Favorite Characters: Evelyn Wang (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

*Spoilers.*

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a wild, weird movie that’s bursting with love, and so many aspects of it are firing on all cylinders from start to finish. But of course, at the center of it all, in the middle of that inventive maelstrom of possibilities, is Evelyn herself.

When Evelyn (and the audience) first meets the Waymond from the Alphaverse, we learn that he’s been searching the multiverse for the Evelyn who’s able to stop the threat of Jobu Tupaki. And he thinks he’s finally found her.

She’s an unlikely candidate, to say the least. She’s a world-weary immigrant mom and struggling business owner who’s constantly stressed trying to keep everything together. In Evelyn’s mind, her flighty husband and difficult daughter add to the constant effort of her daily life. Her laundromat is being audited, and her messy, cramped apartment is full of noise and commotion. And she’s the multiverse’s best hope?

The answer lies in the Alphaverse technology of verse-jumping. Using their tech, users can access their other possible selves in different universes, temporarily borrowing their useful skills to fight against Jobu Tupaki. As Waymond explains it, every choice spawns a new universe in which that decision was made differently. And it’s actually because Evelyn’s life is so dissatisfying that she holds the key to stopping Jobu. Most people, Waymond tells her, only have a few useful alternate selves to draw from. But because she’s made so many wrong choices in her life, littering her own personal multiverse with unlived dreams, she has tons of other selves, all with different experiences/skills she can borrow.

An Evelyn who’s a kung fu expert. An Evelyn who’s an opera singer. An Evelyn who’s a teppanyaki chef, who’s blind, who never married Waymond, who’s a sign spinner, who has hot dogs for fingers. Countless Evelyns with lives far from the laundromat.

Our Evelyn envies that. When she gets her first glimpse at another universe, she longs to stay in that life, dreaming of how much better she could have had it. But ultimately, this isn’t a movie about a woman who sees what her life could have been. It’s about a woman who learns to love her own life, hectic and shabby as it is, because it’s the people that make it special. Her specific people, her sunshiny husband and vulnerable daughter, realizing she wouldn’t trade them for all the glittering possibilities out there in the multiverse.

Instead, she uses those other Evelyns and their skills to take on Jobu Tupaki, understanding in the end that it’s about reaching her rather than simply fighting her. By choosing to overload herself with rapid verse-jumping, replicating the accident that created Jobu in the first place, Evelyn is able to experience the multiverse as she does, is able to understand her. Experiencing everything, everywhere, all at once, while still keeping an important foothold in her own universe, Evelyn holds a hand out to Jobu and pulls her back from the edge. She saves the multiverse, and her daughter in the process.

Relationship Spotlight: Evelyn & Joy Wang (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

*Spoilers.*

As with most aspects of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the relationship between Evelyn and her daughter Joy is both enormously expansive and intimately specific. Because of the multiversal premise, it’s about Evelyn’s relationship with multiple Joys, even as it’s about just one. Watching it unfold over the course of the film is as uncomfortably grounded as it is mindbendingly twisty.

When we’re introduced to Evelyn and Joy, we haven’t heard their story before, but we’ve definitely heard their type of story before. Immigrant mother and her American daughter are unable to connect—Evelyn tends to express her love through “helpful” criticism,” and she brushes it off when called out on it. Joy isn’t as successful as Evelyn would like, and her disappointment has a tinge of “after everything we’ve sacrificed to give you a better life.” At the start of the film, Joy is nervously psyching herself up to introduce her girlfriend to her grandfather, a plan that Evelyn repeatedly tries to steer her away from.

Of course, when Evelyn realizes she’s the only one who can save the multiverse from the villainous Jobu Tupaki, things get a lot less unconventional, and that’s multiplied by a zillion when she discovers that Jobu is Joy. In the Alpha universe, Evelyn was the scientist who pioneered verse-jumping technology, and she pushed her daughter further and further into the multiverse until it broke her. Jobu experiences every Joy in every universe simultaneously, and she flits between universes as easily as you or I might blink. She has a creation that threatens to destroy everything—oh yeah, and she’s been traveling the multiverse killing every Evelyn she finds.

At first, Evelyn sees Jobu Tupaki as a villain who’s taken over the body of her Joy. She entreats Jobu to leave Joy alone, and when a verse-jumped version of her father urges Evelyn to kill Joy, killing Jobu in the process, Evelyn refuses. She decides that the only way to defeat Jobu is to become like her, and she proceeds to verse-jump into more and more versions of herself in the hopes of gaining similar powers.

Over the course of all this, the two of them make a discovery: while it’s true that Jobu Tupaki has been killing Evelyns, that hasn’t technically been her goal. Rather, she’s been searching the multiverse for someone who can understand her and her infinite existence, someone who can meet her at her level. And everywhere she goes, she searches for that someone in her mom.

Given that Alpha Evelyn, Jobu Tupaki’s actual mother, is the one who unwittingly created her, it might make sense for Jobu to hate Evelyn and want revenge on every version of the person who made her feel so alone in the multiverse. Some part of Jobu probably thinks that’s what she is doing, but in every universe, she’s trying to connect with her mother. And when she can’t, her rage and power take over, and she leaves destruction in her wake.

Evelyn understanding this is the key to saving the multiverse. Despite everything she’s done, Jobu Tupaki is Joy, Evelyn’s Joy and every other Joy in the multiverse, and Evelyn doesn’t have to defeat her. She has to save her. She has to love her daughter, accept her daughter, argue with her daughter that both of them have to try to be better. When Jobu is on the brink of stepping into the black hole that she herself created, Evelyn pulls her out.

In the parking lot of the laundromat, Evelyn confronts her daughter, confronts Joy, fights Jobu Tupaki’s nihilism by loving her. She reminds Joy/Jobu, “You still went looking for me through all of this noise.” And she tells her, “No matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always, want to be here with you.”

At this point, Evelyn and Jobu Tupaki are the most powerful beings in the multiverse. They can be anywhere, do anything. But like Waymond says to Evelyn in the kung fu universe, they both choose a life of “laundry and taxes” together in one small, dull universe. It isn’t much, but love is growing between them there, and that makes it the only universe they need.