In Defense of Everything Everywhere All at Once
How not to criticize a movie ft. Seoyoung Joo
About a year and a half ago, Big Straw Magazine published this review of the film Everything Everywhere All At Once, penned by Seoyoung Joo. In short, the movie isn’t good. It’s shallow, inconsistent, and an insult to Asian American film. Pretty harsh stuff. To me, however, a lot of these claims simply don’t hold water. They’re shocking and unexpected, that’s for sure. They’re a different perspective on this movie than we usually get (and from an Asian American student magazine, no less). But unexpected does not imply correct.
Proclaiming that the most awarded film in history is in fact a good film may not seem like a terribly groundbreaking idea. But in the process of reading and analyzing Seoyoung’s review, I’ve realized there’s a lot to this discussion that isn’t often brought up. I think the way we discuss this movie–and Asian representation in movies as a whole–leaves out a lot. This review of EEAAO, to my mind, fails to understand a critical change among Asian American stories within the last few years. So in I think we can learn something from this review, flawed as it may be.
For starters: who bases their opinion about a movie on the Google reviews for it? Seoyoung cites two of these, returning to them frequently throughout the article. One review’s description of the film as a “buffet of Oriental cinematic tropes” prompts Seoyoung’s first argument: the movie is an Orientalist one, depicting Asian culture not as it authentically is, but as white people want to see it. However, this argument hinges on one overlooked assumption. It’s really quite a simple one: how do we know this guy’s review accurately represents the movie? Seoyoung takes it for granted that because he sees this film as an Orientalist one, it is one. But I’d like to offer up the much simpler theory that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This reviewer’s name is “Declan Conlon” - seems like a fairly white name to me. How would he have anything to say about the Asian American generational gap, the struggles of immigrating, or the experiences that young LGBTQ+ Asians have? He hasn’t lived through anything resembling the story this film is telling.
Similarly, take the second review, by one Patrick Jones, which doesn’t mention anything about Asian-ness at all. I’d argue that’s not a reflection of the movie so much as it’s a reflection of the viewer. Again, with little to no experience of genuine Asian American culture, how is some white guy supposed to know how to talk about this movie? We have no reason to take these reviewers as the final word on the movie, or what its significance to Asian Americans is “supposed to be.” Seoyoung claims that “despite the implicit understanding of the ‘cultural value’ EEAAO has, there is very little discussion of the cultural portrayals themselves.” But her sources consist entirely of discussion among white reviewers. I’m not at all surprised she thinks that’s the case.
Equally frustrating to me is Seoyoung’s inconsistency in describing the scale of the story. One of the more interesting questions she raises is: who is this story about? On the one hand, she says it lacks cultural detail, that the story could be “any ‘immigrant story’ about an ‘Asian-American family’ that ‘struggles with cultural differences.’”. The repeated quotes are stereotypes, they’re cliches. So it’s too generic and broad to actually tell a specifically Asian American story. Okay then. But a few paragraphs later, Seoyoung critiques its representation on different grounds, saying that it attempts to tell a story about Asian Americans but from an overly narrow perspective of a Chinese immigrant family: “EEAAO conflates the East-Asian cultures with the wide diversity of experiences, homes, and regions in India, Thailand, Pakistan, and Iran”. So now it’s about Asian Americans, but only one kind, and it leaves out the rest. Which one is it? Too broad or too specific? This basic contradiction goes unrecognized throughout the review.
Maybe the solution here is a bit of both. Whatever happened to “in the specific is contained the universal?” Perhaps this is a story about Chinese immigrants, which happens to resonate with multiple groups of people because those simply are experiences that multiple groups of people have. There’s nothing inherently wrong about telling a Chinese American story which happens to parallel other people’s cultures. That doesn’t make the story any less Asian. But let’s accept for the moment that both of Seoyoung’s claims are true, that it is both too specific and too generic. What should it be about instead? Seoyoung calls for a more realistic story, a film made with “specificity, sympathy, and the unique Asian American worldview.” The first two things are great ideas! I love films that are specific and sympathetic. But the third one is a problem, because there’s no such thing as the “unique Asian American worldview.”
The fact such a thing doesn’t exist is, strangely enough, something Seoyoung already alludes to in her article. There are, as she explains, vast differences between the experiences of East and South and Southeast Asian immigrants, which aren’t present in EEAAO. She leaves out the even finer gradations between the experiences of stateless peoples (like Hmong Americans), Asian adoptees into non-Asian families, mixed-race Asians, or Asians who immigrated to America at different moments in history. The point is, there are a lot of us. Seoyoung is right in that this movie doesn’t represent us all. What I’m confused about is why she ever expected it to. Because in fact, no movie can represent the worldview of all Asian America. I’d be a little disappointed if it could–it would mean that our identity was shallow enough to be condensed into a single work of art. This movie can’t capture the whole of the Asian American experience and it shouldn’t.
What can instead capture the whole of the Asian American experience is a body of work, an institution. In much the same way that Black films or feminist films or queer films are taken as a collective whole, Asian American films are gradually starting to become recognized as their own distinct entity. More Hollywood movies with Asian writers, directors, and actors are being made every year, and they are no longer considered individual, isolated works. They form a continuum and interact with each other. They have their own common themes and tropes. They have a distinct lineage of influences from both Eastern and Western cinema (take EEAAO itself, which cites Rick and Morty and Hong Kong martial arts films as inspiration). They are even capable of calling out and subverting their own tropes–anyone remember the original title of Joy Ride? In short, the institution of Asian American film is capable of evolution and change, as befits the fast-changing nature of Asian American identity.
Seoyoung compares EEAAO unfavorably to Encanto, a similar film about generational trauma in non-white cultures. She points out that the latter would have been able to more accurately explore its own themes if it were a television series, implying that the same is true about EEAAO. However, while a longer running time would perhaps be beneficial, this line of argument misses the point. A television series is not an institution. It can’t critique itself in the same way that an institution can. If you’re looking for a good portrayal of Asian American culture, watch this film. Then watch twenty other films by different filmmakers, about different characters. Look at how they are similar and different. If there’s some experience you don’t think any of them discuss, write your own story about it. But like it or not, this movie contributes to the institution of Asian American film by merely existing at all.
I do think Seoyoung’s right about a couple things. I always feel weird about “tiger mom” stories because that isn’t how I grew up, and so I can never relate either side of the generational gap. I’m convinced every one of these is descended in some way from The Joy Luck Club, a movie that still casts a shadow over Asian American film to this day. (Remember when I said that Asian American cinema has its own common tropes? This is one of them, big time.) Similarly, the film essentially curing Joy’s depression at the end is a cheap move. One can assume they still have underlying issues to work out, but the movie doesn’t seem to concern itself with them. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen any movie deal with depression in a truly realistic way. Neither of these problems are unique to EEAAO, which isn’t exactly a defense of the movie.
But relying on single films to fix these issues–and then slamming them when they inevitably don’t–gets us nowhere. Only a dialogue between multiple films, between multiple Asian American worldviews, can do that. A single film can’t represent all of us and it shouldn’t be expected to. We now live in a world where Asian American films are a proper institution, and the metrics we judge them by need to reflect that change. Say whatever you want about this movie–but it can’t literally be everything, everywhere, all at once.