Into the Multiverse of Meaning
What Everything Everywhere All at Once and Marvel's multiverse phase tell us about our quest for significance
Welcome back! It’s been a while since my last newsletter, for a combination of reasons including having Covid for a second time. My wife and I also have the excitement of our third child on the way! But now I’m keen to catch up with more explorations into the deeper dimensions of the stories we tell - and this time, I’m turning to the multiverse…
Everything Everywhere…
Why are we interested in the concept of the multiverse? What does it tell us about our fears, hopes and longings?
There are lots of ways the multiverse can be used thematically to explore big questions, but ultimately the concept resonates because of the collapse of shared overarching meaning – in a plural, postmodern society, we all exist in a multiverse of meaning. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
I recently caught the wonderfully bonkers Everything Everywhere All At Once in the cinema at the end of its run, and it’s now out to buy on digital platforms like iTunes and Amazon.
It stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, a Chinese-American woman who has to connect with other versions of herself to save all of reality. It leans in hard to the existential questions raised by the multiverse, grounded in the family dynamics of her relationships with her husband Waymond and daughter Joy.
Spoiler warning… I’ll be focusing more on the themes than the plot, but will need to touch on some specifics along the way.
Evelyn is contacted by a team from another universe, who explain to her that mental connections can be made to other versions of yourself, giving access to their memories and skills. Need to know kung-fu? There’s a universe in which you have those skills. (Yes, there’s a big tip of the hat to the Matrix with some of these early scenes). Evelyn just has to do something sufficiently weird and improbable to make a connection with that universe, such as swapping shoes, eating lipbalm or declaring love to a stranger.
It’s one of those rare gems of a film that wows both with technical filmmaking skill and with narrative inventiveness. I happened to watch it by myself, but it’s a story that left me eager to discuss it with others.
…All At Once
Multiverses seem to be having a wider cultural moment. The live-action Marvel Cinematic Universe has played up the multiverse in Loki, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange: The Multiverse of Madness, with other teases and allusions in various films and shows. It’s not quite ‘everywhere all at once’ but it can feel like it!
Alternate realities have long been a sci-fi staple. Star Trek has long dipped in and out of its dystopian Mirror Universe. Doctor Who, His Dark Materials, and even Harry Potter and the Cursed Child have all offered up their takes on divergent timelines and parallel universes.
So what’s the appeal?
Multiverse of crossover brand synergy
Let’s get it out the way at the start: there’s a commercial appeal to multiverses, of course – it plays into Hollywood’s love of crossovers. Make reality go wibbly, and different versions of the same character can suddenly team up, or heroes and villains from previously separate franchises can be pitted against each other.
As The Avengers showed back in 2012 and Spider-Man: No Way Home demonstrated again in 2021, crossovers can do big box-office. When the time comes, it will likely also provide a convenient way to merge the X-Men into the MCU, by having a collision of universes previously kept apart by the real-world licensing restrictions of Fox and Disney’s respective copyright portfolios.
But the multiverse has its own inherent narrative appeal too. The multiverse can be used to raise questions about our choices and what they mean. Who hasn’t wondered how their life might have gone if they had made a different choice, taken their life down a different path?
Multiverse of possibility – anyone can be a hero
Lord and Miller’s animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse set the recent multiverse movie trend. It cleverly used the multiverse to play with the audience’s (over)familiarity with multiple Spider-man origin stories, quickly introducing and teaming up different Spider-heroes, including different Peter Parkers, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, as well as the more way-out Spider-Man Noir, anime-style Pens Parker and Looney-Toons-style Spider-Ham.
Into the Spider-verse succeeded because it both looked visually distinct and fresh, pushing new boundaries in animation, and also had a genuinely good script that landed its characters and their arcs in a satisfying way. The catharsis of Miles embracing his identity as Spider-man as he fell upwards towards the city is one of those great cinematic moments of payoff.
At its heart though was an empowering message: Anyone can wear the mask. Heroism isn’t a matter of destiny, but of choosing to step up when circumstances demand it. The multiverse can be a way to explore and affirm the endless possibilities that life presents. But it can also explore the limits of change.
Multiverse of limitation – can we really change?
Loki and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness both use the multiverse to explore the limits of their protagonists’ abilities to change (again, spoiler warning!).
In all the multiverse, can there be a Loki who is good, who isn’t completely self-serving and untrustworthy? Similarly, is Dr Strange’s need for control and willingness to do terrible things for the greater good a fatal flaw in every universe, or does he have the ability to choose differently?
In Loki, we encounter many different variants of the God of Mischief. It seems that in whatever universe he (or she) finds himself, in whatever version whether as a kid, alligator or grumpy Richard E Grant, he is narcissistic and unable to trust or be trusted. However, his developing relationship with Sylvie – a female Loki variant intent on overthrowing the Time Variance Authority’s control of the Sacred Timeline – offers the tantalising possibility that he might be capable of something more (even if she is, technically, another version of himself). Against the odds, it seems that this one version of Loki does actually change.
Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange, on the other hand, has good intentions. In Avengers: Infinity War he looked into all the possible futures and found the one timeline in which Thanos could be defeated, the one way to achieve the greater good. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness shows the danger that this poses – an alternate Strange is prepared to kill young America Chavez to prevent her powers falling into the wrong hands. In another universe, Strange’s attempt to use the Darkhold, a book of black magic, for the greater good led to the destruction of a universe and his own execution at the hands of his fellow Illuminati.
With the fate of the multiverse on the line, our universe’s Strange makes a better choice: he lets go of the situation, trusting America Chavez at the crucial moment, and empowered she is able to save the day.
It’s unsurprising that the MCU would want to ultimately affirm an optimistic view of our potential for change. Even if the possibility is remote, even if millions of times over we might make the same bad choices, we want to believe that we have the freedom to transcend our own character flaws. The multiverse lets us explore the tension between possibility and inevitability, between change and the constraints of our personality and character.
Multiverse of loss – learning to let go
Another resonant use of the multiverse dramatically is how we relate to loss. When we lose a loved one, or a lose out on achieving some dream or ambition, there’s that nagging question - what if? Could things have been different? Is there any way we can regain what we lost?
In Into the Spider-verse, the multiverse is fractured by Kingpin is trying to find a version of his wife Vanessa and son Richard to be reunited with. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Wanda, the Scarlet Witch, is trying to use the multiverse to be reunited with her twins, Billy and Tommy, who she created in WandaVision along with bringing back Vision from the dead – but had enslaved an entire town as the supporting cast in her fake reality to do so (not cool, Wanda!).
In both cases, the inability to let go after loss is what drove Wilson Fisk and Wanda Maximoff to desperate efforts to be reunited with loved ones – no matter the risk to the rest of reality. This allows us to grapple with the destabilising nature of grief, the way that losing a loved one is the destruction of an entire universe that we knew and want to return to.
Conceptually from a pure sci-fi perspective, there’s no reason why Wanda or Fisk couldn’t be matched up with a universe in which they are dead and their loved ones survive. But that would feel like cheating dramatically.
Because we don’t actually have the ability to reach across universes, these easy solutions wouldn’t be emotionally truthful as story resolution. Instead, the rules of the multiverse bend to the rules of drama – we must learn to embrace our grief and move on, or pay the cost.
Multiverse of meaning – does anything matter?
Underlying these questions of change vs inevitability, holding onto grief vs moving on, is an even more fundamental question: Do our choices even really matter?
This brings us back full circle (or full bagel) to Everything Everywhere All at Once. This film gives an unambiguous answer: no. Nothing matters. And actually it’s making a bigger philosophical point, one that holds whether or not the multiverse literally exists. But it offers two very different directions that this can be taken in, represented by two distinct visual motifs.
The antagonist of the film is Jobu Topacki, who has become conscious of all her alternate lives at once, and concluded that nothing matters. There’s a liberation in this - as she tells Evelyn, “If nothing matters, then all the pain and guilt you feel for making nothing of your life goes away”. She got bored once day and put ‘everything’ on a bagel. This black swirling bagel becomes the vortex of despair that threatens to consume both Evelyn and the multiverse.
Evelyn herself finds her consciousness cracking under the stress of all her universe-jumping, so that she too becomes aware of all her multiple possibilities all at once. But she find a different perspective, one represented by a visual inversion of the black ring of the bagel – the googly eyes of optimistic nihilism.
Nothing matters, but that’s good news, because we get to choose our own meaning.
As Waymond tells her in a universe where despite their young love, they never married, ‘When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I've learned to survive through everything.’
If there’s no ultimate meaning, then why not choose to look for the good in life? If life is only whatever we make it for the insignificant blink that is our conscious existence, why not choose to be kind?
There might not be any universal meaning, but we can find happiness in our relationships. Evelyn tells Waymond that if they had got married, they would have had a difficult life where they spent their time doing laundry and taxes. He tells her, “So, even though you have broken my heart yet again, I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”
This viewpoint of optimistic nihilism is succinctly and creatively presented by Kurzgesagt in this YouTube video:
A better meaning to the multiverse?
Not many people would come out and identify as ‘optimistic nihilists’. But this way of thinking has become part of the cultural air we breathe, from Brian Cox’s BBC documentaries about the wonders of the universe, through to comedy like Rick and Morty. We are stardust, arranged by chance as thinking, feeling beings for a short time, and so we choose our own meaning for our short window of existence.
For all the creativity with which Everything Everywhere All at Once presents the conflict of pessimistic versus optimistic nihilism, I couldn’t help but ask myself, in an infinite multiverse, are these really the only two options?
But it seems to me that the ‘optimism’ in ‘optimistic nihilism’ is borrowed from other more ancient sources of meaning, ones which are committed to this quest for a meaning big enough to be binding on all of us. ‘Be kind’, ‘love those around you’, ‘do to others as you would have them do to you’ – these are great principles, borrowed from other stories, as Glen Scrivener powerfully argues in his new book The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress and Equality.
But on a nihilistic materialist viewpoint, ‘why not?’ rather than ‘why?’ is just an aesthetic choice, a matter of preference. There’s no basis for saying that someone who finds meaning in the unrestrained exploitation of others for wealth, or in racial supremacy or in taking pleasure in sexual abuse, is actually wrong. They have just chosen a different meaning-game for their own lives. Nothing matters. And that’s neither good news or bad news, on a true nihilism, and nothing is good or bad, just brute fact.
The multiverse of meaning
Perhaps another reason the multiverse appeals as a narrative device is our hyper-awareness of each individual’s outlook and sense of meaning. In a very real sense, with the fragmentation of modern culture and the suspicion of overarching metanarratives, we each live in our own parallel universe of morality and meaning.
But we have the ability to crossover between them, to converse and engage with one another, to join a quest for larger meaning.
I believe there are good reasons to suspect that meaning isn’t just something that we humans project out onto the universe. What if good and evil, beauty and truth, purpose and identity aren’t projections but objective realities?
As elusive and contested as that reality might be, shouldn’t we commit ourselves to the quest to discover meaning?
As for me, I’m a Christian. I believe the great Bible narrative – of God making us in his image, our rebellion against him, and Jesus dying and rising to rescue us – is the true story that encompasses all reality.
The Christian story also happens to be the story that has most shaped the Western culture I live in, and where many of the values that put the ‘optimism’ into nihilism are borrowed from. That doesn’t mean I think I’ve got all the questions of meaning sorted already, not in the slightest! But it gives me a framework for my quest to understand reality in its deepest levels.
What about you – what’s your story? What moral universe are you living in? Are you making your own meaning, or on the quest to discover a larger, universal meaning?
What I’m up to…
Podcast: Postmodern Realities
I did find time last month to expand one of my recent newsletter articles on Sneaking Past Watchful Dragons When Reading the Bible as a subscriber-only extended article on Equip.org. I also recorded a podcast discussion for the Postmodern Realities podcast
Speaking: ‘Discipleship to Capture the Imagination’, Hutchmoot UK, 16th July
I’ll be running a seminar on Imaginative Discipleship at Hutchmoot UK in Oxford on 14-16th July. Conference tickets are already sold out, I’m afraid, but if you’re attending, do come to the seminar and join the discussion!