I'm honestly perplexed by this. I think _both_ of those interpretations _were intended_. I came out of that movie understanding completely that the way Evelyn treated her family was completely not ok and that almost all of her problems were at least partially her own fault. She was supposed to simultaneously be pitied but also recognized as the cause (at least partly) of all her own problems. This juxtaposition is _why_ it was such a great movie. It accurately captured the truth of most people's reality: lots of things in your life suck and a very non trivial part of that suckitude, but not all _is your own fault_. The movie is a redemption story in that, through the whole thing, she slowly (_very_ slowly_ comes to realize this and and the end begins the path to healing her relationships and her own problems. Nothin is fixed at the end of the movie, but it's brought to a place where it _could_ be fixed. Yes, life is hard a lot of the time, and yes that sucks, but that being hard _is not an excuse_ for not doing the things that matter and taking care of the things that matter. If you just choose to wallow in "life is hard and it's not my fault" then things will get even worse, but if you actually try, you can't control everything but you can keep the things that matter the most. I think this was the _very_ explicit message of the movie (surrounded by a whole lot of multi-verse sillyness of course)
The fact that this movie showed such an unvarnished look at what is many people's reality was why I loved it.
I'm more or less agnostic on the exact messaging that the director wanted a person to get. But part of why I'm less.. comfortable, I guess? Why I'm less comfortable with saying "oh, that got covered" is that the movie has all her redemption (100% of it) occur during a crisis, like her husband says always happens during a crisis. But the implication is that it always ends as soon as the crisis ends, as well.
And so when we see Evelyn sort of, like, deal with her husband stuff, it's because they are in a crisis and she needs him; she deals with her daughter because her daughter's leaving and she needs to keep her. And it all wraps up very neatly, but I struggle to find moments that really say "Hey, maybe whether things got better for you or not, or there was a crisis or not, maybe you shouldn't have emotionally abandoned your family for years".
And there very well might be! Like I didn't watch the movie ten times. But where I did see the "let's grow and get happy so we can be nice" elements, I'm actually really interested in people pointing out the other - the "you should have really been nice while it was hard, too" bits.
I'm going to gently pile on a bit and say I agree with DangerouslyUnstable. I think the movie was at least trying to give you what you want, and most people left the theater with it.
Specifically I think it does judge and does not excuse Evelyn for being self centered, and does not argue that she has overcome this problem at the end of the movie. I think it argues that she has learned to unblock one particular mental issue, experienced one unit of growth which may or may not be part of a long path. The crises are allegorical, and while it's a fair cop that she only improves in a crisis, I think they're in the movie in order to create the following simple fable: your life will not get better until you learn to stop escaping into all the ways it could be better.
In a way, that gives it the same moral as your recent post about LitRPGs and escapism. This isn't a movie about a lady being absolved for past sins, or solving her personal problems. It's a movie about a lady learning to put a check on her self centered escapism, and the very last scene, where all the alternate realities still flutter in the background, makes it very *very* clear that applying this check will be a lifelong battle. This won't be a lady who magically stops thinking of alternate versions of herself, or even one who successfully stops all wasteful hobbies. But it will now be a lady who tries.
Even shorter, clearer: she's overweight (like you and me and everyone else), she's not excused for being overweight, she hasn't lost weight by the end of the movie, she hasn't learned all the methods of losing weight. She has simply started *trying* to lose weight.
I guess my question is, if it does all this, when does it do it? Because all her improvements - every last one - comes after she's all fulfilled and important, they mostly come from stuff she sees in all her better lives. The specific lesson she learns about how to solve the world doesn't come so much from real-world Wayland as it does some improved wayland in a suit she might have married if she had only lived up to her potential, etc.
I'm trying to think of how I'd show something like what people say they are seeing - that at any point the movie is pushing that "she should have done what she should have done, even when sad" ethos. So like we could have Wayland say "you know, it's good that you've worked through your stuff, but I have years and years of scars, you should have made a token effort to preserve our marriage". But he doesn't - he's a prop; as soon as she's a tiny bit nice to him the movie goes "all fixed - good thing she got happy".
The daughter character does actually say "good you are working through all your shit" but then dodges saying "but there's lots and lots of trauma because you are abusive all the time" by saying "our personalities don't work that well together, I'm not sure what it is".
I'm not actually saying you are wrong - like, it's a movie, it's subjective, etc. - but I do sort of struggle to see what you guys are seeing. To put it a different way, I'm not sure any character at all ever says Evelyn has done anything wrong, at all, outside of the IRS lady saying maybe she shouldn't do so much intentional fraud.
I would argue that it only does the *one* thing, and that thing happens gradually as she tries to convince her alt-daughter not to be a nihilist: she unintentionally convinces herself to let go of escapes. The final push comes from her movie-star-not-husband in the rain.
I don't even think she's fulfilled and important in the end; she's back at the laundromat, having done one good thing, and having gained one maturity skill, but still living her old life, only now it's an intentional choice to be there.
She argued her alt-daughter off the bridge, and in so doing, she argued herself out of an escapist life.
I think the problem you've identified is that absent an external push, she would not have ever started down a positive track (even one as potentially temporary and fraught as exists). In the system of their family/business/life, there were no ways for the situation to improve absent Evelyn making an effort, and she was not making an effort. If not for something outside of the existing system, the problems would have continued and the situation would have gotten worse.
That's actually pretty realistic, and external stimuli can disrupt stagnant systems in positive ways. It makes Evelyn's journey less morally positive for her, but more realistic given what she's like at the start.
Thematically, it feels a bit more like a religious redemption story, in that the external development is what actually made the difference. It's a bit like Jesus taking on our sins before we knew we were sinners, which offers redemption despite our lack of moral perfection.
This is well said. I think a lot of movies celebrate personal growth without mourning the damage done before the personal growth. "I'm a good person now" is almost orthogonal to the issue of "what is to be done about all the bad stuff I did when I was bad?" A lot of other movies resolve this problem by having the reformed person die in an act of self-sacrifice at the end.
So then I'm not entirely sure what your complaint is. Are you saying that you think the movie made Evelyn out to be too much of a hero when it is entirely possible that, after the credits roll and things calm down, she slips right back into her old routine and that the entire movie is just showing one of the many cycles she's gone through?
If so A) I don't really agree that the movie makes her out to be a hero. Like I said, I didn't really like her at all during the movie. Not even during the end. Liking Evelyn was, at least as far as I could tell, very much not the point.
And B) The main message I got was "If you ignore the people you love because your life is hard, you will lose them, and the longer you wait to realize this, the harder it will be to stop/reverse it".
Because it's a story/movie, of course it wasn't going to end where she had waited too long and it wasn't possible (well, it _could_ have but that would have taken some cajones), and they also weren't going to show the story where she realizes before it hits crisis mode and acts responsibly of her volition (that's way too mundane and boring). While both of those things are more common in real life, they are also too depressing and/or boring. The only interesting version of the story is that she only realizes at the last possible moment where redemption is still possible. The ambiguity in this particular movie of whether or not she actually _does_ end up fixing it (which, if it happens, happens after the movie) is something I appreciated.
Evelyn is the protagonist but she is also _very_ much not the hero. I'm not really sure how the movie could have conveyed the message you wanted (be nice when it's hard as well) without either just destroying the plot or else adding a half hour long epilogue, which would have been almost as bad.
So I think it's easier to talk about this first in terms of what we know:
1. By the end of the movie Evelyn, at least for a while, is paying attention to her family.
And then we can talk about it in messages the movie could have been sending about when she wasn't:
1. It's always OK to neglect and hurt your family if you want, and then stop doing that when you want.
2. It's OK (or at least super understandable) to neglect your family when you are sad, or feeling unfulfilled, and stuff like that. Once you are happy, you can start to heal those wounds - so get started on feeling fulfilled and glad.
3. It's never OK to neglect your family.
I don't think either of us thinks 1 is true - that it was intended or what most people got out of the movie. 2. is in some ways almost the point of the bulk of the film - i.e. there's a super heavy emphasis on how this particular Evelyn isn't living up to her potential and an entire metaphoric structure built around her seizing back bits and pieces of what could have been.
And then 3. is really in question for me, like does the movie go that far. Because there's never a moment pre-crisis where Evelyn will talk to any of them, at all, and it's not for lack of trying on their part. Even when she sees the divorce papers, it's framed in "how could you possibly think this was OK?" language - she's never considered that his feelings might matter at all, and still isn't. And she's still too busy for it right up until the end of the movie, when she gets catharsis.
I think it's reasonable to say "yeah, but none of that is presented as *good*, RC." What I'm sort of saying is that at the individual level, like the standard I think I should hold myself to, I think it's pretty bad. Like worth mentioning, worth apologizing for, worth feeling bad about. And I don't think the movie gives me that stuff.
I do sort of thing that the message you are wanting is sort of there by contrast since we are shown how bad her life gets when she _doesn't_ do that. Yeah, it's not shoved in the viewers face, but I don't think it's that hard to get the message of "Don't be like Evelyn who waited until the last possible moment. Be a present person in the lives of the people you care about _all_ the time. If you don't, your world will get consumed by a bagel. And that's bad."
Tacking on extra response: I don't think the conflict here is in whether or not we both think she should have got started earlier, or that her life got bad. It's more - was it *understandable* that Evelyn abused her family for what looks like years and years? Does she ever get blamed for it? Because after that bit - the window into the abuse - the rest of the flow of the movie is "But now she's fulfilled, now she's healed, so now she can heal". And I think that's a disaster for everyone if everyone does that at once.
I did not come away with the impression that the movie wanted us to think #1 or #2 were true. I very much come away with the impression that there was no reason Evelyn _couldn't_ have been present in her family's life the whole time. She just chose to wallow in self pity. And everything downstream of that was a result of that choice. A choice that she could have just not made. That the message of the movie was "if you ignore your family when it's bad, if you wallow in self pity, if you only think about yourself, bad things happen"
Even the divorce papers thing, that part was almost cartoonishly obvious in making it clear how _bad_ of a person she was.
As for "did she get blamed for it"... yes? The entire plot with her multiversal daughter was showing how Evelyn was the problem. How her lack of caring was causing pain in the lives around her.
The rest of the movie isn't that now _she_ can heal, it's that now she can _heal her family_ from the wounds that _she_ caused.
And for the end of your first reply, "What I'm sort of saying is that at the individual level, like the standard I think I should hold myself to, I think it's pretty bad."
I don't understand what you mean by this. What the It's in "it's pretty bad" is.
After all this back and forth, it sounds like the crux of the difference is we just came away with different messages.
You came away form the movie thinking that Evelyn was redeemed/justified. That her early behavior was understandable and ok and she still gets to have a happy ending.
I came away with the impression that her early behavior was completely wrong and unjustified, and the entire movie is her being drug kicking and screaming by the rest of the characters to the realization necessary to have a _chance_ at redemption. She's a bad person who got lucky enough to have people around her that loved her enough to save her (or bring her the possibility of being saved at least). I never once got the impression that it was the slightest bit understandable or ok how she acted in the first 3/4 of the movie.
I have no idea which one of us the outlier though. And I agree that a movie that was conveying the message you got: That it's understandable and ok to abuse your family just because your life is hard, as long as you just barely manage to do the bare minimum to prevent full implosion at the last minute, that would indeed be a bad movie (or at least a movie with a pretty bad message). I just personally don't think that that is what EE is or is conveying.
I think this discussion might be confused by the ambiguity of what “understandable” means? If you understand, should you forgive, or are we just talking about not being confused by what other people are doing? Though you say “understandable,” I think you might be resentful of being asked to forgive the people in the movie? It’s true that forgiveness is a movie cliche, and there are some steps towards forgiveness in this movie. I think it might be more ambiguous, though?
This is a movie about people blatantly, comically, tragically misunderstanding each other. At first it seems kind of cheap, this being an immigrant family, since the misunderstandings often have to do with language difficulties and cultural differences. Ho hum. But those kinds of misunderstandings are real (if cliched), and it piles on.
For example, at first nobody gets what the husband is doing, including the audience, and he just seems randomly eccentric. The divorce papers seem spectacularly ill-timed, piling onto crisis. His “be kind” speech is something of a revelation that there are understandable reasons for his eccentricities.
On top of this there is willfully not understanding. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, but the main character is clearly wrapped up in herself and not really trying. One reason might be that she thought she understood other people in her life a lot more than she does?
And one possible message is that just understanding (not necessarily forgiving) is itself progress.
Ironically, there are aspects of this movie that I didn’t understand. For example, I thought the multiverse stuff was just a fun tacked-on thing to add action and let the movie makers do what they want, which it is, and didn’t entirely realize until today that much of it is also about the main character’s fantasies. I think I’d need to watch it again to understand it well, though I probably won’t.
It seems like the film is being misunderstood. The ambiguity means it’s failing to communicate in some ways, and you could blame the film or the critics.
I understand "understandable" here in the sense that, if we are not supposed to exactly mimic Evelyn's bad aspects, she's still the audience surrogate - she's the eyes through which we see the movie. So to the extent people are to be expected to go "oh, yeah, I identify with that" it's usually going to be Evelyn.
That makes this complex to talk about, because my focus here is basically on talking to the individual. So where I might encounter an Evelyn in real life and ideally go "oh, poor thing, going through a lot, let me help", I'm basically saying to any individual reading - to myself - that this sympathetic reaction is part of a greater set of personal duty doing-what-I-can sort of stuff that I'm telling people (myself) to maximize.
So what I'm trying to convey is a very plausible viewer reaction where they go "oh, look at all her relationships being a mess, and her being a mess; it sure is nice that a bunch of external stuff changed so she could repair those relationships", and pitting that against the fact that most of us feel unfulfilled and underutilized most of the time - that life is hard, and if everyone does what Evelyn does, we will all sit around mistreating each other and nobody will be providing the capital for anyone else to recover.
It's sort of a pay-it-forward concept in that way. Like, everyone wants a Wayland - an ever-suffering dope who just sits around giving you absolutely everything he can until you are ready to take it and use it and do better. But for that to happen, someone has to *actually be Wayland* and pay those costs. And in a perfect world everyone is Wayland - lots of forgiveness for everyone else, very little for themselves, and everyone ticks along trying their hardest in a high-support environment.
I haven't seen the movie, but a good (great?) artist of any kind tends to produce work that has multiple potential interpretations, and intend most of them. They often see deeper than the average schmoo, and have the knack of conveying that depth of vision to those who don't have it naturally.
A few years back I worked for a manager who happened also to be a Presbyterian minister. Not long before he left that role, he told me I sometimes reminded him of Jesus Christ, on account of how reflexively I inclined to self-sacrifice. It's not the only time the tendency's been mentioned, but it was by far the most striking, not least because it was like most of his compliments somewhat backhanded: he had for a while developed a theme with me that I should be more ready to look out for myself and less willing to be taken advantage of - not the first time I'd heard that, either.
I've thought a lot about that since and concluded he was right, because I have had a lot of hurt out of that tendency; the thing about being willing to be taken advantage of is that you get taken advantage of, and the thing about those people who are happy to do so is that they rarely can be bothered to stop. Whatever you'll give, they'll take, and ask for more besides.
And now, this past week and literally today, I'm discovering that I've really learned too much on that score. Because of that desire to avoid being misused, I've helped create and left to fester a situation of deeply wounded feelings on both sides, to the point where I'm not at all sure the best I can do will be enough to even start patching up the hurt but I still have to try. It's not all my fault, not by any means, and I'm not the only one who could and maybe should make a start at trying to fix it, but I'm the only one who's developed the perspective to be able to, and that means I'm the one who has to. And that's going to hurt, too.
The thing is, my old boss the reverend was right. There does come a point where I have to look out for myself, because no one else is going to. What I think he left out and I forgot is that that doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't look out for other people. And yeah, that costs. And yeah, I should be able to rely on other people as much as I've tried for most of my life to make sure others can rely on me. And yeah, I rarely can, because a lifetime of abuse makes for a kind of person that easily draws and hardly notices more of the same, and that's me all over, and it doesn't feel any better to know that underneath it all is a person who'd give the shirt off their back even if it means freezing to death. It's hard to stay kind when it feels like all that comes of it is pain. It's hard to even want to. And right now I really don't.
I'm going to anyway, of course. I can't deal with everything that's wrong right now, but I can deal with what's mine. That starts with what will probably be the hardest and most complicated apology yet in a life that's been full of them, and the hope that it's not too late for an apology like that to be enough of a start - that, and the hope I don't fuck it up on account of feeling that everything I've ever been able to do for the people around me has never led to much of anything coming back my way - which is true, but misleading, because I learned early that it's too dangerous to ever trust anyone enough to ask for what I need, or let on how or why I'm feeling. And that's on me, 100%.
So I appreciate you posting this, because even though I neither know nor care about the movie, your opinion of it has done a lot to help make things come clear for me. I'm glad you're out here doing God's work. It hurt to read, but it should've, and that means it counts for something. And so on Monday I'll say the Aviator's Prayer - the real one: "Please God, don't let me fuck this up." And then I'll try to remember for long enough how to be the person I am rather than the one I've let myself become. Maybe that'll give us a way to actually talk with one another, and maybe that'll be enough.
And either way, I don't like that that was the last thing I thought of to try, when it should've been the first. However it comes out, maybe it'll help me do better next time. I couldn't do a hell of a lot worse.
Beautifully and insightfully written! We may never have the answers, but you've posed the pertinent questions in an interesting and helpful way. Your use of that movie to illustrate these moral issues was masterful. Very well done!
>If these two things seem like they are in conflict, it’s because they sort of are. Someone might say “Listen, if the second thing about understanding people sometimes might not have the resources that make it easy to be good is true, it’s true of you sometimes as well”, and they’d be right. And someone might say “Listen, if you should handle your stuff, that means that other people should too. You aren’t special; you aren’t especially strong” and they’d be right too.
Basically you are describing grace for others and standards for yourself; I also try to use his as a guideline, and I think it's simple to reconcile--it's the only way to counter the natural bias to cut yourself slack and hold others to account for any slight.
What bothered me most about the movie was that the mother/daughter emotional conflict, which underpins the entire story, was so thin and unconvincing. I’m supposed to care about this teenage girl’s nihilism phase? Pixar movies have more psychological and emotional depth! But I think you’re right in pointing to Evelyn as also being difficult to get on board with. Audiences/critics were so dazzled by the visuals and directorial style (which I did like) that they apparently were unbothered by the under-cooked character arcs. And then of course the diverse casting gives the movie woke brownie points.
I think the simplest way to square the circle is to say that you have the moral authority to forgive someone, but you can't really forgive yourself. The whole point of Grace is that it's not deserved, that you can't trade for it because it's not really extending Grace if you benefit from it, and if you're the person receiving your own Grace, you're benefitting from it.
I also think this posture works in that we're all naturally disinclined to excuse someone else's offenses, and heavily inclined to excuse our own, so we simply can't be objective about our own shortcomings. We can excuse someone else because we can see parts of them clearer than they can.
I did not get the first synopsis nor the second synopsis. Actually I got both synopsis, all at once. That is to say from a film standpoint I found it confused and a jumbled mess. One of the worst movies of the year that I could never share with my mother or kids for visual reasons. Michelle Yeoh is a great actress who deserved an Oscar, just not for this everything.
This is very true. I have been depressed enough to be hospitalized over it, and I recognize now that a big part of it was just a desire to be pitied and get a retribution of sorts. For at least some types of mental illness, the depressive, neurotic sorts, I really do think the answer is what the The Last Psychiatrist proposed, which is to stop thinking of yourself and just act.
This is hard to see while you think your pain is justified, but it really all falls into place when you stop seeing it as just, and start seeing it as garbage to take out, or meaningless mental weather to just bear for a while.
Though to be fair, the way out for me did involve spirituality, in that I did have something I cared about more than myself, but I wasn't manifesting that.
What is the religious stuff that gets you out of your conundrum?
The religious stuff is a little boring, but basically one of the strengths of fairly-literal-read deontology of the Christian variety is it carries authority - like where it says "do this", you think you need to do that.
What's nice about this is it couples with a book that mostly, to the extent it relates to this stuff, goes "Take care of people who are weak", "Help make it easy for people to do good" and "Take care of your own shit". It's a distinct layer from "I feel like I should do this" or "I have reasoned utility reasons to do this".
Thank you for this! I didn't like the movie (hate is a strong word). I didn't watch it closely, I must admit. Once I realised that the main character was a narcissist sociopath with princess syndrome, I disengaged.
The "high-brow concept" was, to me, middle low-brow at best. The multiiverse trope has been done to death, and it's just a crutch for lazy authors to begin with. SFX are a sign of laziness in movie-making. Some of the acrobatics by the male lead were entertaining, though; and the sets were mostly good.
I'm not sure EE is holding Evelyn up as a role model (though her becoming a God could suggest different). I feel like the movie is just emphasising the relationship between Asian mothers and daughters, and I agree the resolution didn't feel earned.
I think visuals carried the movie, and a realistic portrayal of Asian family dynamics secured its critical credentials.
There's definitely some elements of "some of this is China" in there. There's a scene where the daughter is leaving the laundromat because her mom has been trying really, really hard to ignore her for about 20 minutes and the mom says "Stop eating so much - you are getting fat". That's as I understand it sort of a Chinese-parent trope; like showing love through concern for the future, or something.
One thing the movie does actually make pains to point out is that the Evelyn is trying to be better than at least the last generation to some extent - like, the daughter is gay, and in the context of the movie "accept your daughter's homosexuality" is treated as a pure-clear-good. The mom at some point goes "I let you go out with a gay person! and they are white, even!" or similar - she's comparing against other asian parents, in a status-driven sort of way.
So I've waited multiple articles for you to have a comment with any substance, and you apparently aren't particularly capable of that, so banned.
For anyone wanting context on this, there's advice that goes around to writers who want to get subscribers that amounts to "be visible and controversial on a bunch of comments sections". This person just posts "that article sucked" with zero reasons why every article; nothing more than that. Some of the articles really do suck, and people are allowed to say so, but you have to be able to form a thought around the statement.
I'm honestly perplexed by this. I think _both_ of those interpretations _were intended_. I came out of that movie understanding completely that the way Evelyn treated her family was completely not ok and that almost all of her problems were at least partially her own fault. She was supposed to simultaneously be pitied but also recognized as the cause (at least partly) of all her own problems. This juxtaposition is _why_ it was such a great movie. It accurately captured the truth of most people's reality: lots of things in your life suck and a very non trivial part of that suckitude, but not all _is your own fault_. The movie is a redemption story in that, through the whole thing, she slowly (_very_ slowly_ comes to realize this and and the end begins the path to healing her relationships and her own problems. Nothin is fixed at the end of the movie, but it's brought to a place where it _could_ be fixed. Yes, life is hard a lot of the time, and yes that sucks, but that being hard _is not an excuse_ for not doing the things that matter and taking care of the things that matter. If you just choose to wallow in "life is hard and it's not my fault" then things will get even worse, but if you actually try, you can't control everything but you can keep the things that matter the most. I think this was the _very_ explicit message of the movie (surrounded by a whole lot of multi-verse sillyness of course)
The fact that this movie showed such an unvarnished look at what is many people's reality was why I loved it.
I'm more or less agnostic on the exact messaging that the director wanted a person to get. But part of why I'm less.. comfortable, I guess? Why I'm less comfortable with saying "oh, that got covered" is that the movie has all her redemption (100% of it) occur during a crisis, like her husband says always happens during a crisis. But the implication is that it always ends as soon as the crisis ends, as well.
And so when we see Evelyn sort of, like, deal with her husband stuff, it's because they are in a crisis and she needs him; she deals with her daughter because her daughter's leaving and she needs to keep her. And it all wraps up very neatly, but I struggle to find moments that really say "Hey, maybe whether things got better for you or not, or there was a crisis or not, maybe you shouldn't have emotionally abandoned your family for years".
And there very well might be! Like I didn't watch the movie ten times. But where I did see the "let's grow and get happy so we can be nice" elements, I'm actually really interested in people pointing out the other - the "you should have really been nice while it was hard, too" bits.
I'm going to gently pile on a bit and say I agree with DangerouslyUnstable. I think the movie was at least trying to give you what you want, and most people left the theater with it.
Specifically I think it does judge and does not excuse Evelyn for being self centered, and does not argue that she has overcome this problem at the end of the movie. I think it argues that she has learned to unblock one particular mental issue, experienced one unit of growth which may or may not be part of a long path. The crises are allegorical, and while it's a fair cop that she only improves in a crisis, I think they're in the movie in order to create the following simple fable: your life will not get better until you learn to stop escaping into all the ways it could be better.
In a way, that gives it the same moral as your recent post about LitRPGs and escapism. This isn't a movie about a lady being absolved for past sins, or solving her personal problems. It's a movie about a lady learning to put a check on her self centered escapism, and the very last scene, where all the alternate realities still flutter in the background, makes it very *very* clear that applying this check will be a lifelong battle. This won't be a lady who magically stops thinking of alternate versions of herself, or even one who successfully stops all wasteful hobbies. But it will now be a lady who tries.
Even shorter, clearer: she's overweight (like you and me and everyone else), she's not excused for being overweight, she hasn't lost weight by the end of the movie, she hasn't learned all the methods of losing weight. She has simply started *trying* to lose weight.
I guess my question is, if it does all this, when does it do it? Because all her improvements - every last one - comes after she's all fulfilled and important, they mostly come from stuff she sees in all her better lives. The specific lesson she learns about how to solve the world doesn't come so much from real-world Wayland as it does some improved wayland in a suit she might have married if she had only lived up to her potential, etc.
I'm trying to think of how I'd show something like what people say they are seeing - that at any point the movie is pushing that "she should have done what she should have done, even when sad" ethos. So like we could have Wayland say "you know, it's good that you've worked through your stuff, but I have years and years of scars, you should have made a token effort to preserve our marriage". But he doesn't - he's a prop; as soon as she's a tiny bit nice to him the movie goes "all fixed - good thing she got happy".
The daughter character does actually say "good you are working through all your shit" but then dodges saying "but there's lots and lots of trauma because you are abusive all the time" by saying "our personalities don't work that well together, I'm not sure what it is".
I'm not actually saying you are wrong - like, it's a movie, it's subjective, etc. - but I do sort of struggle to see what you guys are seeing. To put it a different way, I'm not sure any character at all ever says Evelyn has done anything wrong, at all, outside of the IRS lady saying maybe she shouldn't do so much intentional fraud.
I would argue that it only does the *one* thing, and that thing happens gradually as she tries to convince her alt-daughter not to be a nihilist: she unintentionally convinces herself to let go of escapes. The final push comes from her movie-star-not-husband in the rain.
I don't even think she's fulfilled and important in the end; she's back at the laundromat, having done one good thing, and having gained one maturity skill, but still living her old life, only now it's an intentional choice to be there.
She argued her alt-daughter off the bridge, and in so doing, she argued herself out of an escapist life.
I think the problem you've identified is that absent an external push, she would not have ever started down a positive track (even one as potentially temporary and fraught as exists). In the system of their family/business/life, there were no ways for the situation to improve absent Evelyn making an effort, and she was not making an effort. If not for something outside of the existing system, the problems would have continued and the situation would have gotten worse.
That's actually pretty realistic, and external stimuli can disrupt stagnant systems in positive ways. It makes Evelyn's journey less morally positive for her, but more realistic given what she's like at the start.
Thematically, it feels a bit more like a religious redemption story, in that the external development is what actually made the difference. It's a bit like Jesus taking on our sins before we knew we were sinners, which offers redemption despite our lack of moral perfection.
This is well said. I think a lot of movies celebrate personal growth without mourning the damage done before the personal growth. "I'm a good person now" is almost orthogonal to the issue of "what is to be done about all the bad stuff I did when I was bad?" A lot of other movies resolve this problem by having the reformed person die in an act of self-sacrifice at the end.
So then I'm not entirely sure what your complaint is. Are you saying that you think the movie made Evelyn out to be too much of a hero when it is entirely possible that, after the credits roll and things calm down, she slips right back into her old routine and that the entire movie is just showing one of the many cycles she's gone through?
If so A) I don't really agree that the movie makes her out to be a hero. Like I said, I didn't really like her at all during the movie. Not even during the end. Liking Evelyn was, at least as far as I could tell, very much not the point.
And B) The main message I got was "If you ignore the people you love because your life is hard, you will lose them, and the longer you wait to realize this, the harder it will be to stop/reverse it".
Because it's a story/movie, of course it wasn't going to end where she had waited too long and it wasn't possible (well, it _could_ have but that would have taken some cajones), and they also weren't going to show the story where she realizes before it hits crisis mode and acts responsibly of her volition (that's way too mundane and boring). While both of those things are more common in real life, they are also too depressing and/or boring. The only interesting version of the story is that she only realizes at the last possible moment where redemption is still possible. The ambiguity in this particular movie of whether or not she actually _does_ end up fixing it (which, if it happens, happens after the movie) is something I appreciated.
Evelyn is the protagonist but she is also _very_ much not the hero. I'm not really sure how the movie could have conveyed the message you wanted (be nice when it's hard as well) without either just destroying the plot or else adding a half hour long epilogue, which would have been almost as bad.
So I think it's easier to talk about this first in terms of what we know:
1. By the end of the movie Evelyn, at least for a while, is paying attention to her family.
And then we can talk about it in messages the movie could have been sending about when she wasn't:
1. It's always OK to neglect and hurt your family if you want, and then stop doing that when you want.
2. It's OK (or at least super understandable) to neglect your family when you are sad, or feeling unfulfilled, and stuff like that. Once you are happy, you can start to heal those wounds - so get started on feeling fulfilled and glad.
3. It's never OK to neglect your family.
I don't think either of us thinks 1 is true - that it was intended or what most people got out of the movie. 2. is in some ways almost the point of the bulk of the film - i.e. there's a super heavy emphasis on how this particular Evelyn isn't living up to her potential and an entire metaphoric structure built around her seizing back bits and pieces of what could have been.
And then 3. is really in question for me, like does the movie go that far. Because there's never a moment pre-crisis where Evelyn will talk to any of them, at all, and it's not for lack of trying on their part. Even when she sees the divorce papers, it's framed in "how could you possibly think this was OK?" language - she's never considered that his feelings might matter at all, and still isn't. And she's still too busy for it right up until the end of the movie, when she gets catharsis.
I think it's reasonable to say "yeah, but none of that is presented as *good*, RC." What I'm sort of saying is that at the individual level, like the standard I think I should hold myself to, I think it's pretty bad. Like worth mentioning, worth apologizing for, worth feeling bad about. And I don't think the movie gives me that stuff.
To tack on:
I do sort of thing that the message you are wanting is sort of there by contrast since we are shown how bad her life gets when she _doesn't_ do that. Yeah, it's not shoved in the viewers face, but I don't think it's that hard to get the message of "Don't be like Evelyn who waited until the last possible moment. Be a present person in the lives of the people you care about _all_ the time. If you don't, your world will get consumed by a bagel. And that's bad."
Tacking on extra response: I don't think the conflict here is in whether or not we both think she should have got started earlier, or that her life got bad. It's more - was it *understandable* that Evelyn abused her family for what looks like years and years? Does she ever get blamed for it? Because after that bit - the window into the abuse - the rest of the flow of the movie is "But now she's fulfilled, now she's healed, so now she can heal". And I think that's a disaster for everyone if everyone does that at once.
I did not come away with the impression that the movie wanted us to think #1 or #2 were true. I very much come away with the impression that there was no reason Evelyn _couldn't_ have been present in her family's life the whole time. She just chose to wallow in self pity. And everything downstream of that was a result of that choice. A choice that she could have just not made. That the message of the movie was "if you ignore your family when it's bad, if you wallow in self pity, if you only think about yourself, bad things happen"
Even the divorce papers thing, that part was almost cartoonishly obvious in making it clear how _bad_ of a person she was.
As for "did she get blamed for it"... yes? The entire plot with her multiversal daughter was showing how Evelyn was the problem. How her lack of caring was causing pain in the lives around her.
The rest of the movie isn't that now _she_ can heal, it's that now she can _heal her family_ from the wounds that _she_ caused.
And for the end of your first reply, "What I'm sort of saying is that at the individual level, like the standard I think I should hold myself to, I think it's pretty bad."
I don't understand what you mean by this. What the It's in "it's pretty bad" is.
After all this back and forth, it sounds like the crux of the difference is we just came away with different messages.
You came away form the movie thinking that Evelyn was redeemed/justified. That her early behavior was understandable and ok and she still gets to have a happy ending.
I came away with the impression that her early behavior was completely wrong and unjustified, and the entire movie is her being drug kicking and screaming by the rest of the characters to the realization necessary to have a _chance_ at redemption. She's a bad person who got lucky enough to have people around her that loved her enough to save her (or bring her the possibility of being saved at least). I never once got the impression that it was the slightest bit understandable or ok how she acted in the first 3/4 of the movie.
I have no idea which one of us the outlier though. And I agree that a movie that was conveying the message you got: That it's understandable and ok to abuse your family just because your life is hard, as long as you just barely manage to do the bare minimum to prevent full implosion at the last minute, that would indeed be a bad movie (or at least a movie with a pretty bad message). I just personally don't think that that is what EE is or is conveying.
I think this discussion might be confused by the ambiguity of what “understandable” means? If you understand, should you forgive, or are we just talking about not being confused by what other people are doing? Though you say “understandable,” I think you might be resentful of being asked to forgive the people in the movie? It’s true that forgiveness is a movie cliche, and there are some steps towards forgiveness in this movie. I think it might be more ambiguous, though?
This is a movie about people blatantly, comically, tragically misunderstanding each other. At first it seems kind of cheap, this being an immigrant family, since the misunderstandings often have to do with language difficulties and cultural differences. Ho hum. But those kinds of misunderstandings are real (if cliched), and it piles on.
For example, at first nobody gets what the husband is doing, including the audience, and he just seems randomly eccentric. The divorce papers seem spectacularly ill-timed, piling onto crisis. His “be kind” speech is something of a revelation that there are understandable reasons for his eccentricities.
On top of this there is willfully not understanding. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, but the main character is clearly wrapped up in herself and not really trying. One reason might be that she thought she understood other people in her life a lot more than she does?
And one possible message is that just understanding (not necessarily forgiving) is itself progress.
Ironically, there are aspects of this movie that I didn’t understand. For example, I thought the multiverse stuff was just a fun tacked-on thing to add action and let the movie makers do what they want, which it is, and didn’t entirely realize until today that much of it is also about the main character’s fantasies. I think I’d need to watch it again to understand it well, though I probably won’t.
It seems like the film is being misunderstood. The ambiguity means it’s failing to communicate in some ways, and you could blame the film or the critics.
I understand "understandable" here in the sense that, if we are not supposed to exactly mimic Evelyn's bad aspects, she's still the audience surrogate - she's the eyes through which we see the movie. So to the extent people are to be expected to go "oh, yeah, I identify with that" it's usually going to be Evelyn.
That makes this complex to talk about, because my focus here is basically on talking to the individual. So where I might encounter an Evelyn in real life and ideally go "oh, poor thing, going through a lot, let me help", I'm basically saying to any individual reading - to myself - that this sympathetic reaction is part of a greater set of personal duty doing-what-I-can sort of stuff that I'm telling people (myself) to maximize.
So what I'm trying to convey is a very plausible viewer reaction where they go "oh, look at all her relationships being a mess, and her being a mess; it sure is nice that a bunch of external stuff changed so she could repair those relationships", and pitting that against the fact that most of us feel unfulfilled and underutilized most of the time - that life is hard, and if everyone does what Evelyn does, we will all sit around mistreating each other and nobody will be providing the capital for anyone else to recover.
It's sort of a pay-it-forward concept in that way. Like, everyone wants a Wayland - an ever-suffering dope who just sits around giving you absolutely everything he can until you are ready to take it and use it and do better. But for that to happen, someone has to *actually be Wayland* and pay those costs. And in a perfect world everyone is Wayland - lots of forgiveness for everyone else, very little for themselves, and everyone ticks along trying their hardest in a high-support environment.
I haven't seen the movie, but a good (great?) artist of any kind tends to produce work that has multiple potential interpretations, and intend most of them. They often see deeper than the average schmoo, and have the knack of conveying that depth of vision to those who don't have it naturally.
A few years back I worked for a manager who happened also to be a Presbyterian minister. Not long before he left that role, he told me I sometimes reminded him of Jesus Christ, on account of how reflexively I inclined to self-sacrifice. It's not the only time the tendency's been mentioned, but it was by far the most striking, not least because it was like most of his compliments somewhat backhanded: he had for a while developed a theme with me that I should be more ready to look out for myself and less willing to be taken advantage of - not the first time I'd heard that, either.
I've thought a lot about that since and concluded he was right, because I have had a lot of hurt out of that tendency; the thing about being willing to be taken advantage of is that you get taken advantage of, and the thing about those people who are happy to do so is that they rarely can be bothered to stop. Whatever you'll give, they'll take, and ask for more besides.
And now, this past week and literally today, I'm discovering that I've really learned too much on that score. Because of that desire to avoid being misused, I've helped create and left to fester a situation of deeply wounded feelings on both sides, to the point where I'm not at all sure the best I can do will be enough to even start patching up the hurt but I still have to try. It's not all my fault, not by any means, and I'm not the only one who could and maybe should make a start at trying to fix it, but I'm the only one who's developed the perspective to be able to, and that means I'm the one who has to. And that's going to hurt, too.
The thing is, my old boss the reverend was right. There does come a point where I have to look out for myself, because no one else is going to. What I think he left out and I forgot is that that doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't look out for other people. And yeah, that costs. And yeah, I should be able to rely on other people as much as I've tried for most of my life to make sure others can rely on me. And yeah, I rarely can, because a lifetime of abuse makes for a kind of person that easily draws and hardly notices more of the same, and that's me all over, and it doesn't feel any better to know that underneath it all is a person who'd give the shirt off their back even if it means freezing to death. It's hard to stay kind when it feels like all that comes of it is pain. It's hard to even want to. And right now I really don't.
I'm going to anyway, of course. I can't deal with everything that's wrong right now, but I can deal with what's mine. That starts with what will probably be the hardest and most complicated apology yet in a life that's been full of them, and the hope that it's not too late for an apology like that to be enough of a start - that, and the hope I don't fuck it up on account of feeling that everything I've ever been able to do for the people around me has never led to much of anything coming back my way - which is true, but misleading, because I learned early that it's too dangerous to ever trust anyone enough to ask for what I need, or let on how or why I'm feeling. And that's on me, 100%.
So I appreciate you posting this, because even though I neither know nor care about the movie, your opinion of it has done a lot to help make things come clear for me. I'm glad you're out here doing God's work. It hurt to read, but it should've, and that means it counts for something. And so on Monday I'll say the Aviator's Prayer - the real one: "Please God, don't let me fuck this up." And then I'll try to remember for long enough how to be the person I am rather than the one I've let myself become. Maybe that'll give us a way to actually talk with one another, and maybe that'll be enough.
And either way, I don't like that that was the last thing I thought of to try, when it should've been the first. However it comes out, maybe it'll help me do better next time. I couldn't do a hell of a lot worse.
Beautifully and insightfully written! We may never have the answers, but you've posed the pertinent questions in an interesting and helpful way. Your use of that movie to illustrate these moral issues was masterful. Very well done!
>If these two things seem like they are in conflict, it’s because they sort of are. Someone might say “Listen, if the second thing about understanding people sometimes might not have the resources that make it easy to be good is true, it’s true of you sometimes as well”, and they’d be right. And someone might say “Listen, if you should handle your stuff, that means that other people should too. You aren’t special; you aren’t especially strong” and they’d be right too.
Basically you are describing grace for others and standards for yourself; I also try to use his as a guideline, and I think it's simple to reconcile--it's the only way to counter the natural bias to cut yourself slack and hold others to account for any slight.
What bothered me most about the movie was that the mother/daughter emotional conflict, which underpins the entire story, was so thin and unconvincing. I’m supposed to care about this teenage girl’s nihilism phase? Pixar movies have more psychological and emotional depth! But I think you’re right in pointing to Evelyn as also being difficult to get on board with. Audiences/critics were so dazzled by the visuals and directorial style (which I did like) that they apparently were unbothered by the under-cooked character arcs. And then of course the diverse casting gives the movie woke brownie points.
I think the simplest way to square the circle is to say that you have the moral authority to forgive someone, but you can't really forgive yourself. The whole point of Grace is that it's not deserved, that you can't trade for it because it's not really extending Grace if you benefit from it, and if you're the person receiving your own Grace, you're benefitting from it.
I also think this posture works in that we're all naturally disinclined to excuse someone else's offenses, and heavily inclined to excuse our own, so we simply can't be objective about our own shortcomings. We can excuse someone else because we can see parts of them clearer than they can.
I did not get the first synopsis nor the second synopsis. Actually I got both synopsis, all at once. That is to say from a film standpoint I found it confused and a jumbled mess. One of the worst movies of the year that I could never share with my mother or kids for visual reasons. Michelle Yeoh is a great actress who deserved an Oscar, just not for this everything.
Congrats on the new job.
This is very true. I have been depressed enough to be hospitalized over it, and I recognize now that a big part of it was just a desire to be pitied and get a retribution of sorts. For at least some types of mental illness, the depressive, neurotic sorts, I really do think the answer is what the The Last Psychiatrist proposed, which is to stop thinking of yourself and just act.
This is hard to see while you think your pain is justified, but it really all falls into place when you stop seeing it as just, and start seeing it as garbage to take out, or meaningless mental weather to just bear for a while.
Though to be fair, the way out for me did involve spirituality, in that I did have something I cared about more than myself, but I wasn't manifesting that.
What is the religious stuff that gets you out of your conundrum?
The religious stuff is a little boring, but basically one of the strengths of fairly-literal-read deontology of the Christian variety is it carries authority - like where it says "do this", you think you need to do that.
What's nice about this is it couples with a book that mostly, to the extent it relates to this stuff, goes "Take care of people who are weak", "Help make it easy for people to do good" and "Take care of your own shit". It's a distinct layer from "I feel like I should do this" or "I have reasoned utility reasons to do this".
Thank you for this! I didn't like the movie (hate is a strong word). I didn't watch it closely, I must admit. Once I realised that the main character was a narcissist sociopath with princess syndrome, I disengaged.
The "high-brow concept" was, to me, middle low-brow at best. The multiiverse trope has been done to death, and it's just a crutch for lazy authors to begin with. SFX are a sign of laziness in movie-making. Some of the acrobatics by the male lead were entertaining, though; and the sets were mostly good.
I'm not sure EE is holding Evelyn up as a role model (though her becoming a God could suggest different). I feel like the movie is just emphasising the relationship between Asian mothers and daughters, and I agree the resolution didn't feel earned.
I think visuals carried the movie, and a realistic portrayal of Asian family dynamics secured its critical credentials.
I think theres vastly simpler ethic to improve the world then that: "treat children better then you were"
I havn't seen the movie, but a mother hiding what instincts of disowning she picked up from china or whatever, may fit that.
There's definitely some elements of "some of this is China" in there. There's a scene where the daughter is leaving the laundromat because her mom has been trying really, really hard to ignore her for about 20 minutes and the mom says "Stop eating so much - you are getting fat". That's as I understand it sort of a Chinese-parent trope; like showing love through concern for the future, or something.
One thing the movie does actually make pains to point out is that the Evelyn is trying to be better than at least the last generation to some extent - like, the daughter is gay, and in the context of the movie "accept your daughter's homosexuality" is treated as a pure-clear-good. The mom at some point goes "I let you go out with a gay person! and they are white, even!" or similar - she's comparing against other asian parents, in a status-driven sort of way.
So I've waited multiple articles for you to have a comment with any substance, and you apparently aren't particularly capable of that, so banned.
For anyone wanting context on this, there's advice that goes around to writers who want to get subscribers that amounts to "be visible and controversial on a bunch of comments sections". This person just posts "that article sucked" with zero reasons why every article; nothing more than that. Some of the articles really do suck, and people are allowed to say so, but you have to be able to form a thought around the statement.