Everything Everywhere All At Once

 Feeling sad that I haven't been going to the movies lately, I decided this would be my "weekend of the multiverse," going to see first this odd indie creation and then the product of the vast Marvel machine tomorrow or Sunday. The last time I went to the cinema, and the only previous time I've gone during the pandemic, was for Dune. Picking a weekday showing in the early afternoon assured me that the theater would have only a few people, which I still think is preferable in this era of plague.

The directors of the film, who go collectively by "Daniels," (making them part of the group that my oldest friend and I coined when we were in Middle School, the Dan Clan - I guess Dans just gravitate toward one another) previously made Swiss Army Man, one of those batshit premises that works shockingly well (Paul Dano is shipwrecked on a desert island and finds Daniel Radcliffe's washed-up corpse, who happens to be very useful in various ways) return with a story about the kind of broad malaise of wasted potential and existential drift that I think a lot of people have been feeling in the past few years.

At the center of this is Evelyn Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh, a Chinese immigrant living in what seems to be southern California. Whatever dreams she once had have been submerged beneath the need to run a failing laundromat that she lives above, dealing with what she sees as her sort of pathetic husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan,) the distant daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu),  about whom she feels conflicted that she's got a white girlfriend (both the white and the girl parts) and a father whose expectations have always weighed down on her (James Hong).

While going into the local IRS office to be audited - notably for equipment related to hobbies - Waymond suddenly shifts into some other personality, and reveals that he's been seeking her out as the one who can defeat "Jobu Tabacky," a villain who threatens the entire multiverse.

As she is initiated into this bizarre technology that allows the multiversal travel of her consciousness, picking up skills and abilities that other versions of her have acquired, we get into the absurd, ridiculous action story that is, ultimately, about regret and depression - regret about the choices we didn't make and depression about the ultimate meaninglessness of our own lives in the face of an ever-expanding vision of the cosmos.

It's the sort of movie where there'll be a fight scene where she's trying to prevent a bad guy from sticking something in his butt lest that give him better fighting skills, while another scene will be about the deep pain of passing on the pressures that caused you so much trauma to your own child.

It's funny, because I've been doing a lot of unpacking about generational trauma, and this is very much about the sort of internalization and even projection of fears and resentments.

In particular, I think that the movie has a lot to say about regret - there's a scene where Evelyn accesses the sign-spinning skills of a version of her that flips around one of those road signs for a pizza place, and then uses that skill in her version of the world to fight off a bunch of bad guys with a riot shield. There's a sort of suggestion that the value and potential of every life experience is there, even if we don't really see it.

And this applies to others as well - it's clear that Evelyn sees Waymond as something of a pathetic doormat at first, and that resentment is leading him to consider getting a divorce. But when we see him in a different timeline - one in which they never married - he explains how his worldview might not be conventional, but it's just as, if not stronger than what it could have been.

Rewatching 2021's Dune

 Well, I watched Dune again, this time in my living room instead of a nearly-empty theater. Dune's one of those stories that pervades science fiction - Star Wars might have borrowed the concept of Coruscant (seen only in the prequels directly, not counting the special editions of the original trilogy) from Asimov's Trantor, but the desert world of Tatooine clearly owes a lot of its DNA to Arrakis.

Matt Colville, who mostly does videos about Dungeons & Dragons, did a three-part series talking about Dune and some of the really interesting sci-fi concepts within it. Science fiction is a genre that I think engages the reader/audience from a different angle than other genres, even including fantasy, though those genres exist less as discrete categories and more along a spectrum.

I think the greatest science fiction stories begin with a question: "what if such and such a technology or scientific development came about?" and then attempts to answer that in a way that is dramatic and interesting.

In some ways, I think the primary question Dune asks is "what if humanity survives for tens of thousands more years?"

There's a bit of dark pessimism that has confronted us since the invention of nuclear weapons. While swords, crossbows, guns, and bombs have all escalated the potential for us to kill one another, nuclear weapons have raised the stakes to an absurd degree. Today, we are relying on the sanity of world leaders not to press the button that destroys the world. In some ways, the threat here has preserved peace on a large scale, the logic being that no two nuclear powers can ever afford to get into an armed conflict. Of course, we're seeing the risk of that concept in Ukraine, where a nuclear power is relying on the fear of escalation to prevent direct confrontation with NATO and attack a less powerful country with impunity. None of us today knows how that conflict will end, and I suppose I will just have to hope that this blog post is not some archaeological relic to be found by some distant future historians trying to piece together how the current civilization fell.

Dune isn't exactly optimistic about the future either. In contrast with the Star Trek-like vision of a future built on principles of liberalism, democracy, and the enlightenment, the universe as it is ten thousand years after the foundation of the Spacing Guild (itself ten thousand years from now) has reverted in structure to one of imperialism, aristocracy, and feudalism.

In some ways, I think Frank Herbert dodged some areas of speculation through the use of certain narrative devices. The Butlerian Jihad, in the distant past, saw the erasure of all artificial intelligence and computers. Perhaps Herbert knew that he would never be able to predict how advanced computer technology would get and thus sought to set aside any speculation. Today, thinking about how you could fly a space ship or an ornithopter without a computer seems absurd, but we're also in the thick of a computer-centric world - one that I would bet is far more saturated with computers than Herbert thought it would be even in the distant future.

The needs of the protagonists in the first novel of the Dune series are fairly immediate: their lives and their house is in danger of being wiped out in a feud with the Harkonnens. The plot is full of wheels within wheels - the Emperor fears Leto Atreides because he's a more popular leader who also understands the source of the Imperial House Corrino's power, so he arranges to put the Atreides on the back foot while helping the Harkonnens under the table. Leto knows that Arrakis is a trap, but is plotting to seek out and befriend the indigenous Fremen, who he thinks will be even better than the Emperor's elite Sardaukar. But the Harkonnens have an asset within the Atreides house, and they're able to launch their attack before Leto can reach out to the Fremen. But the Bene Gesserit have also been essentially breeding a messiah for hundreds of years, and Paul Atreides makes use of the abilities that have been bred into him to manipulate/recruit the Fremen to basically do what Leto initially planned.

And so, the first book ends with Paul defeating the Harkonnens and forcing the Emperor to marry him to the princess Irulan and thus make Paul the heir to the throne.

While we get hints of it, it's not until the later books that we see the consequences of all of this. The Fremen inflict the very colonial oppression that they suffered under onto the universe at large, and Paul, with an empire that literally views him as the messiah, has unleashed a fanatical holy war upon the universe - the sort of war where there are no compromises, no peace treaties to sign, and no limit to what your soldiers will do to defeat an enemy they see as definitionally evil.

Thinking about Villeneuve's movie, I wonder how exactly to judge it. On a visceral level, I like it. Visually I think it's fantastic - it looks very much as I imagined the story when reading the book, especially the brutalist enormity of the palace in Arikeen.

Adapting a novel to film is a tough thing to get right, and I think one area the film sort of sidesteps is some of those deeper sci-fi concepts that would be hard to work in. For example, we get some visual clues that Thufir Hawat and Pieter de Vries play a similar role for their respective houses, but the term "Mentat" is never mentioned. We hear about "superstitions" that the Fremen believe, but the source of those traditions and stories is not detailed in any specifics. Of course, the story cuts off before Paul and Jessica make it to Sietch Tabr, so we haven't yet had an opportunity to see how the Bene Gesserit tradition mutated and evolved within Fremen society.

I am still kind of shocked that they didn't just film this as a single production. Warner Bros. must have not had a ton of confidence in it, though I'm happy to hear that part two is going ahead. How sad it would have been to have this part one be the only movie, consigned to the dustbin like, I don't know, the Golden Compass movie. (Come to think of it, did the HBO show also get cancelled?)

I've read Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune, but I'll confess I got stuck on God Emperor of Dune. My dad had cautioned me to stick to the stories with Paul in them, and God Emperor of course takes place thousands of years after the first three books. I believe Villeneuve expressed a hope to do those first three books in film, though I think we might have to be content with just the first book, unless part two is a much bigger cultural phenomenon.

I do feel like Hollywood needs to grade on a curve in this era of Covid, but I suppose it's still about the money you rake it, regardless of outside circumstances.