It Makes Me Afraid: Pascal, Infinity and “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
The recent film reflects the philosopher Blaise Pascal’s struggle to comprehend an infinite universe. Ultimately, both suggest hope and kindness as the paths away from nihilism.
Evelyn Anne Clausen is a writer and artist, living in the North Georgia mountains. Her work has been published in RELEVANT Magazine, Slate.com and numerous music review sites and long-abandoned blogs.
This review contains spoilers for Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022).
The sci fi action comedy, Everything Everywhere All At Once, takes an absurdist look at what might happen if we could see every possible version of ourselves at the same time. It sounds trippy, and it is. In one universe, a Teppanyaki chef is controlled by a raccoon sitting on his head, in another, humans have useless hot-dog fingers. Movies about the multiverse continue to trickle into the mainstream, but Everything Everywhere All at Once is less concerned with how the science of infinite universes works, and more interested in how it feels, on an individual human level. What do you do when you finally see the big picture and it’s infinitely more complicated than you can ever hope to understand? In a multiverse where anything is possible, and every possibility is real, does anything matter?
As the movie begins, Evelyn Wang does not have time for other universes. We watch her sorting IRS paperwork, rolling her eyes at her husband Waymond, arguing with her daughter Joy, dealing with customers in the family’s laundromat, and occasionally pausing to look wistfully at a romantic musical playing on a small tv mounted above a wall of driers. She looks tired and distracted, both overwhelmed and absent. By the time Joy drives away in tears because her mother ended their tense visit by saying “You’re getting fat,” it’s clear that Evelyn is struggling to connect with the life she’s living.
The 17th century philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Blaise Pascal was haunted by everything he couldn’t know. Famous among depressed teenagers for his quote, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread,” his words still resonate. He’s describing the experience of confronting infinity: the combination of awe, pleasure, fear and helplessness that a person feels when faced with the enormity of the unknown, the feebleness of human perception and the apparent insignificance of any one person. At a climactic point later in the movie, Waymond says it another way, addressing an armed group of multiverse-jumping agents, “I know you’re all fighting because you’re scared and confused. I’m confused too.” The infinite whole of all we don’t understand is too much for any one of us to bear. It makes us feel afraid.
Pascal believed that human dignity was in human thought, and especially in our awareness of our own shortcomings and vulnerability in the face of an uncaring universe. He frequently referenced the idea of the human as a hollow reed:
“Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.” (Pascal, Pensées)
For Pascal, imagination and reason were what elevated humans above other animals. Thinking lets us imagine a world beyond our own, and worlds beyond that. It is what allows us to understand that we will die, and that we are powerless against nature and time. In every universe, in every version of our potential story, we are outmatched by depths we can’t fathom. How do we live with that knowledge?
When Alpha Waymond, the version of Evelyn’s husband from the Alpha universe, possesses regular Waymond’s body and tells Evelyn she has a choice to make, he doesn’t tell her what her choices mean. For those of us raised with the Matrix’s “red pill / blue pill” notion of truth, we may at first assume Alpha Waymond is testing Evelyn, that to turn right and walk into the Janitor’s closet will lead her to the “real” world, and turning left and attending her scheduled IRS audit will keep her trapped in the simulation. When Evelyn lets her eyes linger on the door of the closet before ultimately turning away, we think she has failed the test and rejected the call. But the multiverse is not about binaries and every world is the real world. Her choice did not cut her off from the path forward. It simply made another path. It wasn’t about Evelyn’s choice at all, only the fact that a choice was made, and another universe was born. Reality grows at a rate of infinity plus one.
Our minds do not have the capacity to hold the whole picture. We break under the immense weight of truths too enormous to comprehend. Evelyn’s sense of reality begins to fracture as she imagines universe after universe, sees and feels the lives she hasn’t lived. To try and embody every possibility at the same time leads to madness. Awareness of infinity is not the same as understanding, and the more we do understand, the more apparent it becomes that we are only small pieces of an eternal puzzle.
The monster Alpha Waymond wants Evelyn to defeat is described as “an agent of pure chaos, with no real motives or desires.” She is Jobu Tupaki, a super-charged Joy from the Alpha universe, whose mother pushed her to connect to the multiverse until she became permanently untethered, jumping freely from one existence to another and annihilating anything in her path. She has built a cosmic “Everything Bagel”, a manifestation of infinity collapsing into nihilism, and is threatening to destroy the multiverse with it. She at first claims she wanted to find a version of Evelyn who would see things the way she did, who would feel her same hopelessness, and give in to the bagel with her. But later, in a silent world where she and Evelyn are sunbaked rocks on a cliff, she confesses that she hoped Evelyn would see something she didn’t, that she would offer some better solution.
And then, in another universe, Evelyn does see something different. She sees Waymond, gently pleading with the IRS agent to let them try and save their business. Confused, she jumps into another universe where another Waymond stands up to armed fighters and begs them to “Please, be kind, especially when we don’t know what’s going on.” In a third universe, where Evelyn and Waymond never married, a suave and sophisticated Waymond tells a movie-star Evelyn that he knows she always thought he was weak, but that she misunderstood. He chose kindness and hopefulness not because he couldn’t see the darkness, but as a way of fighting it. “It is strategic and necessary,” he tells her. “It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything.”
Thinking about Waymond’s words, she hears the IRS agent jovially calling herself an “unlovable bitch”, and as she flashes among the infinity of universes, she realizes something else. “It’s not true,” she says, “You’re not unlovable. There is always something to love. Even in a stupid, stupid universe where we have hot dogs for fingers, we get very good with our feet.”
For Pascal, the concept of infinity made him afraid. The prospect of death and the fact that nature could crush him at any moment made him afraid too, but he saw the beautiful absurdity of living on anyway. The human instinct to get up in the morning, despite often overwhelming reasons not to, is miraculous, because it flies in the face of reason.
“Yes, you’re right, it doesn’t make sense,“ Evelyn says to Joy, explaining how despite everything, she will always want to be with her. It is our irrational ability to carry on, and not only to survive, but to take part in moments of beauty, grace and kindness, all while staring into the eternal silence, that makes humans fascinating, and gives us reason to hope. It doesn’t make sense, but there it is. When you put everything on a bagel, (As Jobu Tupaki says, “I mean everything”,) it might get so heavy it crushes your spirit, but it also might help you see what’s worth saving and what’s worth loving, even if it doesn’t make sense.
Evelyn realizes that infinite lives exist as possibilities, but only one existence belongs to her, here and now. Freed from the bagel of nihilism, she no longer needs to imagine all the people she isn’t. She knows that all of those other Evelyns exist, and that they all suffer, but also that they are all capable of loving and being loved. As she says to the young chef missing his raccoon friend, “We’re all useless alone; it’s a good thing you’re not alone.” This is not the only life, but it is a life, and it is her life.
As Evelyn holds her daughter, Waymond smiles tearfully and joins the family hug. The infinite spaces persist in their silence, and despite everything, life goes on.
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