Why Everything Everywhere All At Once Hits So Hard

Imagine a world where anything you can  think of can become a visual reality. A Watermelon Pie? We got it. A Cactus ghost?   Got it. Hunter S Thompson as  the president? We got that too. For the last several days I’ve been obsessed with  an AI imagine generator called “Midjourney.” You   put in a prompt like “the perfect cloud” and it  spits out some results. Sometime the results are   awful, sometimes they’re bizarrely terrifying,  but just as many times they’re incredible. Here’s a movie camera by Pablo Piccaso. Infinite Cabbage. / A bathroom designed by  MC Escher. / A person made entirely out of   cheese. / Deluxe beans. / A strip mall  painted by monet. / Dune directed by Wes   Anderson. / A bubble gum farm. / “Family Dinner”  by David Lynch / A Symbol for Bliss / Chicken   Nuggets at a michelin star restaurant. /  Cotton Candy grapes. / Twin Peaks drawn by   a child. / A potted tongue plant. / Pills by Gucci I’ve spent hours surfing through what is  essentially humanity’s collective imagination   remixed by my random ideas and a powerful  Artificial intelligence. It’s addicting   and fascinating. Every idea is like a gamble,   you don’t know if it’s going to spit out  something amazing or just a pile of trash. sorry, a box of trash by Van Gogh But it’s as terrifying as it is fascinating.   As this technology improves, (which it already  is; DALL-E 2 Google’s AI image generator is   much more powerful than Midjourney) What will  it mean for art, images, imagination? What is   a world where anything we imagine can become a  reality? What if we put everything on a bagel? That Funny Feeling  There’s a new feeling I’ve been feeling  occasionally in recent years. It’s hard   to describe, deeply personal, overwhelming,  fractal, uncomfortable, and yet enticing and   awe-inspiring. For a while I wasn’t sure what  it was. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from,   or if anyone else was experiencing  what I was occasionally feeling.   And then- in 2020, I started noticing some  artists starting to depict the feeling. The first person who really put  a finger on a part of the feeling   was Bo Burnham with his Comedy Special Inside: That funny feeling. But another recent work- that captures  the feeling in an even more fundamental   way I think is the incredible, hypermodern,  maximalist film Everything Everywhere All At Once.  It’s easy to get bogged down in the technical  elements of “multiverses” and how they work   either as a storytelling device, or as an actual  theory for our own cosmos. But what I’m most   interested in about the multiverse, as it’s used  in Everything Everywhere all at once, is as a   metaphor for our own world and our own experience.  And for in a certain sense, the experience of: Title: “The Internet”  I love the internet. For someone who’s always  loved learning about new and novel things,   who has a kind of insatiable curiosity, and could  spend all my time just endlessly exploring and   learning about what’s out there if I didn’t have  to also do other things like socialize, pay rent,   and eat: the internet has been a garden of  endless wonder, delight and possibility.   The internet has an inexhaustible variety  of cool stuff, tons of fascinating people   and ideas to discover. The internet is why I’m  able to have such a cool and interesting job. But it’s also a double edged sword. Even when  it’s pointed towards what on the surface feels   like productive learning, and not just  mindless entertainment, when given the   option to fulfill endless curiosity, there comes  a tipping point, a crossing of the bell curve. Here’s the thing: We don’t need an actual  multiverse to put cracks in the clay pot   of our mind when we already have devices for  careening through the endless imaginations of   the multitudes, when we exist in an environment  where you can encounter the personal stories and   experiences from people on every continent,  all who are living their own unique life in   just a few minutes, all from the comfort  of your own toilet. When more interesting   ideas and concepts, and people and places can fly  by in the space of one 30 minute Tik Tok binge   then some of our ancestors experienced in the  entirety of their localized illiterate lives. The internet, for those who are inspired to spend  lot of time on it and use it in a certain way,   for those who envelope themselves in it’s  self-referential world of constantly evolving   novelty and imagery, will inevitably have a  profound effect on the way you see the world. The Overview Effect What is the result of   the headlong dive through novel ideas and imagery? Many Astronauts, upon seeing earth  for the first time from space,   spinning by below them report something  that has been dubbed “The Overview Effect” “It is the experience of seeing  first-hand the reality of the Earth   in space, which is immediately understood to be a  tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void",   shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. These astronauts are noting a  difficult-to-describe shift in their psyche   as a result of their extreme shift in physical  perspective. And while I don’t think the effect   of being “very online” is same as The Overview  Effect that astronauts experience, I do think   there’s an analogous effect that can happen from  consuming the amount of information many of us   now do. Seeing so much of the world so quickly can  trigger a sort of psychological paradigm shift.   The shift isn’t coming from being exposed to a new  idea of perspective that forces you to reassess   your own, the shift comes from the shear amount  of perspectives and ideas that we’re exposed to.   The shift and the feeling of this shift can  contain some positives, but it isn’t all good. I think for most people the Digital Overview  Effect is a gradual and pervasive accumulation,   slowly building up as we swim through a world  of thoughts, ideas, concepts and emotions,   all projected at us through images, text, and  video, one after another in an endless parade.   Each new idea can pull you in a different  direction, and there’s a certain point where   everything, the infinite possibility starts to  look and feel like nothingness, at at that point,   the entire thing collapses on itself. Sincerity  is long gone, but irony has also died. // For me Everything Everywhere All at once  is one of the first true post-internet   films. It’s not just about the internet,  it doesn’t just comment one the internet,   but fully embraces it in all it’s absurdist,  chaotic glory. The maximalist excess   and the complete tonal whiplash from one  moment to the next, captures the unhinged,   unfiltered anarchy of using the internet in a way  that nothing else I’ve ever consumed ever has.   This is a movie for people who have found  themselves blinking sleep out of their eyes   with 50 tabs open at 2am, which I suspect  is many more of us than we openly admit. In an interview with Slashfilm, Daniel  Scheinert, one of the movie’s directors said: “We've talked a lot about what it's  like to have grown up with the internet,   and how that exacerbated the typical generational  divide, and what it feels like for everyone,   no matter old you are, to live right now with the  internet. So, that's one of the key metaphors,   was just like, we wanted the maximalism of  the movie to connect with what it's like to   scroll through an infinite amount of stuff,  which is something we're all doing too much.” Most media that tries to comment on the internet,  comments on the “content” of the internet, or one   small element that it wants to critique, but it  doesn’t comment on the message that comes from the   medium of the internet. The way the most absurd  or inane things you’ve ever seen coexist in the   immediate context of tragedy and your family and  friends. Everything Everywhere All At Once does.   It’s silly and stupid and choatic  because, well. Welcome to the Internet. Jobu Tupaki is a child of the internet,  raised in and by the chaos of the multiverse,   cast unknowingly by her parents, without training  wheels, into the void. She doesn’t have the   skills to cope, and neither do many of the real  teenagers who are growing up on the internet now. Evelyn first tries to resist, and then  tries to understand, but realizes that   she too is not equipped to handle the  onslaught of experiencing the internet head on. How do we handle this situation?  How do we stare head on into the   void? Maybe you haven’t experience what I’m  talking about, maybe you don’t know what I mean.   Maybe you’ve been able to venture into this Brave  New World we’re living in relatively untouched,   but even if you haven’t I would argue that you  have. Our world is being shaped and formed by   people who have gone in and haven’t come  out unscathed, while my parents generation   and even mine got to grow up with the internet as  something that you still went to as box to log on   to, current generations are growing up with it as  an omnipresent extension of themselves. They grow   up in a technological world increasing dominated  by the internet, where it’s intertwined with their   education, social lives, and careers,  and where it increasingly takes a bold   and defiant individual to take a step  away, much less disconnect entirely. And it’s not slowing down. While  the adults in power are just now   becoming aware of the issues that began rearing  their heads in a decade ago, the next decade   holds even more astonishing wonders and terrors,  waiting for us to embrace them with open arms. It might sound from all this that I  think it’s a very hopeless situation.   But I don’t really think that, or at least I  don’t feel hopeless, and neither does Everything   Everywhere All at Once, which ultimately  affirms a quiet acceptance of a life that openly   acknowledges the infinite chaos and possibility,  but quietly ignores it and makes the choice to   value more immediate and personal things.  And in some sense while chaos reigns on a   planetary scale, it is possible I think for an  individual to find a better, healthier way to   engage with this Brave New World, and while that  doesn’t fix the problem as a whole, if we can’t   figure out how to engage with these things  in a healthy way as individuals, we’ll never   figure out how to do it as communities. And to engage with this world in a healthier way,  you’ll have to understand what doesn’t matter.   Because the internet is a place  where everything matters all at once   all the time. But the real word, the  life you’re living, is one where you can   only pay attention to a few thing in one  place, at a time. And giving your time and   attention to a few things that do matter  means looking an almost infinite world of   possibility constantly vying for you attention  and boldly proclaiming that it doesn’t matter. There’s a quote from Marshall McLuhan that gives  me hope when thinking about these kinds of issues,   so I’ll leave you with that: “There is no inevitability, so long as there is  a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

Channel: Thomas Flight

Views: 1,156,318

Keywords: Video Essay, Thomas Flight, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Maximalism, ADHD, The Internet, Bo Burnham, Review, Explained, Ending Explained

Id: VvclV0_o0JE

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/World-Tight]

Golly! Thanks for the link.