Queer Time and Futurity in the film Everything Everywhere All at Once

The film Everything Everywhere All at Once, written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, is an Academy Award winning film that defies genres in its chaotic, absurd, and heartwarming plot. The film follows Evelyn Quan Wang, a Chinese immigrant, who owns a laundromat with her husband. In the present day, Evelyn is dealing with several hardships: her laundromat is being audited, her husband Waymond is serving her with divorce papers, and her relationship with her daughter Joy is tense. After a meeting with an IRS agent, Evelyn is told by Alpha-Waymond, an alternative version of her husband, that there are several parallel universes that exist, known as the multiverse. Evelyn travels through universes attempting to save the multiverse from Alpha-Joy, an alternative version of Evelyn’s daughter, while also attempting to repair her broken relationship with her daughter and husband. The concepts of queer time and queer futurity are especially central when analyzing this film in a queer context. The film’s nonlinear timeline, the absurd scenes, and the emotional kinships challenge the normative ideas of what it means to live a "typical” life and strive for alternative possibilities. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, queer time and queer futurity come together through the film’s complex multiverse, bizarre worlds, and complicated familial relationships, showing that queer survival is not about following a straight path, but about embracing absurdity, failure, and the possibility of different ways of living. 

In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Evelyn’s journey through the multiverse challenges normative ideas of time. This reflects Jack Halberstam’s idea of queer time, which rejects traditional life paths and timelines. Halberstam argues that queer time works “in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (Halberstam 1). In other words, queer time is not about following one specific or expected path and ending up at a defined endpoint, instead it is about the unpredictable complex and nonlinear ways that life unfolds. At the beginning of the film, Evelyn is following a very rigid, heteronormative life path where she upholds conventional ideas about success and family. Her commitment to this path leaves her overwhelmed with her failing laundromat, disconnected from her kind and understanding husband, and unable to connect with and fully accept her queer daughter Joy. Any deviation from the norm, such as her daughter's queerness, causes her to lash out. Her feelings are deeply connected to heteronormativity and capitalist notions. As Rodrick Ferguson states: “Liberal ideology has recommended conforming to the heterosexual nuclear family model as the appropriate way to bear such burdens” (Ferguson 20). This explains why Evelyn clings so strongly to this rigid structure, even when it is failing her, because of her own internalized beliefs that conform with the heteronormative and capitalist ideas related to success. 

In the film, hopelessness and failure are not just hardships that Evelyn must overcome but are central to the idea of queer possibility and futurity. Evelyn is deeply overwhelmed with her “failures” such as her business, marriage, and relationship to her daughter, but the film does not frame these as a sign of weakness for Evelyn. The film leans into discomfort, chaos, and confusion. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed, she writes that “queer subjects... feel uncomfortable” in spaces that are defined by heteronormativity, especially when certain events in a person’s life “fail to sink” into a normative life path (Ahmed 148, 152). Evelyn, and the discomfort she feels in her inability to conform to the standards of being a “good” businesswoman, wife, and mother, mirrors the feelings of not fitting in because of an inability to conform to heteronormative standards. As stated in the previous paragraph as well, this also reflects how non-American identities, like Evelyn, are persecuted by the heteronormative and capitalistic ways of America. The significance of this discomfort is that it acts as a starting point for Evelyn’s transformation, allowing Evelyn to begin to challenge the traditional norms of her life and hope for an alternative future. Evelyn knows something is missing in her life and she begins to look elsewhere to find it. As stated in the article “Hope and hopelessness: A dialogue”, José Esteban Muñoz and Lisa Duggan state “feeling revolutionary is feeling that our current situation is not enough, that something is indeed missing and we cannot live without it” (Duggan & Muñoz, 278). Her feelings of hopelessness and discomfort are not a failing, but a queer opening which embraces the possibility for a different, less rigid way of living.

Evelyn is finally able to break free from her heteronormative life path when time in the film is completely fractured, thrusting Evelyn into multiple different realities. Evelyn, then, encounters multiple versions of herself, and none of them follow a straightforward or predictable trajectory. This breaks from the idea that a person should pursue one life path which typically involves marriage, family, career success, and a clear resolution. Evelyn’s alternate lives highlight a refusal of linear success and stable identity. Evelyn experiences many different versions of herself in the multiverse such as her as a movie star, a kung fu master, and even a rock. Even though there are several versions of Evelyn and her life, the film does not portray one version as “better” or more “real” than the others but instead argues that there is no “correct” version of her life or way to live. The multiverse represents and serves as a metaphor for queer time by demonstrating time as fractured, nonlinear, and different. Evelyn survives not by “fixing her life”, but by letting go of the idea that she must follow one expected path and to stop pushing that idea onto those around her. This reflects the idea that queer time resists a clear path and embraces change and the freedom to live a different, less traditional life. 

José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of queer futurity from his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity is extremely relevant to this film. Muñoz states in his book that, “we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds (Muñoz, “Introduction: Feeling Utopia” 1). Queerness is not just a label for an identity, but also a kind of longing for an alternative future. This longing is played out in the film's most absurd, bizarre scenes from different universes such as the hot dog finger world and the rock universe. These strange scenes are supposed to be funny for the audience but are also deeply emotional. In the hot dog world, Evelyn and her IRS agent Deirdre share an intimate relationship with one another and learn to experience the world in different ways due to their fingers being hotdogs (i.e., playing the piano with their feet). In the rock world, where both Evelyn and her daughter Joy are rocks beside each other on a cliffside, they communicate through the subtitles on screen in complete silence. These scenes may be described as a type of ephemera by José Esteban Muñoz. Ephemera is defined as “traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things” that offer evidence of queer life (Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence” 10). Ephemera in this film comes in forms such as googly eyes, pinky fights, hot dog fingers, and rocks who speak through subtitles. These forms of ephemera, while seemingly wacky and nonsensical, actually offer a glimpse into what an alternative life or future could be. They resist the traditional logic of a normative life and embrace unconventional forms of living and life. This helps demonstrate how queer futurity is not about arriving at a correct destination but learning from the possibility of another world. 

One of the most impactful elements in Everything Everywhere All at Once is the relationship between Evelyn and her daughter Joy. For the majority of the film, Evelyn and Joy struggle to understand each other. Evelyn is having trouble coming to terms with Joy’s queerness and accepting Joy’s white girlfriend. Their strained relationship is mainly due to Evelyn’s internalized ideas of success, normalcy, and family, which are based on traditional, heteronormative ideals. However, Evelyn’s journey through the multiverse and her exposure to queer time and queer futurity completely alter her perspective and allow her to reconnect with her daughter through the lessons she learns. By living through multiple timelines, Evelyn learns that her traditional views of life and family are not always the “right” course or necessary source for survival. Instead, she learns that there are many acceptable and valid ways to live and connect even if they do not follow a traditional path. This is evident in the parking lot scene at the end of the film where Evelyn finally is able to connect with Joy. Instead of Evelyn reinforcing the traditional ideals of family on Joy that she has been throughout the movie, Evelyn admits that life is confusing and messy, but that she will choose her daughter in every lifetime. This choice to reconnect with Joy and Evelyn stating “Joy, I still want to be here with you, I will always, always want to be here with you” to Joy, reflects Marlon Bailey’s idea of chosen connections from Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. In this chapter, Bailey emphasizes how queer kinship is based not on biological ties, but through emotional care, acceptance, and recognition (Bailey 19, 25). Evelyn's relationship with Joy at the end of the film is not based on some biological obligation, but instead through her decision to accept and love Joy and her complexities. Through what she has learned from queer time and futurity, Evelyn is able to let go of the stagnant and constricting expectations and choose a future for herself and her family that embraces care and new forms of living. 

The film Everything Everywhere All at Once challenges traditional notions of time, identity, and family by acknowledging the complexities and messiness of life. Through Evelyn’s journey in the vast multiverse, the film rejects a traditional, heteronormative, linear life path. The film instead, using the multiverse, imagines queer survival through failure, acceptance, and the possibilities of alternative ways of life. Evelyn’s exposure to queer time and futurity teaches her that her traditional expectations and notions of success are not the only ways a person can live. Her relationship to Joy is about choosing to connect and acceptance, not biological obligation. Scenes like the rock universe and the hot dog universe all demonstrate resisting normative logic and the possibility of an alternative life path. Everything Everywhere All at Once imagines queer survival, not as something that follows a normative route, but as something messy and deeply human. 

Sources:

Ahmed, Sara. “Queer Feelings.” The Cultural Politics of Emotion, NED-New edition, 2, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, pp. 144–167. 

Bailey, Marlon M. “Introduction: Performing Gender, Creating Kinship, Forging Community.” Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit, University of Michigan Press, 2013, pp. 1–28. 

Duggan, Lisa, and José Esteban Muñoz. “Hope and hopelessness: A dialogue.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 19, no. 2, July 2009, pp. 275–283. 

Ferguson, Roderick A. “Introduction.” Aberration in Black: Toward a Queer Color of Critique, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, pp. 1–29. 

Halberstam, Jack. “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies.” In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York University Press, 2005, pp. 1–21. 

Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 8, no. 2, 1996, pp. 5–16. 

Muñoz, José Esteban. “Introduction: Feeling Utopia.” Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, NYU Press, 2009, pp. 1–18.