forever bitter and solid now

"Fuck Multiverse" gave me the feeling, only nine words: a woman's midlife crisis.

The Asian-American mother-daughter relationship that people talk about, like all the relationships shown in the film, between father and daughter, between husband and wife, and even the tax declaration faced by the laundry, all clearly outline the most important part of the film. Overarching theme: A woman's midlife crisis.

In this eternal theme, the multiverse is just the embodiment of a woman's psychological world, Evelyn's "imaginative and unrestrained" in countless moments of distraction, and the question that arises in the middle-aged people's mind: "what if?". The film itself also gives enough hints. For example, the cosmic shuttle is called "verse jumping", which is a poetic and imaginative leap; the Waymond that Evelyn kisses is called Alpha Waymond, which is the "Alpha" version of the good and weak husband.

As for the multiverse, Asian, and gay daughters, they are all pre-conditions set by the movie. They are not only some interesting gimmicks and selling points of the finished movie, such as the ubiquitous universe shuttle, Hong Kong movie elements, and Jackie Chan-style martial arts; and Evelyn. The environment she was thrown into made her Angst, Recognise, and Accept.

The film materializes the midlife crisis into one problem after another - the tense relationship between the out daughter and Evelyn, the annual tense laundry tax filing, the husband's courageous divorce appeal, the visit of the elderly father; Like the reality that countless middle-aged people may face, rebellious children, estranged spouses, aging parents.

The film abstracts the midlife crisis into existential anxiety. On the one hand, it is Evelyn's shake and regret about the key choices in her life, and on the other hand, it is the nihilistic abyss of her daughter Joy who understands all choices and possibilities. One is Evelyn's life of infinite failures, all her dreams and determinations that gave up halfway, created the God of Choice that Alpha Waymond said could save the cosmic crisis (infinite failures created infinite possibilities); while her daughter Jobu Tupaki was It is the extreme rebellion of the mother's failed life, the nihilistic monster who has seen all the possibilities and experienced Everything Everywhere All at Once, and lost the meaning of self-existence.

When I was reading a book many years ago, I came across a passage quoted from Nietzsche's (eternal recurrence) "Eternal Recurrence", which was a thought experiment that suddenly understood the meaning of "freedom". The Greatest Weight

- Suppose the devil breaks into your loneliest solitude one day or one night and says to you, "Your present and past life, what you will experience again and repeat countless times. It will repeat itself over and over again. , nothing new, every pain, pleasure, thought, sigh of your life, and everything big and small, unspeakable, will be repeated in you, in the same order, even now in the trees of spiders and moonlight, this moment and demons like me. The eternal hourglass of existence will keep flipping up and down, and you're just a speck of dust in the hourglass."

Will you collapse to the ground after listening to this demon? Will you gnash your teeth and curse this raving demon? Or maybe you've had a moment of extreme happiness in the past, when you might have answered the devil, "You are a god, and I have never heard anything more holy!"

If this idea of demons gets hold of you, it can change you or even crush you. The question will come up in everything and everything: "Would you like to go through this again and repeat it countless times?" This question will hang over your actions, the heaviest burden. ! Or, what kind of life do you have to achieve in order to face this ultimate eternal confirmation and imprint? (The Gay Sciene, p. 273-4)

An unexamined life is not worth living, but how many choices and choices in life can survive the torture of the devil's "eternal reappearance"? Another version of Nietzsche's demonic torture that the movie is born with with magnificent imagination and countless versions of Evelyn: If you live your life now and in the past, you will go through it again and keep making different choices. The possible lives will expand infinitely, and each life will be displayed in your subjective consciousness. The eternal hourglass of existence expands into an endless multiverse, and you are just one of them, the most humble and failed example.

While many believe that the film's ending falls into a rut, like countless rescue kinships, self-salvation routines, Evelyn wins some brief moment of reconciliation in her life. However, this is an almost inevitable ending. Evelyn, who has tortured herself in the subjective sea of consciousness, must and helplessly return to face her "always bitter and solid moment", and she has to accept her own behavior. This thing, This place, This moment. Even among the infinite possibilities of life, Evelynn has never encountered the perfect life. A movie star who mistakenly loves, a teppanyaki cook who competes with his colleagues, a sausage hand who falls in love with a tax preparer... Everyone lives with their own disappointments. Only the stone mother and daughter in the desert exist in eternal silence.

It may be chaotic, absurd, or it may fail. Evelyn can only make a little change as much as possible in front of the delineated time and space and the delineated characters, to deal with this troubled moment, to gain a short-term peace, and then to invest in the next Once in a daze.

Just like facing Nietzsche's question, we can only answer: "Luckily, I only live once."