When You Really Put Everything on a Bagel
April 2025
In 2022, the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary was awarded a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for a program bringing together scholars, faith leaders, activists, and artists of color to explore religion and racial justice through the medium of film. With movies ranging from movie theater blockbusters to arthouse indies, this cohort uses art as a public pedagogical tool for social change. Below is a conversation among three cohort members discussing the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All At Once and how it might reorient our moral outlooks on the mundanities of racialized life in the US, familial obligation, nihilism, and self-worth.
Samah Choudhury: By way of introduction, we should say that the three of us are a ragtag group of scholar/artist/activists who work on religion, gender, politics, and a whole mishmash of other things. Mihee, you study Asian American Christianity, citizenship, race, and religion. Amey Victoria specializes in Black feminist thought, Marian iconography, and theologies of Black protest. I write about notions of Muslim humor, the performance of standup, and how Islam gets articulated in US pop culture. What brought us all together, though, was Kelly Brown Douglas’s vision for a collective that recognizes not only that film provides a revelatory medium for understanding the ways race and religion function as social phenomena, but also that their interchange can instruct and expand our moral imaginaries. The film Everything Everywhere All At Once is a prime example of a film that can do, and does, those things in wildly creative and obtuse ways.
MKK: It’s still remarkable and a bit mind-boggling to see so much of (Asian) diasporic and immigrant life portrayed in film in general, and not just the bad tropes and stereotypes. The stories that are the most compelling and resonant to me are the ones that have snippets and shards of my life now as well as the lives of my family and community—my parents, my home church, my grandparents, and extended family.
Amey-Victoria Adkins Jones: The three of us have discussed the experiences and demands of our lives at the intersections we share between our academic professions and, specifically, what it means to also be a mother in this world. The last thing I expected from this plot, which I initially knew nothing about, was that it would center so inventively around a mother-daughter relationship (in relationship to all of the commentaries on existentialism, nihilism, gender, immigration, the multiverse, joy … everything, everywhere? Yep).
SC: What stood out to you both as particularly instructive moments in the movie?
AVA: I actually really love the opening scene. The musical score here mimics a lullaby, but becomes discordant and interrupted, a screeching halt that sounds like we are being warped into a horror movie. We get our first mirror image (and the first of innumerable circles and reflections as a motif), that takes us back to a different time (or perhaps a different reality) of a happy family. The mirror flips suddenly to a much more mundane reality. Papers everywhere, house projects left undone, clutter from business and work indistinguishable from the rest of the house, and the familiar introduction to the demands of finances, cultural familial expectations, and marriage, through the eyes of an overwhelmed and overextended Evelyn. She’s barely keeping her head above water–sandwiched between an aging parent and a child stepping into her adulthood, completely oblivious to the divorce papers right in front of her eyes–and her husband Waymond is the first to intimate that there is a greater kind of quality of her life, in a moment where all she can see are the ways she has failed.
SC: And this is all within minutes of the movie’s start! But it’s setting us up for the two dominant mindsets of the film, scarcity and abundance. And that you can actually feel those things.
AVA: Gilles Deleuze has an essay that opens with the line “Exhausted is a whole lot more than tired,” and I think about this at the starting point of Evelyn’s journey. The endless cycles of it all; Life reduced to receipts. And it is Waymond from the start who tries to help course-correct the defining lens of success, and to affix a googly-eyed gaze to the senseless cycles of how we measure our lives. How fitting that they are literally surrounded by endless loads of laundry? And Waymond, in a sense, asks not just Evelyn but the audience, to look at ourselves differently. The camera goes in and out of focus through this section, as Waymond asks Evelyn this poignant question of perspective on one’s life, “But it’s what you and I see, right?”
Mihee Kim-Kort: There’s also a scene where Jobu/Joy and Evelyn find themselves on a cliff overlooking a stark and silent landscape. Under a cloudless blue sky with dramatic views of the mountains in the distance, it looks quite like landscapes one might find on our Earth. But in this universe they are rocks. The sudden shift to this world is disarming and deafening. Evelyn seems a bit disoriented and calls out to her daughter (silently, as we read the text on the screen since they are … rocks): “Joy? Where are we?” Jobu/Joy explains: we’re in “one of the universes where conditions weren’t right for life to form.” Apparently, there are many universes like this, and for Jobu/Joy it is a momentary reprieve. She says, it is a space where “you can just sit here and everything just feels really…far away.” Evelyn then tries to apologize but Jobu/Joy cuts her off: “Shhhh. You don’t have to worry about that here. Just be a rock.” We get the impression that she has been here before, and the simplicity and silence provide a kind of refuge for her.
AVA: This is such an evocative scene for many reasons, mostly because up until this point in the movie, we’ve been subject to increasingly weird, hilarious, even unsettling worlds that Evelyn must navigate to stop Joy/Jobu’s path of destruction. It’s been loud and chaotic and suddenly that all drops off.
MKK: To me, it’s one of the most moving scenes. And yet, nothing is happening. The sun is nearly blinding. The wilderness is almost colorless. We are looking at inanimate objects. The dialogue we “hear” appears in text on the screen. And yet, there is something affecting in this moment. Though Evelyn and Jobu/Joy seem completely impenetrable, something is happening here and not only through the text that appears as speech. At the very least, a media and performance studies critique of Asian inscrutability is useful, but I want to read this opacity specifically as a moment of disaffection.
SC: Can you say more about Asian inscrutability? This is drawing from Vivian Huang’s work on Asian American artists, right?
MKK: Yes, and for my dissertation research I also encountered and am informed by Sunny Xiang’s Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War and Stephen Hong’s Inscrutable Belongings: Queer Asian North American Fiction. By registering the disaffective, I riff on Xine Yao’s work too, on the relationship between affectability and raciality in Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America. Yao theorizes how “unfeeling is not simply … negative feelings or the absence of feelings, but that which cannot be recognized as feeling—the negation of feeling itself” and how disaffection is the “unfeeling rupture that enables new structures of feeling to arise.” This inscrutability is often a racialization of the Asian American person or experience. But, Asian inscrutability is a way to refuse the dominant structures of affect, that is the expectation that a certain kind of sentiment or emotion must be expressed to be registered as human. The characters are rocks, not only expected to be unfeeling, but incapable of conveying feeling.
SC: In this moment, these rocks represent not only these characters but the figure of the Asian American, and the power of refusal to be emotionally or affectively legible.
MKK: The fraught and electrifying dynamics of the parent-child relationship is all too relatable, as are the larger dynamics of family life. It was painful and yet somehow cathartic to witness throughout the movie. It also landed in particular ways for each of us.
AVA: When I rewatched this around Mother’s Day—–a day that is immensely meaningful and also deeply fraught for so many—–I was brought to tears. Not only the realization of my own sense of exhaustion…[gestures toward everything in the world, and especially on our campuses, and counting the numbers of children horrifically martyred in Palestine and displaced in Sudan and, and, and, and …]. And there is this sense of endless fatigue, in multiple registers, that drives us to Jobu. Deleuze describes that being tired requires a kind of object–there is some thing you can point to that is making you tired. But one is exhausted by absolutely nothing, and also everything. And I find myself deeply moved both by Evelyn’s struggle, as well as Joy/Jobu’s sense of searching every single possible universe, for some kernel of meaning. It’s the question we are all asking, of how to deal with this enduring sadness, and this sense of futility of the world as is, even more so when we look forward to some kind of future?
SC: I always used to roll my eyes when folks would say “kids grow up fast,” or “you should enjoy every moment” because those moments will soon flit away and leave behind something and someone you no longer recognize. They are such basic truisms that I’m embarrassed to admit how deeply that truth has withered me these days! We stand at the precipice of kindergarten in our home: the letters that my four year old writes are turning legible and uniform, and colors no longer sprawl outside the lines in coloring books. His Bengali diction is fading and the grammar is jumbled coming out of his mouth when it even does, and why not? English reigns in our lives. And of course, of course, these are all just tiny shards of despair in a broader heap of affection. But seeing a disaffected mother star in this film had me attuned to how a multiplicity of identities are housed in a single person.
MKK: I was deeply moved and challenged by the multiplicity of identities in all the characters. It was a reminder that it’s easy for me to get caught up in the need for (Asian/American) representation to look and sound a particular way for me to feel it 1) did its job and 2) validates me. But I see how this uncritical expectation can cause not only a marginalization and invisibilization but a violent erasure … of possibility, of whole universes that exist in a person.
SC: Calls for “representation” were a vocal driving force for years with fraught outcomes, serious limits, and as we’re now seeing, a determined backlash. Even though I spend a lot of time in my academic work theorizing this movement, there is still something so compelling about recognizing yourself and the people in your immediate life out in the cinematic public. My latest rewatch of EEAAO left thinking a lot about debt and fugitivity. Anne Cheng writes that “to be an immigrant is to live in a fractured multiverse, one riven with geographic, temporal, and psychical dissonances,” and one of the greatest strengths of the film is how it captures that near-totalizing sadness. What do we owe the people who upended their lives to make possible our own? How can we ever do justice to an entire people, a people whose lives, culture, and history are being systematically extinguished while we sit here, across the ocean, encased in the sick privilege of simply not having to think about it if we so choose? Indebtedness can look and feel like many things, but lately, it's overwhelmingly felt like despair.
This has been my backdrop – small stitches of sadness for the unstoppable passage of time that watches over the growth of my kid and the past lives of my parents, debilitating heaves of sadness for that same unstoppable passage of time that bears witness over yet another genocide. Viewing EEAAO has given me a few tools to reckon with that sadness, or at the very least channel it into something less mired and more elastic.
AVA: Last semester, I was teaching Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. It’s such an important historical and theological text; Julian is an Anchorite living and writing in the world through her own pain and chronic illness (hers is the first text we have in English that was definitively written by a woman), in a world that had been decimated by the plague, and she insists on reflecting on the love of God. She has a famous passage, where she describes a vision of “a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind’s eye it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, ‘What can this be? And the answer came to me, ‘It is all that is made.’” Julian ponders this thing, and has three conclusions, essentially that God made it, God loves it, and God cares for it, and that this is the basis for all of existence, including our own.
MKK: How do you contextualize this for students who are trying to thread a difficult needle: marrying literary analysis to these otherwise immediate and visceral questions of ontology?
AVA: Julian is writing in this remarkable era, and making these claims that God can be found intensively in and with and through our bodies, and in our sensations and our pain and blood and tears and sweat and life. And she keeps returning to this ethic of care and desire, as the source of salvation and hope, that really speaks back to the different theories of atonement and understanding of creation as deeply mirrored in the violence and suffering of the world as redemptive. And I was talking to a lovely student after class who asked me if the hazelnut was kind of like the “everything bagel” in EEAAO. And it was like, yes. I really think so!
SC: The weird, swirling bagel is one of the kooky premises introduced by the film’s directors that then also functions as a grave metaphor for the meaning of life. It’s foreshadowed in nearly every scene of the movie until its dramatic reveal as Jobu’s manifestation of ultimate reality. But somehow this weird, swirling bagel became a useful cipher for a young person to make sense of Julian of Norwich even though they’re separated by almost 700 years.
AVA: The seeming absurdity of the everything bagel, this black hole of destruction and precipice that Jobu creates in search of relation, and this sense of meaninglessness. It’s such an absurd and also a really brilliant kind of metaphor (full disclosure, I was really skeptical about it at first … it took me a few tries to make sense of it). Jobu explains this pseudo-psychedelic bagel in dialogue with her mother:
Jobu: When you really put everything on a bagel … it becomes this. The truth.
Evelyn: What is the truth?
Jobu: Nothing matters.
SC: Oof. That’s a bar. Sobering and sad, but still a bar!
AVA: Who can’t relate in times like these? That sense of futility and fatigue, again. But by the end, even amidst the nothingness, Evelyn and Joy do come to realize that there are things that matter. That we do matter, even if it seems only to one another. And even if that mattering is a hot mess of imperfection, the insignificance of it is actually significant enough.
SC: Evelyn rejects the debilitating sadness near the end of the film (the swirling, ominous hole in the middle of that bagel). It was a sight to behold, and not because she is an archetypal hero who refuses defeat. It’s actually because she knows that sadness intimately; she even realizes it is one of the few things she shares with her daughter. What a cruel mutuality. “Out of all of the places I could be, why would I want to be here with you? You are right. It doesn't make sense,” she remarks with a flatness in her voice. It’s unexpected, that moment, and I remember my heart dropping because she seems to have admitted the thing we have been asked to always fight; maybe love isn’t enough.
MKK: But Evelyn sees through that, as well.
SC: She does! “Maybe there is something out there,” she continues. “Something that explains why even after seeing everything, and giving up, you still went looking for me through all of this noise. And why no matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always want to be here with you.” I choked back tears! Because sure, love isn’t a sensical answer, but this love evades sense.
AVA: And I think the diction is so perfect, Samah. What does it mean to evade rather than exhaust? I think about Julian writing through her pain in a completely other time and context and place, and this pointing to the ways our largess, our immense capacity, is held by our smallness. My TA for that class, Maddie Jarrett, noted that Julian’s book has pain on every page, but it also has joy on every page. And I think that’s the sustained note we’re left on at the end of this movie—Evelyn, Waymond, Joy … on every page. And it’s not this shiny cutesy thing. There’s this sense that you will miss the point of healing, if you’re only thinking within the confines of a cure.
SC: And while the character of Waymond helps exemplify that realization, it’s a conclusion that Evelyn and Joy come to together - uniquely maternal and filial.
MKK: Might this moment of disaffection inspire a different way into a moral imaginary? In the universe where they are rocks, it is a liminal space. In this space, there is no need for confession or absolution, for forgiveness or redemption—the call is to “just be a rock.” The call is just to be. Although the struggle between Evelyn and Joy/Jobu will continue up to the point of near self-annihilation, I wonder if in this universe where they are rocks, this moment was a turning point in the movie. It offered the possibility of a different kind of presence “embodied” by Evelyn and Joy/Jobu. And then, I wonder if this moment of “new structures of feeling” made possible new structures of relationality. Evelyn later realizes no matter what she wants to be with Jobu/Joy. She tells Joy/Jobu: “I will always, always want to be here with you.” Here. Evelyn even follows Jobu/Joy as she hurls herself as a rock over the cliff later in a montage of attempted acts of self-obliteration in all the universes. In doing so Eveyln and Jobu/Joy demonstrate the multiple ways love and commitment are enacted—sometimes illegible, sometimes surprising, sometimes very real.
AVA: It’s transcendent - a truth that exists outside the context of the film, its characters, its writers, its audience. It doesn’t need to define itself or prove its worth. Because IYKYK!
SC: Fred Moten has written that fugitivity “is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed... an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument.” Of course, Moten and other theorists of fugitivity are writing about contexts different from this fictive Asian American multiverse (chattel slavery and the Black radical politics, specifically). But Evelyn’s love for Joy, across worlds of chaotic possibility and consistent heartbreak, feels a lot like a fugitive act. It is something that – in a world that is deeply hostile to our migrant parents and continually diminishes us – needn’t register as a legible and permitted form of “familial love” to be meaningful to us. These kinds of fugitivity keep us from settling, let us stay in motion, and elude the logics that reproduce paternalistic social worlds.
MKK: The movie, in a lot of ways, is predicated on the impossible and infinite nature of time as a tool to reinterpret our relationships with others in the present.
SC: It kind of reminds me of this 12-second TikTok I saw where a bleary eyed young man sits in his car, sniffling into his phone: “Y'all ever remember that your mom is just a girl? She's just a girl! What am I supposed to do?” So many things are happening in this - and we can even call them fugitive things, I think: it’s recognizing while mourning while admiring while raging while loving while fighting. It’s everything! And it’s everywhere, all at once.
AVA: It’s really such an accurate title.
SC: I walk away loving this movie because it tells me that the debts we carry in relation to our parents, our children, and one another are always mutual. We would do well, according to Moten and Stefano Harney, to see debt as “run[ning] in every direction, scattering, escaping, seeking refuge.” Why? Because we are always in debt to each other, and refuge comes from realizing that not only can we never pay it all back, you need not. The relationship between Evelyn and Joy was a reminder I needed now, that debt is not some draining, all-encompassing thing that we are saddled with and unable to outrun. Why run from what we owe each other? It is an honor and an act of love to be in indebted relationship with the fugitive public. Palestinian people have exemplified that beautiful mutuality, and our students have taken up that cause in a righteous show of force. My parents sent me pictures of students at the Western Michigan University encampment for Palestine before it was taken down last year, and I’d been taking my son to the one set up at the University of Chicago (before the predawn police raid that shut it down). My sadness hasn’t dissipated, but it doesn’t need to.
MKK: That fugitivity is unbeholden.
AVA: And in the midst of the everything, everywhere, all at once, what if that’s the point? To persist without diminishing, and to find refuge in one another? And the choices we do have, in who we want to be, and how we want to show up, and how we meet significance and solidarity. Jobu would destroy it all. But there’s a moment–one interaction, in one universe, in one relationship–that makes it not necessarily worth saving, but at least worth holding out a little longer for. This world, à la Arundhati Roy, I keep trying to hear her breathe. And it keeps bringing me back to Waymond’s question, or rather, his first proposition, of what we choose to be: “But it’s what you and I see, right?”