The Clever Bilingualism of Everything Everywhere All at Once

[Music] welcome to language and film where we take a closer look at how language is used creatively in cinema [Music] everything everywhere all at once is an intense experience the first time you watch it the film purposefully overloads you without giving you a lot of space to catch your breath and process all that incoming information so between the everything bagel and hot dog hands universe and talking rocks and martial arts fanny packs and kung fu pinkies and cooking raccoons it's easy to miss what i found to be the most interesting use of language in the film and there are a lot of ways this film creatively employs language but for me what stood out as the most interesting way the directors daniel's quan and scheinert used language occurs early on in this movie before things get crazy and that's how they used the bilingualism of the central characters to reinforce the themes of the movie this movie is about the fragmentation of reality into multiverses well right from the opening scene we're presented with fragmented dialogue which switches freely and swiftly back and forth between english and mandarin i have to finish all this before fast just as evelyn will later be frantically flitting from one multiverse to the next and then back again this is called code switching when people alter their speech for their listener in a more traditionally structured screenplay or movie you might see bilingual characters speaking in one language to one person and then switching to another language for another person [Music] but here the code switching is all jumbled up which helps set up the frantic tone this movie will soon assail us with and the first time evelyn experiences the split into multiverses we see her character saying the same thing in two languages simultaneously which is a really nice touch [Music] just as evelyn will eventually get stuck between multiverses already she is a woman stuck between worlds eastern and traditional versus western and progressive and these viewpoints are personified by her father and daughter respectively the cultural attitudes of each character are expressed through their language fluencies her father gong gong speaks no english and her daughter joy raised in the u.s is more fluent in english and so has difficulty communicating particularly with her grandfather but also with her mother and just to make things more complicated the grandfather speaks cantonese while the others speak mandarin so we essentially have three different languages bombarding our ears from the start with evelyn in the middle trying to make sense of it all her confusion with discovering the multiverse is further amplified by the fact that in this scene she is trying to process three languages at once you're always trying to confuse us with these big words the tension in the mother-daughter relationship between evelyn and joy is the central conflict of the story it's both a culture clash as well as a generational one and this tempestuous dynamic is revealed through language by evelyn enjoys contrasting competencies in the chinese and english languages evelyn is not as fluent in english as she is in chinese while joy is more fluent in english joy has to sometimes translate for her mother my english is fine and we have google so you don't have to come and be a translator and her mother has to translate for joy oh the fact that these two women are multilingual and yet opposite in their degree of fluencies helps highlight the differences between them which are at the heart of the story joy is gay or bisexual and seeks her mother's acceptance of this but evelyn hasn't yet fully accepted her daughter's sexual orientation though she isn't overtly condemning of it however she passively aggressively does this through her word choice first she uses the english pronoun he to refer to becky and when joy points this out evelyn blames it on the gender-neutral aspect of the mandarin equivalent in chinese just one word so easy the fact that joy is quick to point this out in a resentful tone reveals their tense relationship over this topic and perhaps it was just an honest mistake but soon after this scene when introducing becky to joy's grandfather evelyn intentionally chooses the word which means good friend instead of the more appropriate term for girlfriend later when evelyn attempts to reconcile with her daughter she does this by now appropriately using the right word to identify becky as joy's girlfriend to her grandfather so i thoroughly enjoyed the ways the directors utilized multilingualism to highlight attitudes and tensions among the characters and it adds to the overall maximalism of this film it's a more subtle touch in a movie that most of the time has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and as a movie nerd who recently made a video essay about 2001 a space odyssey i just want to say how tickled i was with the reference to that movie in this one it may have been my favorite moment in the film be sure to check out that video if you haven't and let me know in the comments what your favorite part of everything everywhere all at once was thanks for watching guys [Music] you

Channel: Language & Film

Views: 174,573

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Id: H2wID9_FFD0

Length: 6min 21sec (381 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022