Everything Everywhere All At Once #3

Take It From Me, Parents Just Don't Understand

Parents. Ugh. Amiright?

There is a worn out stereotype in story-telling about rebellious children and intractable parents. Kids rebel. Parents respond. What’s more, there are a thousand stories of adults sitting on therapist’s couches reckoning with their family of origin. There are a thousand stories because those therapists couches don’t lie.

For as long as there have been children there have been adult children dealing with their parent-wounds. Wounds, sometimes as deep as abuse and other times surfing along the waves of general disappointment and long held misunderstanding.

Everything Everywhere All At Once (EEAAO), on some levels, is a simple story, the story of a mother (Evelyn) coming to fully accept her daughter (Joy) after a fragment of that daughter searches the multiverse to find her mother. In the beginning, the daughter wants to destroy her mother, but how? She wants the mother destroyed by experiencing what she has experienced.

There is something so primal and universal in that quest.

Human beings assume that if other people were able to step inside our experience they would see the universe the same we see it. If they could, others would respond as we have responded. They would understand. And there is no one we want to understand us as deeply as we want our parents to understand us.