This episode is also on Bilibili too.
So爽, so happy!
Everything Everywhere All at Once hit every one of my pleasure centers, and now I’m completely immersed in a feeling of happiness. I feel like I haven’t seen a movie this perfectly suited to me in years. For this movie buff who’s been obsessed with cinema for more than thirty years, Everything Everywhere All at Once felt like running into my first love again in middle age, and thoroughly reliving the beauty and greatness of movies. I’m crying my eyes out now; every tear is packed with happiness. Ha-ha.
(First I’ll talk about why Everything Everywhere All at Once moved me so deeply, then I’ll recommend a few movies in the same vein.)
Why did Everything Everywhere All at Once make my heart race and leave me completely flustered?
I’ve reflected on it these past few days and realized that, for most of my life, my taste in movies has been remarkably consistent. The movies I consider most wonderful all look like Everything Everywhere All at Once. In other words—
“A psychedelic surface + a tender core.”
A psychedelic surface
First of all, my favorite movies of this kind all have an intensely psychedelic quality. It’s as if the directors took a trip to Yunnan while making them and accidentally ate those red-umbrella-white-stem mushrooms that cause hallucinations. They then shot the movies with their heads full of hallucinations, excitement, and chaos. You can feel that the emotions and atmosphere are unlike the ordinary state of someone emotionally stable and clear-headed.
These movies are like one dream after another, pulling me into dreams as I follow the characters’ experiences, wandering lost alongside them. In the world of dreams, logic becomes a little strange, symbols a little scrambled, and all kinds of wild impossibilities fill the air. My favorite movies all have this dreamlike, hallucinatory quality.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a classic example: its psychedelic intensity is extreme. The parallel universes in it are nothing like the parallel universes in Spider-Man or Doctor Strange.
Marvel’s parallel universes are science-fictional; Everything Everywhere All at Once’s are psychedelic.
The film’s way of depicting parallel universes feels less like the female protagonist’s soul jumping into parallel universes than like her experiencing an uninhibited dream—or like the distorted perceptual state of someone who has taken a massive dose of hallucinogens.
Seen from this angle, Everything Everywhere All at Once is basically a—
“Hallucinatory Experience Simulator.”
It uses razor-sharp editing, psychedelic colors, and wildly imaginative, startling plot developments to simulate the various hallucinatory experiences that follow taking hallucinogens.
Actually, even if we set aside the director’s methods and look only at what the female protagonist goes through in the story, we find countless hints of hallucinogens. Her distorted perceptions, her quasi-religious mystical experience, and the drastic change in her worldview over a very short period are all typical experiences of taking hallucinogens.
There’s also the way she can feel everything and merge with everything in the same instant—another major sign of hallucinogen use. Many people who take hallucinogens report that their “self” seems to dissolve, as if they’ve merged into the universe and achieved unity between heaven and humanity.
This feeling of the self dissolving, experiencing everything, and becoming one with the universe can be summed up in the simplest possible words: everything, everywhere, all at once—which happens to be the English title of the movie.
All of that is the “psychedelic surface.” The most wonderful movies, in my book, first need this fierce, flamboyant surface, with imagination and filmmaking technique turned all the way up.
A tender core
At the same time, beneath this aggressive surface, these films have an inner core of startling contrast. Just like the ferocious imagination and wondrous plot developments in Everything Everywhere All at Once ultimately serve a profoundly tender core. That core is this:
When you’ve explored every possible choice in life, when you’ve seen every possibility in the universe, what insight will you come away with?
Perhaps your insight will be that “everything in this world is empty,” like the daughter in the film: after seeing and experiencing everything, nothing matters anymore. The end of the universe is a bagel that destroys everything—absolute nothingness.
But perhaps you can have another insight too. Professor Dong Mei of the Central Academy of Fine Arts once distilled the theme of Dream of the Red Chamber into eight Chinese characters:
“All realms are empty; I cannot abandon love.“
I think those eight characters are exactly what the female protagonist realizes at the end of Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Dong Mei writes:
“Emptiness is the universe’s fundamental law. All things in this world pass through arising, abiding, decay, and emptiness; therefore, love is the fulcrum of life, and it is what gives existence meaning.”
That is also the female protagonist’s final choice in Everything Everywhere All at Once: even if I’ve seen everything, even if I know that everything ultimately becomes empty, at this moment I still choose to use my love to connect our souls, floating alone in an empty universe, and use our tiny, seemingly insignificant bonds to give this barren universe a little meaning—that is “all realms are empty,” but “I cannot abandon love.”
Many people finish Everything Everywhere All at Once and find the ending terribly conventional: the usual Western liberal hand-waving, reconciliation, love, self-acceptance—all old news. But on the level of “all realms are empty; I cannot abandon love,” I find it an exceptionally tender ending, and it moved me enormously. For the first 2/3 of the movie I laughed until my face cramped; when this meaning emerged in the final 1/3, I cried until my face cramped too.
That is the second layer of the most wonderful movies in my mind—a tender core.
1+1>>>>>>>2
It’s a little contradictory: I’m pretty allergic to sentimental movies. Pure emotional manipulation usually makes my skin crawl, and many highly rated, purely heartwarming films in Douban’s top 250 get low scores from me. So why does a tender core become an emotional bomb once it’s attached to that psychedelic surface, leaving me completely defenseless?
I suppose it’s because, in daily life, I’m someone whose feelings are crushed beneath reason. My head is full of rules and frameworks that lord it over emotion, while those psychedelic images and plots happen to help me escape the restraints and the framework. Immersed in such a surreal atmosphere, my rational mind may briefly lower its guard, allowing emotion to burst out without obstruction and resonate intensely with that tender core.
“Psychedelia + tenderness” became, more or less, an outlet for my emotions, my private psychological treatment plan, and my lifelong love.
Dream Simulator
I said earlier that watching a movie like Everything Everywhere All at Once is like dreaming along with the director’s camera. We all know, though, that dreams contain not only wild flights of fancy but also blazing emotion. Dreams loosen reason’s restraints and release emotion. Often, only in dreams can we release the anger suppressed deep in our hearts, indulge in sorrows we can’t tell outsiders about, and remember longings that seem to have been forgotten in waking life…
So “hallucinatory experience simulator” may not fully describe movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once. They are really “dream simulators“: once a psychedelic feeling is joined to a tender emotional core, it becomes a dream.
People say cinema is the art of creating dreams. That’s only a metaphor, of course, but the finest movies of this kind, in my mind, put the literal meaning into practice. They really recreate dreams on the screen, letting us viewers dream with the characters while awake.
“Dream Simulator” Watchlist
I don’t know how many people feel as strongly as I do about movies with “a psychedelic surface + a tender core.” If you’re one of my fellow travelers, these “dream simulators,” with their psychedelic surfaces and tender cores, should win your heart just as Everything Everywhere All at Once won mine.
First: Twin Peaks: The Return
The greatest film or series in the universe, in my book. If, after I die, I’m allowed to bring God one screen work to show Him the heights of human glory, I’ll bring David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return and say: “Watch this, and you’ll know how far the human spirit has ever traveled.”
As far as expressing psychedelia goes, anyone who calls themselves number two would never dare claim number one on Earth. David Lynch is a wizard, but also an extraordinarily tender person. In the Twin Peaks series, Agent Cooper spends 25 years doggedly searching, challenging demons in a mortal body and conjuring all that mystical strangeness. But his ultimate goal is to rewrite fate and save a life that died 25 years ago.
Second: 3-Iron
A signature film by Korean director Kim Ki-duk. The astonishing plot turn in the final 1/3 left me speechless for a long time the first time I saw it. If you find the first 2/3 pretty boring, hang in there—the film takes flight in the final 1/3.
Third: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
A film by Michel Gondry. The best dream movie, and the best love movie.
Fourth: Sunshine
A film directed by Danny Boyle. The plot is science fiction, about humanity saving the solar system; but its temperament is psychedelic, so psychedelic it blasts right out of the solar system.
Fifth: Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time
I didn’t understand it, but I was deeply shaken. Afterward I felt as if I’d awakened from a very long dream—or as if I hadn’t woken up.
Sixth: Like Shadows Following
A stage play directed by Lai Sheng-chung. Theater can be psychedelic too; it can be a dream.
Seventh: The Wife’s Suspicion
A film by Akio Sakaguchi, possibly the movie closest in spirit to Everything Everywhere All at Once. Outwardly absurd to the extreme, inwardly tender to the extreme.
Eighth: Kaili Blues
A film by Chinese director Bi Gan. Bi Gan may currently be China’s best director at expressing this kind of psychedelic surrealism. His first feature, Kaili Blues, might look from its images alone like a film version of Country Love, but in reality it channels David Lynch, creating a dreamlike atmosphere within an apparently rough rural setting. Hidden behind this hazy dream is the protagonist’s longing for a departed old friend.
Ninth: The Sun Also Rises
There’s another master of psychedelia among Chinese directors: Jiang Wen. It’s just that this side of him rarely gets much attention. The final part of his film The Sun Also Rises is one of the most astonishingly psychedelic passages in the history of Chinese cinema.
(This “dream simulator” watchlist is what I came up with from memory over the past few days, so it’s far from comprehensive. Consider it a small offering to inspire better ones—I welcome additions.)
Written by: Zhichao Wei
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