The most exciting aspect of this year’s Oscar winner is the way it handles the heroine’s learning trajectory. Through its innovative techniques, the film crosses multiple boundaries between cinema, reality, and digital learning. For this chapter, I am focusing on narrative design.
EVERYTHING AT ONCE spins the tale of Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a middle-aged Chinese immigrant going through a marital crisis. Her business, marriage and relationships are simultaneously collapsing. Evelyn dreams of the different scenarios her life could have followed if she wasn’t married to Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). At the same time, she battles with her queer-identified daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu).
But when she visits the tax office, an alternative universe version of Waymond informs Evelyn her existence is being threatened by a shadowy figure known as Jobu. This turns out be a parallel version of her daughter Joy. To defeat her, Evelyn must travel through a maze of multiverses. She has to harness all of the powers of her doubles, from martial arts to singing.
The film is divided into three chapters (shown in the image ). Each chapter begins in Evelyn’s house, where the cupboards contain the symbols that the narrative further elaborates. Visually, a strange impression is created that the film is an e-learning course, just as much as it is a linear narrative. The framing of the shot suggests the idea that the screen is part of a larger external network. In this way, the boundary between fiction and the physical world collapses. Our ‘reality’, like the cinematic reality, is just one in an endless array of parallel realities. This design can be likened to a hypercube. Its four-dimensional geometry captures quantum paradoxes. No matter how much the box changes shape, it always returns to its original form. Although Evelyn undertakes a dizzying number of trips through the ‘metaverse’, at the same time, she is sitting at home. She appears to be moving while standing still. In this way, her journey is less towards achieving goals, and more a process of gradual revelation. As the story progresses, Evelyn realizes that the solution stood right in front of her nose.
The film’s directors explained that their intent was to abandon the ‘hero’s journey’, the typical Western narrative form. In your classical learning scenario, development happens through goals and conflicts. Here the film deploys Kishotenketsu, a story model that sees truth as Nothingness. The journey does not necessarily lead to acquisition of knowledge; rather, we accept the fact that total knowledge isn’t possible. Therefore, the active pursuit of rewards must be counter-balanced with passive acceptance. This is a very important message for today’s multi-tasking world, where technology compels us to navigate between parallel universes. As the title of the film suggests, ‘everything at once’ (totality) can be read as ‘nothing at once’ (nothingness). Learning becomes a balancing act between Yin and Yang.
