Wife says I never get this title correct. My introduction to Daniels was by being cheerily catfished into seeing Swiss Army Man five years ago. I think Wife and I rented a car or took a 90 min train to SF in order to see that movie and left feeling bloated as a waterlogged corpse. EEAAO is their sophomore film and the trailers for this movie were bonkers. It promised to be Cloud Atlas but with more kung fu and less philosophy.
In Phase Four of Marvel’s highwire act of creating and then killing an entire movie genre before our very eyes, the multiverse is introducing a generation of audiences to a staple subgenre of sci-fi/fantasy. It’s something that I’ve been doing some advance work on for a few months by slowly assembling and reading multiversal and interdimensional fiction by women and POC: some people we’ve talked about before like Micaiah Johnson and VE Schwab, and others that we haven’t yet like the venerable NK Jemisin, the delightfully crude Tasmyn Muir, or the unlikely pairing of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. (We’ve spent a lot of time talking about white men and the multiverse too, just in case you were thinking this is in some way a knock on them. You’ll notice of the absence of the billion dollar Spider-Man: No Way Home from this list, which Wife and I have haplessly avoided for months because of the tiny tyrant living in our home, but I need to correct this error before seeing yet another multiverse movie in Doctor Strange 2 next week, and I should add that though we haven’t had a lot of opportunities to talk about television like WandaVision or Loki and Jonathan Majors‘s sudden and welcome rise to the top of the MCU’s baddest villains, those are top of mind when discussing the way that the multiverse has pervaded pop culture in the last two years.) Anyway, the project continues, but it’s given me some ways of thinking about the central questions about multiversal narratives that I was on the lookout for in EEAAO.
I brought along Friends, one of whom has a particular bee in his bonnet for the multiverse, because, his theory goes, the more iterations or variants of a person or place, the lower the stakes become. Inverse has a great retrospective on the (37th?) anniversary of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the MCU’s “greatest achievement” if you, like me, are not entirely sure how and when comic books became so enamored with the reduplication of characters and their crisscrossing timelines. This is maybe what we’d glibly describe as the Rick and Mortification of Parallel Universe Plots. We the audience get to live out our darkest fantasies and desires of violence, grief, and horror as applied to our favorite heroes and villains, mash them up into permutations of set pieces, and then clear the board and claim it’s all a dream, a crisis on infinite earths, before neatly returning every character to its box.
I’m sympathetic to this worldview in other arenas, with some notable exceptions. Video games like League of Legends take advantage of players’ affection for the storylines and aesthetics of their hundreds of heroes while also sneakily asserting their non-canonical nature within the very battle arena in which you spend the majority of your time interacting with these characters. They are copies of the real thing and you are summoning their essence for a temporary simulation. Meanwhile, the cinematics and lore develop those characters in surprising ways (Netflix’s Arcane showed how much potential there is for seeing these stories play out and mature), and we’re sort of left in a narrative stasis, where characters are forced into relationships with longstanding heroes from similar worlds without being able to break away from them because of the limitations of the storytelling format. Everyone returns to their appointed role like a commedia del’ arte play or a Loony Toons marathon. In Community, the multiversal plot is played for laughs and doesn’t have very much bearing on the major arc, although there is a characteristically Dan Harmon thread that follows Chang through multiple seasons. Multiverses in comics often manifest themselves through alternate history settings, as playfully portrayed in Rick and Morty’s The Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat in Season 4, but those alternate histories are not meant to be sustained. They’re paintings meant to be viewed from a single point of perspective, a smash and grab for a particular interaction.
Comic multiverses give the hero a chance to contemplate the importance of certain decisions, but they also give the audience a new visual aesthetic, a new thematic skin to layer on top of their favorite ensemble of characters as a novelty-seeking exercise. The protagonist very rarely dies or is replaced, although Rick Remender seems fond of this as a storytelling device in both Black Science and Fear Agent. Multiverses are oftentimes shooting galleries and killing fields. Sometimes they’re in between spaces for learning, as in Lovecraft Country‘s Episode 7 “I Am” or Natasha Leone’s Russian Doll. Doctor Who does a really lovely job with multi-season, multi-decade callbacks and reincarnation with variations on a theme, doubled characters, and Timey Wimey plot knots.
In terms of the narrative fruit of multiversal spaces, I think that Friend had well-founded fears based on the haphazard use of the multiverse in comic book movies and television most recently, but as he said in his own words, this was exactly how to do multiverses right.
EEAAO fits into a pretty standard Campbellian plot: the Call, Trials, and Ordeal. The multiverse is really a vehicle for giving a non-traditional hero some very traditional fight scenes. There are a lot of echoes of The Matrix’s training scenes, the downloading of knowledge, the techies hacking in the back of a bumpy vehicle, but for all the Neal Stephenson cyberpunk aesthetic, EEAAO’s virtues are in the family drama at the heart of the story, the family visit by a judgy Asian dad (see last week’s Turning Red review for more), the cracks in a marriage, the gay romantic subplot. Wife always says she prefers the sort of stories that are not “fate of the world at stake” and though there are elements of that here, there’s also a sense that the stakes may be small.
It feels wrong to describe this as one movie, though. It turns out this is actually like six mini movies, or as Brother politely put it, “they had a lot of tape” to use–he also mentions glowingly that the SFX for this visual bouquet of silly violence was FIVE peeps, and to prove that is, in fact true, here we are with the video from WIRED:
EEAAO could probably stand to lose one or two of those multiverses to tell the story (keep piñata world, obviously, and the rocks, but maybe lose a lot of the Oscar-winning world? We get it without the alley conversation, don’t we?). The charm of this film is the way that it sticks the landing and gives dignity and heart to some absurd Family Guy type jokes late in the first act by committing to the gag. EEAAO’s multiverse is aimed directly at critics of the multiverse like Friend, audiences who view those low stakes storytelling as part of a larger problem/fixation with metaphorical portrayals of existential angst and millennial apathy, withdrawal, and suicide as plot. If anything is possible, why does anything matter?
NK Jemisin’s multiversal Big Bad from The City We Became shares a lot in common with Hsu’s portrayal of an interdimensional explorer gone wrong. Stephanie Hsu may ring a bell if you’re a fan of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, but also for (all five) fans of this site who read about her very fun, darkly comic spotlight film at CineJoy two years ago in Asking For It, where she plays the victim of a creepy internet stalker.
At the risk of gazing too deeply into my own navel, and because I think that I agree even more with my assessment of Stephanie Hsu now after having seen EEAAO, here’s what I wrote about her in Asking For It:
The protagonist Jenny … slow rolls into your heart in Asking For It. She has excellent comic timing and plays the millennial hopelessly flailing through a quarter life crisis effortlessly without the schmaltz or the self awareness to be able to voice that deep discomfort in trite aphorisms…. The film blends absurdist humor with social commentary while keeping the pace at a fairly quick clip…
There are multiple points at which, I laughed so hard and for so long that I am certain I missed jokes buried under other jokes like humor landmines in at the comedy DMZ…
Asking For It, HOTS review from 2020
The tilt of Hsu’s head is a very efficient physicality for the type of tricky possession action that’s occurring in this film, and the googly eyes as a “peering mechanism” (as Brother puts it) for the villain feels like an intentional fake out on the part of Daniels, from the very first scene when a bag of laundry is glowering down at Yeoh to the little visual Easter eggs in the trailer that allude to a possession function to the bindi-like facial adornment. The true meaning of the googly eyes plays on the expectations of viewers in an emotional way, which I think is very characteristic of Daniels’ directorial aesthetic, silly, but with sentiment.
Which begs the question I end up asking to anyone who’s seen this movie, it’s visually interesting and I like that it was schmaltzy, but was it too corny?
Friend says that EEAAO loses some of its visual literacy in the end of the first act in favor of fast cut scenes, which I think is fair. I had heard somewhere that the most impressive thing that you can do with a fight scene in kung fu is make it a single shot and hold that shot for as long as possible, because it demonstrates how choreographed and disciplined the actors and cinematographers are. I think it was applied to Jackie Chan’s work in the 80s, but would love a fact check? If we think about action scenes as existing on a spectrum between the highly choreographed Jackie Chan fight scenes on one hand and completely stylized, multi-cult mashups, the “pornification of violence” (NSFW from Thought Catalogue and Cosmo about this phenomenon), then EEAAO stands very firmly on the opposite side of the spectrum. And there is virtue in that kaleidoscopic aesthetic–or there might’ve been if it had not been spoiled in the trailer. (May 15 update: Fun fact, the Daniels actually approached Jackie Chan to star in this movie and he said he was busy! When he found out how well the movie was doing, he texted Michelle Yeoh to congratulate her!)
Ultimately, some facts that Friend sent me ahead of this movie have stuck in my brain and should stick in yours too if you’re on the fence about seeing it, and I’m going to fudge some of the irrelevant facts in order to tell a more compelling story: the Daniels basically turned down directing Loki in order to tell their own original multiversal story without having to compromise their creative vision about LGBTQ plotlines in order to be marketable in China (unlike Tom Cruise and Top Gun).
