Ornamental Nihilism and Reparative Excess in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
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This paper examines how Everything Everywhere All at Once visualizes excess as both the culmination of and alternative to the collapsing logic of the American Dream. Drawing on theories of materiality, temporality, and affect, it analyzes Jobu Tupaki’s excessive costuming, the narrative device of the multiverse, and visual motifs such as the Everything Bagel and the googly eye to show how excess transforms from accumulation to collapse, and from collapse to care. Through close reading of the film’s aesthetic and formal strategies, the paper shows how the ideological promise of progress and accumulation is rendered as sensory overload, culminating in “ornamental nihilism,” an affective and temporal condition that emerges when accumulated achievements, credentials, and surfaces collapse into meaninglessness. Tracing the shift from this nihilistic endpoint toward an ethics of care grounded in kindness, this paper argues that Everything Everywhere All at Once reconfigures excess from a symptom of racialized failure into reparative politics that resists chrononormative organization, demonstrating how instability and incoherence can become generative frameworks for reading Asian Americanness.
Abstract
This paper examines how Everything Everywhere All at Once visualizes excess as both the culmination of and alternative to the collapsing logic of the American Dream. Drawing on theories of materiality, temporality, and affect, it analyzes Jobu Tupaki’s excessive costuming, the narrative device of the multiverse, and visual motifs such as the Everything Bagel and the googly eye to show how excess transforms from accumulation to collapse, and from collapse to care. Through close reading of the film’s aesthetic and formal strategies, the paper shows how the ideological promise of progress and accumulation is rendered as sensory overload, culminating in “ornamental nihilism,” an affective and temporal condition that emerges when accumulated achievements, credentials, and surfaces collapse into meaninglessness. Tracing the shift from this nihilistic endpoint toward an ethics of care grounded in kindness, this paper argues that Everything Everywhere All at Once reconfigures excess from a symptom of racialized failure into reparative politics that resists chrononormative organization, demonstrating how instability and incoherence can become generative frameworks for reading Asian Americanness.