Everything Everywhere All in The Waste Land
On a Hundred Year Difference by Nicholas Hallers
If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable
In retrospect, 2022 seems like an unimportant year. The evil COVID time was over and this, our year of election, with its problems of succession, was still as removed from our consciousness and attention as a dust mote in a crowded room. Now, that dust mote is roaring down on us like King Lear on his daughter Cordelia.[1] However, I’d like to gratuitously distract us from the political sphere by looking at two notable things that happened a couple of years ago in 2022.
First, we experienced 100 years of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the landmark poem of literary modernism; it competes with Picasso’s Guernica and Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps for the 20th century’s most important work of art. TWL always threatens to consume discussions, so I do the following with trepidation. You, dear reader, likely haven’t read Eliot’s poem recently, so I will try, probably unsuccessfully, to give a brief synopsis.
Some historical context will be helpful. Compare the early 20th century to 1st-century Rome. After centuries of Greek philosophy—Pythagorean Transmigration, Plato’s theory of the Forms, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover—any Roman with an education knew that the state religion was little more than pomp and circumstance, mainly suitable for pacifying the ignorant hoi polloi.
Fast-forward to the 1910s and 20s, and at places like Harvard and Oxford, the intelligentsia were similarly disillusioned. Though the long withdrawal of Faith began much earlier,[2] the study of comparative religions, Darwinism, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy had made serious inroads in academic circles. Moreover, even non-intellectuals were living lives of practical atheism.
Christianity was no longer the default position; rather, to believe in God had become a struggle.
Then, the great Roman Empire suffered Barbarian invasion after Barbarian invasion, shattering cultural ideals of supremacy and superiority. The Romans didn’t know what to do with themselves. (Some blamed the Christians, of course, leading St. Augustine to write The City of God.) In 1914, World War I halted the Myth of Progress in its tracks and broke Europe’s culture into incoherent bits. No one really had anyone to scapegoat this time. The Hell was of our own making.
T.S. Eliot himself was undergoing a mess of personal suffering around this time, too, mostly resulting from his unwise decision to marry Vivienne Haigh Wood in 1915. The two were probably what we today would call co-dependent—terrible for each other. The Waste Land was finished in Switzerland after Eliot had a mental breakdown in 1921.
A common trap is to reduce The Waste Land to one of these three external contexts: 1) As WWI destroyed Europe, the poem is blown up into fragmented voices and dizzying allusions. 2) Without a belief in God to anchor the world’s intelligibility, we are left with a fractured experience of reality. 3) As Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: “Mary Hutch. . .interprets it to be Tom’s autobiography—a melancholy one.” Each of these options is insufficient.
Unfortunately, I’ve done what I hoped not to: spent too much time talking about The Waste Land. (This post is supposed to be about Everything Everywhere All At Once, too, you know.) So, anyway, I hope the following excerpt from Denis Donoghue’s intellectual memoir, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, will help give you some sense of what The Waste Landis about:
The poem cries for its form: what it shows forth in itself is not form but the desperate analogy of form, tokens of a virtual form which would be valid if there were such a thing. What holds the several parts of the poem together is the need, at once the poet’s and our own, to keep life going, including the life of the poem in the dark space between the words. The problem is not that the poem lacks form but that it has a passion for form, largely unfulfilled, and—to make things harder—the memory of lost forms.
You know only a heap of broken images. The Memory of lost forms. These fragments I have shored against my ruins.[3]
A sense of lost coherence permeates The Waste Land. Meaning haunts its pages. Allusions to Dante, Shakespeare, Marvell, Webster, pagan fertility rituals, the Chapel Perilous and the Fisher King litter the poem like unpleasant and unexpected guests. What are they doing there? The fragments and broken images are buried, as it were, in the poem’s space and await a little water, that new life might begin. But, April is the cruellest month – anticipating a spiritual regeneration that does not come – Eliot’s poem leaves hope ambiguous. Can modernity’s waste be a space for regeneration? If not what do we do?
Shantih Shantih Shantih, whispers the poem’s closing line. Peace, peace, peace. And the meaninglessness and alienation and suffering remain.
That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
What an unsettling peace it is.
What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation
Second,[4] also in 2022, the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once came out in theaters.[5] The film captures our contemporary moment pretty accurately, with its anxieties about identity and barely pushed-back despair. I hope to do a better job giving it a brief overview than I did with TWL.[6]
An immigrant mother and small business owner named Evelyn is overwhelmed by, well, everything. . . all at once. The apartment is cluttered, her father who once disowned her is visiting from China, her daughter wants to bring her girlfriend to the family party, and the IRS are auditing her laundromat. Things aren’t looking up for Evelyn. At one point she says, “If I have to think of one more thing today, my head will explode.”
As she and her husband, Waymond Wang (Dickensian name), who plans to confront her with divorce papers (as if things couldn’t get worse), go to the IRS to try and sort out their (kind of fraudulent) finances, something strange happens. Her docile, good-natured husband suddenly has a wholly different personality. A Waymond from an alternate universe, the “Alphaverse,” —where, instead of simpering, he is heroic and romantic—inhabits the lame Waymond’s body through a technology called verse jumping. Apparently, there are countless Waymonds and Evelyns in other universes. Every decision ever has created a branch universe in which the other option has played out, with its own subsequent branches. An evil, alternate IRS-lady Deidre declares, “Now let me assure you of one thing. Just like the rest of your miserable lives, this is nothing more than a statistical inevitability.”
An evil villain, Jobu Tupaki, stalks these universes, hunting down and killing the various Evelyns, of all people. Then, it turns out Tupaki is the Alphaverse’s version of Evelyn’s daughter, Joy, who is not quite on good terms with her mother.
Joy (Tupaki) was over-verse-jumped by the Alphaverse’s Evelyn and her mind shattered across every possible universe, which she experiences all at once. The fruit of her unlimited knowledge of everything?
Jobu Tupaki: “What is the truth?”
Evelyn (facing the black bagel): “Nothing matters.”
Nihilism.
EEAO attempts to salvage the human experience in two ways. First, in one of the film’s culminating moments, after extended scenes of dark-comic violence and Joy (Tupaki’s) thwarted attempts at self-annihilation, Waymond entreats his wife and daughter, “Please be kind.”
And this is the first of EEAO’s answers to postmodernity’s bleakness. “Please don’t kill each other or yourself; instead, be nice and (sentimentally) loving.” Its second attempt at finding a way to keep life going is actually the same thing the movie has been enacting for about an hour and forty-five minutes: entertainment. “Everything is meaningless, but please don’t kill each other or yourself because we have movies we can watch.” [7]
I gotta use words when I talk to you
So, where do these two works of art collide? In what we’ll call “spiritual channel surfing.”
The Waste Land’s polyphonic array of voices, vignettes, and jaggedly layered allusions cut one from the next in the way a television might switch from channel to channel. Banal infomercial, the weather, action flick, ads, soap opera. Unburied corpses, dissolution of national identity, the Rape of Philomel, Tiresias witnessing far too much, and so on. The disciples on the Road to Emmaus, the Agony in the Garden, Coriolanus, Dante, the Chapel Perilous, the Upanishads. Images of coherent belief and traditional sources of meaning are piled up next to each other—The Waste Land’s spiritual channel surfing—in a formless attempt to construct enough meaning to preserve life. The misery is felt intensely.
In Everything Everywhere All At Once, director Daniel Kwan employs the same technique. Evelyn takes on qualities from alternate Evelyn’s haphazardly: kung fu Evelyn, sausage fingers Evelyn, pinky kung fu Evelyn, blind singer Evelyn, rock Evelyn, and so on. Moreover, the precondition for verse jumping is doing something really strange, and, in certain parts of the film, Evelyn and other characters go from one bizarre action – blowing on someone’s nose, eating chapstick – to more and more hilariously off actions. The film’s characters constantly cycle through different identities, each more absurd than the last. In the end, EEAO’s spiritual channel surfing all becomes a kind of joke. Nothing matters, but we can be funny.
The Waste Land feels the profound void left by God’s absence and can barely hope for Faith through its Shantihs. Everything Everywhere All At Once, feels it, despairs that nothing can be done, and laughs, asking that we be nice to each other while we enjoy some moviegoing together.
A hundred years and little has changed. Eliot did eventually come to see reality in a fuller light than he did in 1922. And I believe the poem that actually fully expresses and captures the twentieth century is not The Waste Land but his late Four Quartets (1943), wherein purgatorial flames enact and fulfill the struggle for belief. War, disaffection, belief, art, and even people like you and me—all find their right place in the order of things, playing their harmonious part in the dance of the world’s still point. The Descent of the Holy Ghost resolves the earlier agony for form. The corpses of WWI and shattered images planted in The Waste Land really do end up giving birth to new life. In a last rejoinder to his earlier poetry, the last stanza of Four Quartets contains a Christian answer to Shantih Shantih Shantih. Borrowing from Julian of Norwich, Eliot writes, “And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well.”
It took Eliot roughly twenty years to answer back to himself in The Waste Land with the more complete vision of reality captured in Four Quartets. How long will it take a filmmaker to answer back to Everything Everywhere All At Once?
[1] A whole heap of poignant satire could be written about Lear and presidential elections. Is Biden Lear or one of his daughters?
[2] Cf. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”: “The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full. . .But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”
[3] TWL
[4] Remember how I mentioned 2 things happening.
[5] Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Sheinert.
[6] Sorry about earlier.
[7] There is something McLuhanian waiting to be written about the film’s use of electronic media/technology and the EEAO’s multiverse.