Visual Symbolism in Everything Everywhere All at Once
There are some movies that are simply amazing.
And one of the things that many amazing movies, the ones that are simply incredible like Steven Spielberg's masterpiece E.T., do is amazing visuals.
Visuals that mean something, but which you feel deeply to the depths of every fiber in your being.
Like Eliot and his friends flying on their bikes in E.T.
Or Wonder Woman standing up against the war, in the middle of the trenches of World War I, as a living Goddess of Victory.
Everything Everywhere All at Once takes this to a whole new level.
Its visual symbolism, like the everything bagel, you feel deeply just like the imagery of Eliot flying on his bike.
But intellectually, Everything Everywhere All at Once has imagery of such complexity and sophistocation!
Like going from John Williams's use of musical themes in Star Wars, with maybe four themes for the entire original trilogy (the Star Wars that matters), to Wagner's use of theme in his Ring Cycle, with maybe 40 themes!
And yet in Everything Everywhere All at Once, you still feel the visual symbolism deeply and vividly!
And there is not a bit of absurdist imagery in the movie that does not represent something in the movie's deep philosophical ideas!
The Everything Bagel, the central imagery, is the central idea in the movie, which is that the movie seeks to find an answer to existential nihlism- and the Everything Bagel is existential nihlism itself!
It is a big dark Zero, '0', symbolizing nothing!
And that is the question that the movie seeks an answer to- the question of, is everything just a big nothing?
If you put everything in all existence on a bagel, would it mean nothing?
And the answer is found, through an abundance of elaborate visual imagery, all symbolizing deep philosophical ideas, with the universe where people have hot dogs instead of fingers!
Which is that even in an absurd universe where we cannot do anything with our hands because we have hot dogs in the place of fingers, we can still love each other!
And that goes along with a fundamental truth- which is that if you want to find an answer to nihlism, you must choose to find meaning somewhere- and that the best place to choose to find it is in love!
But this is about the use of imagery in the movie.
And this is just the barest beginning of the use of visual imagery in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
You could write a book about this movie's use of visual imagery!
And that book would have some of the deepest philosophy in it, for this movie puts its philosophy deeply in its imagery!
Imagery that you feel as deeply as you feel the imagery of Eliot and E.T. flying on their bicycle!
And the movie is right!
For even in a terrible universe that makes no sense, where we cannot do anything with our hands because we have hot dogs in the place of fingers, we can still love each other as family!
And just like in the movie, family to me means whoever happens to be right next to you!
For in the movie Evalyn finds friendship and family not only with her husband, and with her daughter who desperately needs her, but with another character (I will not say who so as to not give away spoilers), who just happens to be there, who she just met for the first time earlier in the movie!
Family is whoever happens to be right there with you, especially if you can establish a meaningful friendship with them!
Including your blood relatives, some of whom most likely have been right there with you in your life your whole life!
We can always find meaning, if only we are willing to look for it, if we know where to look (and that we don't always know), though the search can sometimes be hard, and we can always find meaning in love and friendship!
And we can add beauty to that to make our lives beautiful!
Anyway, I just couldn't talk about existential nihlism without talking a little bit about the answer to it all!
But mainly I wrote this to talk about the elaborate use of deeply felt visual symbolism in Everything Everywhere All at Once!
You could spend a whole book analyzing the visual symbolism and its ideas!
Hopefully someone will write that book! (But I have so much that I want to write that if I write such a book, it will not be for a long time and many, many books from me in the future!)
Perhaps the greatest movie ever made, along with a few others like Steven Spielberg's E.T.!
God loves you! Look for the light and the meaning!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson