For characters to multiverse jump in order to garner the special skills needed to fight, their present self has to do the most unlikely and most ridiculous thing to slingshot them to the universe with the different version of themselves that has those skills. (Who’s to differentiate the last two, anyway?) When the time comes to call back to this joke, its thin surprise lies less in what happens but more in how it happens. But as the Daniels engage and endeavor to stretch these cinematic, comedic, and philosophical boundaries, letting them bleed and explode into one another, there’s a bizarre reflex to also rely on the pedestrian and the stale.Ī butt plug is an award for dealing with IRS bullshit, the word association game for such arduous processes branching out from the filmmaking team’s well-worn undergraduate brand of crassness: hardass, anal retentive, pain and/or pleasure.

The film is always figuring out where to place the tension of a joke, as if the universe is indeed laughing at us. If its other jokes show how sweeping, universe-jumping film comedy can be, this one butt plug gag was tethered to the ground I already know.Įverything Everywhere All At Once concerns Evelyn, whose world is broken open during a tax audit when she's declared the multiverse’s only possible savior (while juggling a failing marriage and a brooding, aimless queer daughter). As the film compartmentalizes queer love as having a girlfriend, being depressed and nihilistic, and not being accepted by your mother, it shies away, for whatever reason, from the pleasure of it all, or at least a universe where that might exist. But that it doesn’t tacitly reveals how its writers conceptualize queerness and gratification. It’s understandable if a joke doesn’t work. Is the joke two guys sticking something up their ass? Is it the power that they find when they do it? Is it the revulsion Evelyn feels after defeating them by removing the objects from their orifices? When the joke turns into a whole scene, where two henchmen (played by the film’s choreographers Brian Le and Andy Le) going after Evelyn, the owner of a laundromat played by Michelle Yeoh, furiously race to insert the trophy into themselves to “verse jump” and find the martial artist within, its humorous goals get muddied. Or, given the rules established by the film, perhaps it's both and neither at the same time. The filmmaking duo’s trick is mostly done so well that one is unsure of whether it’s a joke fractured into epistemological inquiry, or epistemological inquiry shattered into a joke. Everything Everywhere All At Once is, in its way, directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's take on wonderland, if wonderland were an infinite multiverse. It wouldn’t be so far-fetched to call Curtis’s character this film’s Red Queen, capable of both laying down a law of cruel realism as well as its intended opposite: pure illogical chaos. Generosity could call the gag absurd, but only so that the attribute can be used defensively later.

And then the joke is dilated beyond its limits. This image gets a laugh, perhaps because of its incongruousness or that its visual metaphor is barely veiled. They sit, three in a row, forebodingly in the corner of Deirdre’s little cubicle, almost overrun by paperwork. Each trophy is bulbous, unmoving, the neck tapered-and quite obviously, they are butt plugs. Jamie Lee Curtis’s dour IRS agent Deirdre shows us just how much bullshit she has to take doing her job in Everything Everywhere All At Once as the camera cuts past her to a line of awards, black and bruising like their recipient.

Haha butt minions