Bagel, please.
Bagel, please.
(Pronounce that in your head not like “Coffee, please”, but like “Bitch, please.”)
The Multiverse has been in the zeitgeist lately. Notably in movies, it often happens that different films touching on similar topics will emerge around the same time. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is one. Everything Everywhere All At Once is another.
Spoilers ahead, particularly for those two films, some Marvel Cinematic Universe backstory, and also – for physics.
We all love a good story. Stories, as Sir Terry Pratchett was fond of pointing out, are a huge part of how we think about the world. “Fisherman catches fish. Poor man begs for fish. Fisherman refuses. Poor man turns out to be King pretending to be poor man. Fisherman begs forgiveness, learns lesson about being kind to strangers.” That sort of story sticks with us and is retold over centuries, because it encodes some basic truths.
Kings are useful plot devices because they’re powerful. They allow things to happen that normally could not, widening the scope for the drama. Lots of things could befall the protagonist if a King is around.
More powerful than a King is a wizard, or a genie, or a god. We love stories featuring these sorts of powerful, wily, and unpredictable characters. They expand the possibilities and raise the stakes.
Doctor Strange is a wizard, and in his Multiverse of Madness, he faces his opponent, who is… a witch. The Multiverse is the stage, but it’s really about the actions of these two powerful characters, plus a third who is… kind of a wizard too, just a different sort. The third character can jump between universes, and it turns out there are an infinite number of them. All are different from each other, to lesser and greater extents.
When a powerful character isn’t enough for a great story, you can place your story within a mind-melting setting. This used to be, say, Olympus, or the Realm of the Dead (and sometimes it still is). More recently, we’ve had entire genres set within “the inky, infinite reaches of outer space”, and “the many bizarre worlds within that wide Universe”, the province of science fiction or fantasy shows. Some of these ideas weren’t possible before we realized space was so huge. Back when we thought the night sky was the inside of a dark sphere with tiny lights set in it, it was easier to imagine a realm full of gods, instead of a world full of aliens.
Gradually, science pushes back the boundaries of the unknown. As this knowledge percolates into society, it starts informing our fiction. The Multiverse may be another example of this.
Granted, the Multiverse could also be showing up simply because it’s convenient. Marvel can use it to bring back different versions of Spider-Man in the same movie. An entertaining story doesn’t need a deeper reason.
In nonfiction, I’m currently reading Our Mathematical Universe, by Max Tegmark. This is cosmology and hard physics, heavy on the quantum mechanics, and the Multiverse plays a central part in how Tegmark views the deepest workings of our reality.
Forgive me if I elaborate a little on the quantum weirdness… thing. As Tegmark explains, the field of physics has been getting gradually better, in a sort of drunkard’s walk towards the truth with many missteps along the way, at explaining more and more of our observations with fewer rules. We thought we understood how light behaved, and yet there were some oddities that made no sense. Then quantum mechanics postulated that certain very small objects, that make up our larger world (like photons of light, and electrons), behave in ways widely divergent from our everyday experience. A particle can, in some sense, be in more than one place at a time, and can jump between two locations through a barrier that ought to be impossible to breach.
Sherlock Holmes observed, “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Physics runs smack into our hard-won intuitions about how physical objects behave. We’re tempted to dismiss the conclusions of quantum mechanics because they seem impossible. But in fact, what’s impossible is to ignore the consistent experimental results. Quantum mechanics is an extremely successful theory. Its predictions have proven correct, time and time again, and with incredible accuracy, however little sense they make to us.
We keep trying to make sense of it, though. This has been a source of frustration for physicists over the past century. Yes, it’s been around since the 1920’s.
We can’t help but try to make sense of our world, to find meaning in it. So we ask, what does it mean that a particle can be in two places at once, until we look for it? The “Copenhagen Interpretation” essentially told us to shrug: “Look, we know this seems nonsensical, but just trust us, it really happens. Do the math and get on with it.” And following that approach, we built amazing devices like the cell phone I’m using to write this text. We rely on computers which would not work if quantum mechanics were wrong.
Max Tegmark was deeply dissatisfied with the Copenhagen Interpretation, and went another path, popularly called the “Many-Worlds Interpretation”. This idea has been gaining adherents recently. He believes we live in a Multiverse. In fact, as he describes in his book, he believes we live in a Multiverse on four levels. I won’t get into all that… but one of the levels is Hilbert space, and is all about the weirdness of quantum mechanics.
When an electron is in two places at once, and you look for it, and find it in just one place, why is that? Tegmark believes it’s not that the electron “made a random choice”. Rather, it’s that there are now two universes. In one, the electron is here. In the other, it’s over there. Understanding that the number of electrons (and every other sub-nuclear particle) is staggeringly huge, and that they’re all interacting with each other constantly, and that the number of possible outcomes can be many more than two, and that it’s been going on for 13.8 billion years, this suggests we would by now have accumulated a truly dizzying number of alternate universes.
Quantum mechanics, as a mechanism for calculating the future from the past, has a “totalitarian principle” that roughly states: everything not forbidden is compulsory. If the rules say a particle could go left or right, then it does both. In Tegmark’s view, this suggests that every possible universe allowed by physics must exist… somewhere. The “somewhere” gets a bit philosophical, but Tegmark believes it’s real.
The main difference between that idea, and the fictional Multiverses portrayed in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Everything Everywhere All At Once, is that it’s only possible in stories to travel between them. The purpose of stories is both to entertain, and to convey wisdom rather than fact. Not “truth”, but “Truth”.
These two movies differ in a number of respects, starting with the fact that Multiverse of Madness is just one movie within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and characters such as Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) have been shaped and embellished over many hours on screen. We know what drives Strange: He was arrogant, got careless behind the wheel, and got himself into an accident that ruined his skilled surgeon’s hands. Then he discovered a much wider universe, a Multiverse known only to those skilled in the magical arts, and gradually acclimated to his new role as defender of this universe against threats from other ones.
He faces off against his antagonist Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). We know her backstory too: She lost her sweetheart, Vision (Paul Bettany), in the battle against Thanos the Mad Titan (Josh Brolin). Thanos intended – and for a time, succeeded in – wiping out half the life in the universe. There’s your well-honed formula for a dramatic story: a sweeping stage, the highest sort of stakes. Vision is sacrificed, as it turns out, in vain. For a time, lost in grief, Wanda conjures up an imaginary Vision and even two imaginary children. Eventually she learns that what she’s doing with her magic is harming innocents. She turns away from the fantasy, but then she learns about the Multiverse… and the fact that her two children do exist, in another version of reality. She can’t resist the temptation to steal them.
These stories are fun to watch on the big screen. They’re flashy, the computer animation is top-notch, and the actors do an amazing job. In the end, though, the characters’ motivations aren’t terribly complicated ones. Thanos has a motivation too: He saw civilization collapse on his home Titan, and concluded that life contains the seeds of its own destruction. Wiping out half of everyone was not his idea of an act of cruelty, but of kindness, meant to spare the universe from the suffering he witnessed. In fact, a lot of the MCU characters are driven by loss: Peter Parker lost Aunt May. Steve Rogers lost Peggy Carter, and basically everybody else, when he was trapped in the ice for several decades. Tony Stark lost his parents in a brutal assassination. And so on.
Most of these characters get themselves into trouble by responding to their loss in, to put it mildly, unhealthy and inappropriate ways. Being willing to kill half of everybody, or to break entire universes in order to steal your doppelganger’s children, demonstrates a clear recklessness and disregard for the welfare of others. We can still sympathize with the characters and their pain, but we don’t condone the well-established rules of conduct they break.
That’s a key point though: In these stories, we all agree on who the bad guy is, and what lines have been crossed.
By contrast, in Everything Everywhere All At Once, it’s a bit more nuanced. On one level, it’s another superhero movie that takes place within a Multiverse – and yet…
The protagonist is clearly Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), the frazzled wife and mother, trying to do everything at once as she juggles running the laundromat, struggling to file her taxes, raising her teenage daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and caring for her aging father Gong Gong (James Hong). Her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is there to help, but she often finds him at least as much of a hindrance. Meanwhile, he’s trying to get her to pay attention to him by serving her with divorce papers, and Joy is struggling to get the family to accept her girlfriend. Evelyn strives to do everything, and fails at everything, and her family is slipping away.
Then an alternate Waymond crashes into her world, taking over her husband’s body, and introducing her to the Multiverse and her place in it. He expects her to save the Multiverse from Jobu Tupaki, a chaotic being of seemingly limitless power, who seems intent on destroying the entire shebang. Jobu is offered up to the audience on a silver platter as the story’s obvious antagonist, until we shortly learn that Jobu Tupaki is an alternative version of Evelyn’s daughter Joy.
For all that she casually turns people into confetti, the real villain here might not be Jobu. It might be the bagel.
Everything Everywhere is a great film, and by that I mean, I would consider it capital-G Great, one of the best films I’ve ever seen, on a par with The Matrix and The Fifth Element and The Dark Knight. These are all, in a sense, science fiction superhero stories, but each has elements that elevate it above standard popcorn fare (and Multiverse of Madness, though fun, doesn’t make the cut). They all aim, in their own ways, to address questions of “what it all means”.
To begin with, Everything Everywhere is delightfully bizarre. Though the martial arts fight scenes are not particularly novel compared with other superhero tales, they’re paired with a mechanism to explain the characters’ heightened powers, derived from the mechanics of the Multiverse itself. With a seemingly infinite number of alternate universes out there, one can find versions of oneself with incredible skills: mastery of Kung Fu, the ability to dodge obstacles one cannot see, and so on. The characters wear small transmitters that let them connect their minds to those of their alter egos, and vacuum up those skills for ready use a fraction of a second later. Unlike in Multiverse of Madness, they don’t physically travel to those other universes; only their mind makes the trip. Sometimes, the skills Evelyn needs reside in the bodies of Evelyns whose universes go way past “odd” and firmly into “ridiculous”.
This is even more delightful when seen through the lens of real-world physics. If it’s true that everything not forbidden is compulsory, then every possible universe allowed by the laws of nature must in some sense exist. This includes the ones where people have floppy hot-dog fingers.
On top of the ludicrous construction of these realities, the characters must intentionally do silly things to reach them. It’s explained that “Verse Jumping” requires first finding a “jumping pad”. It’s envisioned as a sort of slingshot maneuver. By doing something wholly uncharacteristic and unlikely, such as suddenly eating chapstick or stapling a paper to their own forehead, they place themselves well outside their projected activity in the space of all possible universes. The odder their actions, the further they will travel when they fling their mind away. So the martial arts fight scenes are of a common variety… except that sometimes the combatants derive their power from butt-plugs. Evelyn defeats them by, well, disarming them.
It must be said that much of the movie's charm comes from Michelle Yeoh's portrayal of Evelyn's (quite understandable) bewilderment. It’s also hilarious how much trouble Evelyn has with simply remembering the name of her opponent, variously coming out with “Juju Toobootie”, “Jobu Tobacky”, and “Juju Chewbacca”.
I’m sure some who watch this movie must have trouble getting past how bizarre it is. But underneath the playfulness and the Alice-in-Wonderland quality, it has a message that is very clear.
Jobu Tupaki operates as an agent of chaos, akin to Batman’s arch-nemesis the Joker, and part of the difficulty the heroes face in defeating her is the same: simply in figuring out what she wants. In The Dark Knight, Albert (Michael Caine) warns Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) that he may not fully understand the aims of his new, dangerous opponent The Joker (Heath Ledger). “Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money,” he says. “They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Jobu seems to have a similar nature, a Shiva the Destroyer type, who creates in order to destroy.
This brings us to the bagel.
In her adolescent mind, the idea of making a true “Everything Bagel” must’ve been a hilarious prank.
“I got bored one day, and I put everything on a bagel. Everything. All my hopes and dreams, my old report cards, every breed of dog, every last personal ad on Craigslist. Sesame. Poppy seed. Salt. And it collapsed in on itself. ‘Cause you see, when you really put everything on a bagel, it becomes this. The truth.”“What is the truth?”“Nothing… matters.”
Jobu created the ultimate Everything Bagel, and the bagel is now the ultimate black hole – not for physical matter, but for meaning. Jobu understands that because everything happens somewhere in the Multiverse, it doesn’t matter what you do with your own life. When she sees her father solving problems by applying empathy and compassion, she shrugs it off. Nothing impresses her because every possible thing must happen somewhere.
It transpires that what Jobu really wants is for someone to understand her perspective, her mind fractured by too much knowledge of too many universes. She built the bagel not so much to destroy worlds, but to destroy herself. The real villain is not Jobu, but the Multiverse. Except of course, the Multiverse is not a character; it doesn’t do anything or have any goals. The stage can’t be the antagonist. The real antagonist must be our inability to process how big the Multiverse is, and how small we are in comparison. The real antagonist is the existential crisis, represented by the bagel, a dark pastry in the shape of a zero.
The crisis was bad enough when we thought there was a single universe, with perhaps 10 trillion galaxies, each containing a hundred billion stars. Even within this one universe, the scope is too large for our minds to grasp it. Set against such a vast space, how much do the actions of our species appear to matter? Bagel.
This is rather different from the actions taken by the Scarlet Witch. We understand Scarlet Witch’s pain, but think of ourselves as people who would never cross the lines she does. Jobu, by contrast, is facing a crisis that is truly universal and inescapable, the need to come to terms with an inexplicable universe that seems not to care about us either way. When ordered to kill Jobu, Evelyn refuses, instead seeking to pull her daughter back from the ledge. To convince her to abandon the Path of the Bagel, she must restore her daughter’s hope and sense of purpose.
I’ve written about the absurdist philosophy of Albert Camus, and it’s very relevant here. Camus said there were three ways we could respond to the universe’s stubborn meaninglessness: Commit actual suicide; commit philosophical suicide by surrendering our search for meaning to a religion; or embrace the absurd and resolve to live a meaningful life despite the universe. Camus believed only the third option was a workable solution. It’s interesting to note that Jobu Tupaki illustrates both of the first two. She creates the Everything Bagel seeking a way to destroy herself, but she also inspires cult-like followers wearing bagel hats. Everyone wears white robes, and the building that houses the bagel looks like a church.
These violent philosophical disagreements play out in absurd fantastical battles, like Evelyn besting everyone with her superpowered pinkie fingers. Meanwhile, though, she is maintaining a connection to her mundane life in the laundromat, and to several other realities.
Ultimately it is Waymond who advocates for the third path.
“Please - be kind, especially when we don’t know what’s going on. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight. When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary.”
Evelyn sees her husband in a new light. She begins to fight by rearranging the worlds of her opponents to give them happiness. Jobu scoffs at this, too. But when Jobu tries to dive into the endless depths of the bagel, Evelyn and the rest of the family refuse to let go.
Was she a superhero at all, or was it all in her head? Did she invent everything that happened outside the laundromat and the IRS office? Was Jobu Tupaki even real, or was she just Evelyn’s manifestation of her daughter’s depression and her desire to leave? However you choose to see it, Everything Everywhere turns out to be more than escapist entertainment. It takes direct aim at the question of meaning that we all must face.
There's one more aspect in common between Multiverse of Madness and Everything Everywhere. In both films, the antagonist's suffering stems only partly from their personal grievances. The rest comes from the pain of knowing too much. In Everything Everywhere, it's the bagel. In Multiverse of Madness, it's the forbidden knowledge within the Darkhold, corrupting the mind of Wanda Maximoff and anyone else who reads it. Fortunately, the Darkhold is fictional. But we might live in a Multiverse, and we do live within a universe that is vast and incomprehensible. It is every bit as absurd as Kung Fu pinkie fingers. All we can hope to do is to struggle onward together, seeking connection, and trying to be kind.
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