Content warning: Discussions of death.
“We come to this place … for magic.”
When I was hospitalized in 10th grade, I was told that if I had gone untreated for another week, I would have gone into cardiac arrest.
I thought about that what-if a lot. If I had passed out in the middle of AP European History, would people have been able to reasonably guess what was happening inside the intestines of that teenager — that the exhaustion he’d been exhibiting for months wasn’t due to the characteristic sleep deprivation of a high-school Harvard aspirant but severe anemia from bleeding internally from ulcerations for months? Would his heart have stopped then, his corpse caught between the mass-produced desk and the carpeted floor? Or would he have been successfully resuscitated, and lived his life on the same oscillating path of recovery and relapse that I’ve been on for years?
“We come to AMC theaters to laugh, to cry, to care.”
Nicole Kidman (“Moulin Rouge!”) has this really funny AMC Theater ad. It is at once over-dramatic in its script’s emphasis on the value of the cinematic experience and wholly unnecessary when it only plays before cinema screenings, advertising theater attendance to those who are already there. It is so infamous that we have a shot-by-shot analysis of it, sufficiently breaking down every aspect of the ad’s melodramatic audiovisual experience. What’s always been funny to me, however, is how grand and upscale the theater itself looks in contrast to my own lived experiences. The frail AMC 10 in my hometown pales in comparison to the beefy Quality 10 Powered by Emagine that is a mere five minutes away by car; the former only seemingly survives because their few employees are easier to sneak snacks past, the high chance you are the only person in an empty theater and its screening of blockbuster releases well past their theatrical runs. These are the circumstances that led me to see “Everything Everywhere All at Once” two days in a row the summer after my sophomore year of college.
“Because we need that, all of us, that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim.”
After blood transfusions, various examinations and a diagnosis of the autoimmune disorder indeterminate inflammatory bowel disease, we had been exploring treatment options ad nauseam for months, still unsure what would be best. They were treatment options, after all. There’s no known cure for what I’ve got. There’s no 100% guarantee that I won’t start bleeding again, no sure chance that I won’t end up back in the hospital, no way to ensure that I wouldn’t again start crawling to my death — the thought of which I hadn’t been able to get out of my head for months.
“And we go somewhere we’ve never before. Not just entertained, but somehow reborn.”
Hometown boredom and my beloved 2001 Honda CR-V is what drove me to the AMC one night to see “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” I love my family and visiting home, sure, but there’s only so long I can stay in the immunocompromised-regulated house in which I spent way too long quarantining. I aimed to not just escape my own world for a little while, but to also escape into a whole litany of realities I’d been advertised were contained in this new A24 release that all my friends (and all of social media) were clamoring about. I just needed to take my mind off things.
“Together.”
I’ve never been able to stop thinking about different universes after learning of the concept.
When I was in elementary school, I would think about universes where I went to church on Sundays, universes where we didn’t live on the outskirts of town, universes where I looked the same as every other kid around me, universes where we could go to any mandir down any block on Sundays and universes where my parents never left India.
When I was in middle school, I would think about universes where I knew how to speak to people around me properly and universes where it didn’t take me until middle school to have best friends.
After I was diagnosed, the universes I thought about were every single other one where my body wasn’t like this, or one where I at least knew what to do when my mother started sobbing at the sight of me in my hospital bed. I asked her not to cry, and said what we always said to each other: “Everything’s gonna be alright.”
“Dazzling images on a huge silver screen.”
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is a visual feast for the most cinematically gluttonous among us, stuffing every single frame and transition with its overstimulating, ultimately wondrous aesthetic. It was almost enough to keep my mind entirely away from why I was here. Its story, of course, wouldn’t let me forget, as it painted a deeply intimate portrait of a multigenerational immigrant family and then split them across language and cultural barriers as well as the infinity of the multiverse. I was here because I couldn’t be around my family that night. I don’t even remember what had sparked the conflict, which likely shows how insignificant it was in the grand scheme of things. It was a habit I picked up while quarantining, where I could comfortably blame cabin fever. What excuse did I have now?
“Sound that I can feel.”
It was my mother who poured herself into feeding new life into me. Part of the treatment for an intestinal disorder is everything involved in digestion, which means she made herself into an expert on all things gastrointestinal. Even after my blood transfusions, she was pushing me to eat spinach and dried apricots and walnuts to keep my iron up, vegetable soups and every brand of liquid nutrition when I had to stop eating entirely for months, then easing me back into eating once again with recipes she studied across those months. She taught me how to cook, how to synthesize the perfect masala base and almost everything else to create a good kitchen.
As I became proficient in cooking, I began to ask her to stay out of the kitchen while I was in there; she couldn’t stop herself from trying to help and I felt I needed to attempt these things myself to learn proper culinary independence. The fact is, I hear her advice in so many things I do. Whether I want it to or not, her voice chimes inside my head, ringing from my heart.
There were times over this journey of mine that she’d tell me again and again, “Everything’s gonna be alright.” She told me to have faith. I wouldn’t be honest if I said I always believed her, that I always trusted her. I wanted so much from the life she gave me, and it was all breaking away from me. My disease extended beyond my body, ulcerating every other universe where I could have been something better than what I was. It shattered them, flinging pieces of me across time and space, leaving my loved ones to pick up the pieces.
“Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”
The absurd defines “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a constant oscillation between comedy and tragedy, contradiction and resolution, universe and universe. It’s likely I was alone sitting in this theater because I had come into some conflict with my mother and came here to escape. I kept thinking about her while sitting there, wondering how she’d react to the martial arts proficiency she told me she loved watching in Bruce Lee movies combined with the film’s manifold phallic fights.
And then there was one crucial moment, between all the silliness and multiversal suspense of the movie. The protagonist Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) finds out the antagonist is her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu, “Joy Ride”). From then on, Evelyn opposes everyone else in the film to save her daughter, fracturing herself across the multiverse to do so — albeit by performing absurd actions and badass kung-fu. I watched this, and I thought to myself, She’s breaking herself for her child.
The voice of my mother echoed in my head: Don’t we all?
Everything in me gave in to emotion, to tears that wouldn’t subside throughout the final hour of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” sobbing that would eventually slow until the next emotional beat hit and I found myself blubbering once again. I would have started wailing if I hadn’t wanted to make sure I heard every bit of music and dialogue that came next. I was glued to my chair as the credits played, pressed under the weight of every universe I had ever imagined, every universe I knew my mother had imagined for herself. As I rose out of my seat, I finally made my peace with them, as they all faded away into the infinite.
“Our heroes feel like the best part of us, and stories feel perfect and powerful.”
I still think about death. My apartment is across the street from a cemetery, and I go on walks there when it’s nice enough. But now, when I look at the graves, I no longer dread them. I will live the hell out of this life my mother brought me into.
Also, I will never be buried — my body will be laid to cremation like my father’s father and my mother’s grandfather were, and like every single part of the family that came before them, the weight of which my parents carried overseas and try their absolute best to not let fall onto their children.
Infinity means nothing to me in the context of the only existence I’ll ever get to experience. Everything I could have been, if not for countless other things I can no longer change, means nothing to me in the life I have with the people who love me. Nothing matters to me except what I care about, especially my family in all our frustrations: my father, my sister and my mother who holds us all together.
The more time I spend away from you, Mom, the more I understand you were right about these things, and how much I am your child. I understand it when I ask my friends to text me when they make it home and I understand it when I clean my apartment in a frenzy before hosting people and I understand it when I find myself needing faith more than ever. I understand just one more thing too.
“Because here, they are.”
I understand that everything’s gonna be alright.
Happy birthday, Mom. No matter who I become, no matter where I go, no matter how long it is — I promise I will always come back to you. I love you.
Daily Arts Writer Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.