What was the point of Everything Everywhere All at Once?

According to the reviews:

“Thematically, Everything Everywhere deals with feeling small and irrelevant, the belief that nothing really matters, the idea that our lives are cosmically insignificant, and the experience of being overwhelmed by the apparently endless list of things that demand our energy and attention.”  Wikipedia, 25 Mar 2024

What about an alternative view?  The characters appear to be in and out of their heads not in their actual reality.  They are consumed by their fears and biases, which are represented by the circumstances of being treated as insignificant immigrants in a foreign culture, the USA. 

To cope, the characters create imaginative scenarios that give them an illusion of having more power than they actually have.  This amounts to the creation of a fictitious reality that displaces an overwhelming and unmanageable reality.  Ironically, the viewing audience has created their own fictitious reality with the price of admission to this confusing, confronting and confabulating film.    

The “I” and the “Me”
According to psychologist Henry James, the “Me” of self-identity is our autobiographical identity. We base our view of self entirely on our experiential history. We assess ourselves on what we have done and what has happened to us. This self-observation is salient but somewhat incomplete. We are more than what we have done and what has happened to us.

Conversely, according to Henry James, the “I” self-view is thought to incorporate our self-awareness of the here and now. We transition from a historical/biographical reference, the “Me”, to an identity based on our consciousness of the present, the “I”. ⁽¹⁾

This duality helps us understand how illusions may get a foothold on our sense of self. When we are too focused on the past, we may not be able to be in the reality of the present. Take the anorexic client as an example. When asked to identify their current body shape, the anorexic client will consistently say they are two or three body shapes larger than reality. The anorexic person sees only the “Me” or autobiographical experience, of being overweight, and not the “I” or here-and-now awareness of their real identity. What becomes obvious from this example of the anorexic client is that the “Me” orientation is a distortion of the person’s self-identity, and is an illusion.

Once in the illusion, the power of one’s imagination takes control. Professor Bruce Hood has gone so far as to suggest that in an illusion the brain sees imagination and reality as the same thing, no different. Given this may be true, we would be captive to our illusion unless we become aware that we are in an illusion.

“Tradition is the illusion of permanence.” – Woody Allen

The Fictitious Reality and Self Deception
Whereas pretending appears to have some mechanism of control, self-deception has the potential to become something out of one’s control over time. The awareness of when one is pretending has been pushed to a level where our awareness becomes gradually more and more marginalized. The lying is no longer perceived as lying because the truth has been hijacked. Our awareness has been displaced with habit and repetition. A lifelong pattern of pretending does appear to somehow be related to self-deception due to the link between changing our perceptions of what is real and what is true.

These types of distortions could eventually lead someone to believe they could jump off a tall building and fly. And, this distortion might also begin to connect how unhealthy pretenders may escalate into the dangerous practice of self-deception.

Pros of Coping Through Fictitious Reality
We all have a need to “zone out” of reality at times.  Reality can be stressful, depressive, confusing, and damaging to our health when we are not coping.  Movies, art, literature and social interaction are great vehicles of transport to an alternative reality.  We heal in these moments of escape from the burdens of our current circumstances.  When we play or watch others compete at the professional level, we are creating an artificial canvas or fictitious reality of our everything, everywhere, all at once existence. 

Cons of Coping Through Fictitious Reality
When we “zone out” with fiction, we may lose our reality.  The characters in the film “Everything…”  only really cope when they come back to their reality and leave their fictitious realty.  The mother daughter connection is reconnected only when both characters relinquish their fictional identities.  This happens in real life not just in the movies.  Fantasy and imagination have their place but they can also be a place of lost identity.  Drugs and alcohol along with other addictions like pornography and gambling are commonly utilized as displacement realities for a less palatable genuine self. 

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.” - Simone Weil

Pondering Fiction
Fiction is really all about creating interesting parallels with what reality is or could be.  Fiction expands our minds into new possibilities and new potential realities.  Our future will be determined by our abilities to imagine a better future.  Should we ignore or eschew that important responsibility, we will not be the benefactors of a liveable planet.  We need our fictional pursuits.  However, our tendency to fictionalize our reality must be temporary and remind us of the importance of truth. 

References

^{1-Fontana, D. (1988). Self-Awareness and Self-Forgetting: Now I see me, now I don’t. In Progress In Reversal Theory, Editors, Apter, M.J., Kerr, J.H., and Cowles, M.P., North Holland publishing.}