by Karin Malady

“You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? Something is off. Your clothes never wear as well the next day. Your hair never falls in quite the same way. Even your coffee tastes… wrong. Our institutions are crumbling. Nobody trusts their neighbor anymore. And you stay up at night wondering to yourself…”

“How can we get back?”

How do we get out of this mess? I gesture broadly at the state of the world as I ask. We’re offered plenty of options: cottagecore branded traditionalism, video game power fantasies, the grand spectacle of yet another Disney movie even though it’s getting hard to tell what does or does not classify as “a Disney movie” anymore. Even getting “blackpilled” – an incel term adapted into a general word for pessimistic nihilism – offers the same amount of agency as any of these options, which is to say None. But maybe there’s hope. What if we’re a short hop away from being an isekai protagonist? What if there really are other worlds? Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness as well as Everything, Everywhere, All At Once both dig into the rats’ nest of branching timelines dubbed a “multiverse.”

Here is the truth of matter: there is a knife that cuts actuality out of possibility. The quantum physicists have proved it, and to their horror, they can’t stop proving it. Turns out the real issue is that we can’t figure out what the knife is. What mechanism congeals chaos into phenomena? The many-worlds interpretation has remained the shiniest blade in the drawer. Each probability splits into another world from all possible options at every instance. Historically, we’ve always been aware that “world” is not synonymous with “planet”. It’s kind of refracting modal logic we are constantly trying to puzzle out. The Atomists of ancient Greece seemed to think as much. “There is nothing new under the sun” is the core conceit underlying both of these films. Unlimited possibilities create a vacuum where everything equally means nothing, yet we claw for that potential because we feel like it was somehow stolen from us.

This sense of quantum nihilism is shared by both of these movies. In Everything, Everywhere it manifests as an everything bagel turned black hole and in Doctor Strange it is revealed in the true nature of dreams. Staring into America Chavez’ star shaped portal felt like gazing into that very bagel – an act that filled the antagonist Jobu Tapaki with a profound emptiness. In the MCU cosmology, dreams are just visions of multiversal selves. Every dream a person has is actually happening out in the vast weave of chronologies and dimensions. This is confirmed when a character asks about their dream where they are chased by a murderous clown – that’s really happening somewhere. In real life, we don’t know what causes dreams exactly. Theories range from the scientific to the spiritual. Regardless, they are something that holds power over us. They can affect our mood or inspire us. To some, they are views into other worlds or metaphors or mystical visions. There is a true potential in the way they reflect the human spirit, something mysterious yet vibrant, strange, beautiful, and terrifying. To say dreams only ever view real things is to say the human spirit has no creative spark at all.

It was here I had a vision. Disney has long been at war with reality, as they pre-package and sell conservative traditionalist ideologies to children, as they desperately cling to the copyrights that hold their core identity intact. Imagine infinite variations of Chris Pratt wrapped in a neat little bow of intellectual property. A gacha-like conception of personhood – Christmas Star-Lord and Summer Star-Lord are all different and also the same legally defined character, all owned together by a single corporation. How far could that be stretched? ‘Til they own every character? If they can push for the length of a copyright to be infinite, surely they can push for the definition of one to be just as expansive. They’re creating a future that looks a lot like the twine game Mastaba Snoopy by goddesses17. A world that exists only within the constraints of Peanuts comics stretched to their very limit. The entity responsible for such is described thusly “It grows and converts all life into more of itself, like a living strangelet – emotionless spacial cancer.” The introduction concludes with the shape of what Disney would consider utopia: “End result: There exists an infinite, nonsensical world with all locations, living things, and social interaction based on half-remembered dreams.”

Yet America Chavez seems to avoid this fate in what is probably one of the most heavily handed metaphors for American exceptionalism ever conceived, in the sense that she is literally the only truly “unique” person in the entire setting – she has no other multiversal selves. Scarlet Witch, after having an entire TV show redemption arc, has once again become the villain. Her motivation is the family she desired was torn away from her (I’m told this contradicts WandaVision’s finale) while she dreams of every possible timeline where she has one. Given the overturning of Wade v. Roe, a character’s motivation being that she wants to acquire biological children even if it shatters the fabric of time and space is a little on the nose. In all the different universes, she seems to inhabit her worst possible self caused by her lack of children. On the other hand, Doctor Strange is his best possible self because all his other selves are bigger assholes than he is. The franchise discards its previous designation and takes the comics’ Earth-616, tying Disney to the mark of the beast. Which proves that reality’s writers are not getting paid well.

The bleakness I feel from this movie is reflected in Everything Everywhere as the aforementioned bagel. It is depression with an event horizon, in which nothing escapes. An entropy of meaning, sundered and rendered into noise. If everything is real and true, then it holds to reason that nothing is. Any single option can be contradicted by another. Everything cancels everything else out. The lead, Evelyn, is said to be the worst version of herself who failed at everything she tried. When every result splinters into a new timeline, for every self who succeeds, there must be one who didn’t. Gottfried Leibniz argued that this is the best of all possible worlds. Yet in the memetic canon, the internet has concluded that we live in the darkest timeline. These things do not necessarily contradict. A world whose failings can create definition for the rest of existence. The bleakest world must then be the most meaningful one. A root world from which all possibilities emerge. From Thomas Ligotti’s I Have a Special Plan for This World: “For they see this world as if it were alone and original / And not as only one of countless others / Whose nightmares all proceed / Like a hideous garden grown from a single seed” Maybe what this world looks like doesn’t matter. The TTRPG Nobilis’ setting is the Prosaic Earth – the lie the Earth told itself to explain suffering. This is an image not unlike Philip K. Dick’s conception of the Black Iron Prison: the true nature of Empire is revealed when you overlap the past, present, and future. The heart of the construct never changes, but its appearance does. The Empire never ended.

Chaos in Everything, Everywhere is a generative act. Doing something completely unpredictable and out of character connects you to alternative selves. Things like wearing your shoes backwards, or chewing gum stuck to a desk are unpredictable enough to connect to another version of you. It bears a resemblance to the principles of the Situationist International. The urban landscape subtly imposes on its inhabitants. Methods of travel, direction, purpose, etc are all built into the very streets you walk. Thus a sort of playful form resistance was formed, a sort of purposeful aimlessness in navigation, called dérive. To move without aim, to be drawn to what is happening around you rather than the designs of architecture is to find the places where life thrives and to connect to the city and its people, not just the routine imposed on you. Motes of possibility like this are chance encounters, Situations. In the movie, chaos creates potential, but potential creates noise. In a fantastic monologue, Waymond admits that no one has any idea what is going on. Not just in the movie, but in life. We are all confused and terrified and drawn into conflict with each other through that. This is the true heart of the nihilism in the movie, but also its power. We’re all scared.

How do you defend a world like this? Melina of Elden Ring has a response, “However ruined this world has become, however mired in torment and despair, life endures. Births continue.” It’s easy to get washed away in a sea of how things could be. A similar sentiment comes through in Everything, Everywhere. Maybe it’s true that nothing matters. Maybe this world is a rotten foundation. But something queer happens when the world is rendered into a pointless place where nothing matters. There is a strange power inherent to nihilism, where if everything is meaningless, then we ultimately get to decide what meaning is, and what it is assigned to. If everything is meaningless, then everything is meaningful. While I feel alienated by movies about family, one thing I love about this film is that it expands this compassion to its entire cast. If we can do anything, why not live kindly? It takes the broad scale anxieties and solves them on a directly personal scale that reflects outward. As above, so below.

Ultimately, the multiverse is not for me. I can’t believe in infinite worlds of congruent logic if I can’t believe in one world of congruent logic. The MCU renders all life into inert, plastic action figures. They can try to appeal to me with rainbow flag pins, but nothing they do will evoke wonder in me or stir my soul. Everything, Everywhere realizes how depressing the idea but only ever winds up begging people to be kind. Which, I get it, I do that too. And while I found the movie emotional, I can’t say that tactic has ever worked in my life. Unlike Evelyn and Scarlet Witch, I’m certain I’m the best possible version of myself. This isn’t gloating. All my other selves are all ones I was desperate to avoid. People who, when they rear their head in my heart, I drown on sight. The reality I am left with is even stranger than a universe where you’re a cartoon. I live by pleading with spirits, begging for the apocalypse, abandoning knowledge, letting anyone take the driver’s seat. Pain is something that chokes you, coloring your entire world. The only way to be free of it is to understand that your pain is not all-encompassing. The Black Iron Prison is something I can feel in my bones. There is a way out: by understanding the world is not all-encompassing. Quantum Bayesianism suggests that the viewer collapses possibility into actuality based on their expectations into their own reality. I don’t need infinite reflections of myself, my world belongs only to me. There will be kindness whether you want it or not. There will be a parade of terrors yet unknown. There will be a fire in me that you cannot snuff out, steal, or imitate. I am the daughter of Mystery and Kaos and I am here. All things are true. Tread carefully.