The Utter Banality Of The Multiverse
When psuedo-philosophy takes over pop culture, all we're left with is utter mediocrity
By Eric Shorey
*Spoilers for Everything Everywhere All At Once throughout*
Out of nowhere, it suddenly seems like every movie, comic book, video game, and sci-fi novel is suddenly about the sprawling non-concept of tHe MuLtIvErSe. You’ll have to forgive me for not taking this idea seriously as a real intellectual aporia despite the hypothesis having philosophical roots dating back to the ancient Greeks. The basic gist: we exist in one of an infinite number of possible universes that may or may not branch off each other in nodal points such that alternative dimensions containing different cosmological possibilities exist parallel yet totally unreachable to us. Yawn.
Sure, I guess the idea itself is fine and interesting enough if you’re a college freshman philosophy student who just discovered the idea of Gnosticism —what if we all live inside a demon’s dream?! Woah. Lately, I can’t help but look sideways at the proliferation of multiverse plots in media as anything other than lazy corporate cash grabs.
Even if the concept is more amusing to you than it is to me, it’s blatantly obvious that this idea is an easy way for mega-companies to recycle intellectual property in supposedly surprising ways so that they can repackage long-forgotten characters as new, hyper-toyetic products to garner fanbases on social media. Take, for example, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse: a truly adorable and well animated Marvel film that uses “The Multiverse” as an excuse to explore variant, lesser-known stories in the history of the Spiderman comics.
I, personally, liked the movie a lot — but it was clear from the jump that the hope was to take relatively unpopular characters from the source material and thrust them into the mainstream public’s imagination: essentially an elaborate market test to see which protagonists could be meme’ed into profit-generating popularity.
Other multiverse escapades are even more cynical. Multiversus, a Smash Bros-esque video game from WB Games, pits disparate characters like Harley Quinn and the Tasmanian Devil against each other in cartoon combat.
Sure, fine, whatever — the game is probably fun for fifteen minutes as a silly button masher. Kotaku writer Zack Zweisen correctly notes that the appearance of the Iron Giant as a playable brawler — a character whose pacifism was entirely the point — runs contradictory to the artistic ethos of the original text. But who cares! Nostalgia gets clicks — so we’re doomed to repeat the past in an endless slog of early 00’s alternate histories. What could be more boring?
Because the multiverse allows for fictions that couldn’t possibly interact to finally collide (Stephen Universe vs Scooby Doo zOMG!), it gives media companies endless “new” ways for characters to be “reinvented” — and hides an utter and absolute lack of imagination, creativity, ingenuity, and artistic integrity.
There’s nothing less original than noting that there’s nothing original left anymore. This is one of the founding tenets of post-modernism: we exist in a copy of a copy (of a copy) for which there is no original. The original referent has long ago been lost, and we’re left with dangling signifiers pointing towards nothing at all. It’s simulation (or simulacra) all the way down. And the multiverse perfectly captures this kind of epistemic or ontological nullity: if everything is a node towards nothing, then nothing means anything at all.
This also happens to be the thesis of the villain in Everything Everywhere All At Once, a film that should be the final entry in the emerging multiverse sub-genre (but probably won’t be).
Jobu Tupaki, the film’s fashionable femme fatale, is cursed with the power of accessing all multiverses at the same time after being forced into a failed multiverse experiment by her overbearing mother. Jobu creates the Ultimate Everything Bagel — a bagel that contains literally everything in existence, and consequently will destroy everything in existence — as a symbol of the ultimate nihilism at the core of the cosmos. Everything everywhere is actually nothing at all.
In fact, Jobu is astutely aware that most of the universes in the multiverse are totally barren. In perhaps the film’s most poignant scene, Jobu transports her mother into an entirely empty world where they exist as stagnant rocks staring at a vast desert. Actually, most of the universes in the multiverse are like this, says Jobu. Totally empty. The multiverse itself is largely a vacuum. Cosmic banality on its grandest scale — endless parallel emptinesses.
Formalistically, EEAAO points towards the kind of chain of signifying described by post-modern media critics in its usage of genre sampling. For example: in one alternate universe, the film’s protagonist becomes a successful actress instead of a stressed out laundromat owner. Scenes in this universe are styled like the neon-drenched romances of Hong Kong-based director Wong Kar-wai. Wong Kar-wai’s movies, in turn, are styled after American film noir in the 40’s — with their emphasis on crime and heavy usage of chiaroscuro lighting. American film noir in the 40’s, in turn, was styled after German expressionist filmmaking from the 20’s, which in turn took aesthetic cues from early Soviet propaganda films. And so on and so on. (Curiously, Michelle Yeoh is actually playing herself in this universe, which, through a fourth-wall-breaking gesture, implicates our world in this cosmic disorganization.)
The original referent has been lost, and the multiverse genre — the plot of which always escalates towards an ultimate collapse of all multiverses into one terrible ur-multiverse or total non-existence — represents the utter disintegration of all nodal points into one generic banality. EEAAO moves from comedy to action to melodrama so fast that the genre differences essentially dissolve into nothing. This de-differentiation is a sort of cinematic apocalypse — the end of style itself.
But EEAAO is — thank fucking God! — smarter than your average corporate multiverse. The astrophysical journey of Evelyn Wang can be read entirely as the protagonist’s psychotic or schizophrenic break from reality under the duress of American klepto-capitalism. This experience is triggered by the extreme stress of her living situation: the impending dissolution of her marriage, her daughter’s unwelcome queerness, her father’s disappointment, and the potential bankruptcy of her business in the wake of an IRS audit. Jobu Tapaki’s nihilism is not just the result of cosmic resentment, but is an entirely un-subtle metaphor for a typical kind of intergenerational trauma hoisted upon second-generation immigrant millennials. That is to say EEAAO isn’t really about the multiverse at all — again, thank GOD! — it’s actually a deeply personal family chronicle told in a contemporary, popular aesthetic.
But the schizophrenia of Evelyn’s experience isn’t unique to her: it’s the natural and only response to the conditions of post-modern media bombardment and hyper-capitalist pressures. Perhaps pop-culture’s current fascination with the multiverse is that it accurately reflects this kind of pervasive social psychosis: in which the only possible reaction to the exigencies of contemporary life is for reality to totally shatter (note the broken glass through which Evelyn sees the universe) into a million individual possibilities and identities — without any chance at integration.
Social media (although entirely unmentioned in EEAAO) exacerbates this sense of fractured reality in that it creates conditions in which there is no longer a mutually-agreed set of facts upon which reality can said to be even phantasmatically based.
In Netflix’s documentary The Social Dilemma, a film in which former tech executives come clean about the purposefully addictive design of social media software, various talking heads assert that the algorithmic nature by which social media organizes our lives accidentally adjusted us towards total atomization. That is to say: when I use Google to search for a “fact,” the “facts” I get as search results are often entirely different from the “facts” that someone in — oh, let’s say Dallas, Texas might get. This is specifically done to keep us clicking: we are presented with “facts” that cohere with the opinions the algorithms assume us to have, which are ironically also shaped by the very same algorithms.
We already exist in a multiverse: the reality I exist in is likely entirely different from the reality of my Republican neighbors. We live in parallel realities with no chance at reconciliation or contact because we’ve been fed a steady diet of individually curated “facts” that are presented to perfectly cohere with our already-formed beliefs and values. The result of this goes beyond political polarization as these “facts” we see no longer shape only our actions on Election Day, but our ability to think at all.
No wonder Marvel’s multiverses, with their corporate pantheon of handsome, quippy superheroes, are so popular right now. They seem like a comforting cosmology by comparison: in these movies there is a reality we all live in, and other realities out there — when, in fact, we each operate in our own personally constructed realities with no hope of real connection or communication.
In William Gibson’s Jackpot Trilogy, the hyper-wealthy of a post-apocalyptic future create super-technology that can communicate with computers in the past — thus accidentally fracturing history into various continuities — a kind of cyberpunk take on the multiverse. These scrillionaire time-barons begin investing in these timelines as a kind of perverse hobby: they manipulate stock markets in alternate histories to see what impact they’d have in the future. Other “continua enthusiasts” catalyze world wars for their sadistic entertainment. This seems like a more accurate depiction of the true potentiality of the multiverse: in which the already-powerful are using alternate realities as playthings for their own psychopathic bemusement.
I remember back towards the beginning of the pandemic when the phrase “the darkest timeline” began appearing everywhere on Twitter to ostensibly describe our global culture’s speedy slippage towards panoptic authoritarian-fascism. What a pathetic refrain: the idea that other worlds exist in which things are theoretically better.
Maybe that’s why everyone loves the multiverse so much right now. It’s the last possible fantasy of hope. Maybe somewhere — in another reality, in some parallel dimension — there’s some promise, some light left. But there’s certainly none here.