does?
Everything Everywhere All At Once is, I hope, the vanguard of a different kind of storytelling: one that pushes against these now impulses towards cynical, self-conscious cinema and allows us to make earnest art without the fear that, because we’ve decided to play with all of fiction’s meaning-making tools, someone, somewhere may not take us seriously. And it does seem like we’re moving somewhere a little more like the world before the 2010s. James Cameron finally made his second Avatar, and it picked up right where the 2009 original left off. Jordan Peele’s Nope returned the creature feature to the summer blockbuster stage, while weaving together threads of fear and pathos that gave each of its characters their own special kind of dignity. And after making two of these, I doubt the Daniels are anywhere close to done.
Sunset Over Ithaca 