Color Study of Everything Everywhere All at Once
Introduction
At the most recent Academy Awards, the indie sci-fi action film Everything Everywhere All at Once was crowned with seven awards, including best picture, director, original screenplay, and lead actress. In the movie, the Wang family snuggles with a tax problem with the IRS regarding their family laundromat’s business operation. Besides the financial problem that promotes the film’s plot, the story also includes Evelyn’s conflicts with her lesbian daughter, Joy. Through traveling between the multiverse, Evelyn has the opportunity to see different versions of her life and eventually learns her determination to protect the family. The motion picture struck a chord with the Asian community worldwide while embedding the cultural symbols of minority groups into the mainstream Hollywood market. In addition to the complexity of the plot and the adoption of a multiversal aesthetic, Everything Everywhere All at Once impresses the audience with the brilliant and profound utilization of cinematic color. In this film, colors are precisely chosen to draw out the characters’ screen personalities and to help the audience interpret Chinese cultural elements and Asian philosophical thinking that appear on the screen.
The principles of color, tone, and composition in making a painting a fine art could also be applied to make a colored motion picture a work of art. The design and colors of sets, costumes, and furnishings are planned and selected just as artists would choose the colors from their palettes and apply them to the proper portions of their paintings. When choosing a specific color, filmmakers focus on the general human cognition associated with a particular color. Nevertheless, there is always the option of subjective reading, which depends on personal preference for color and the benefits of harmonious combinations. The color tone of a film depends significantly on the worldview and creativity of the director, cameraman, and colorist. By understanding color, directors could evoke dramatic emotion and impression in the audience. Thus, color does play a symbolic role in cinema. American abstract painter Mark Rothko says, “a painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.” Similarly, a motion picture is an experience itself, and colors enrich this experience — they are capable of producing energy, exhaustion, and even plenitude in viewers.
Red
Red is undoubtedly the most favored national color in traditional Chinese culture, as it stands for vitality, long life, happiness, and success. Usually used in particular contexts, it manifests the material and spirit pursuit of generations of Chinese people. In the second half of the movie, the Wang family gathers in the laundromat with friends to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Characters are in red outfits surrounded by decorations such as red lanterns, red couplets, and red hanging backdrops (Fig. 1.1). Although there is no caption reminding the audience of the special occasion, the overuse of red color in the room has already made everything clear. As the film itself is a phenomenon of cross-cultural production between the West and the East, the color interpretation is a mix of both cultures. In western counties, red, in fact, has the meaning of violence and anger. It is the strongest one of all kinds of colors for the person’s eyes and brain. The off-white washing machines, the wooden walls, and the dazzling fluorescent lights contribute to a weird atmosphere. Red elements in this scene seem even more obtrusive from the background, implying to the audience that the final brutal and violent conflict of the story has not come yet.
For most of the film, Evelyn is shown wearing a flowery shirt with a red vest and a pair of scarlet slip-on sneakers (Fig. 2.1). Indeed, she is meant to represent red across the multiverse. In the universe where she becomes an action movie star, she wears a red kung fu jacket (Fig 2.2); in her life as an opera singer, she is dressed in red-and-pink costumes (Fig 2.3); she is also shown in red during several flashback sequences (Fig 2.4). Different shades of red suggest various phases of life, such as love, physical strength, passion, excitement, anger, turmoil, revenge, and shame, that complement the establishment of the heroine. In the story, Evelyn Wang breaks the rule of a typical patriarchal Asian family: she is the primary operator of the family business. At the end of the movie, she saves the universe with her superb fighting skills. Red underscores the violence, strength, and intensity of her characteristics. As Berry argues that the color has the power “to expand and come out at you,” Evelyn gives the audience the primary and most appealing visual stimulation of the film.
Green
Waymond Wang, Evelyn’s goofy and meek husband, wears a long-sleeve striped green shirt for most of the film (Fig. 3.1). In Chinese culture, the color green represents health, patience, sensitivity, and harmony, which perfectly describes his personality. Waymond is an excellent example of both patience and sensitivity in this movie. Compared to the more familiar role conception of a heroic father, he is depicted as relatively feminine while constantly comforting his wife, who is burned out due to the family’s financial burden. Besides, he is seen to be the mediator amid various conflicts, showing understanding towards the rebellious daughter. Waymond associates with green color again when he talks to Evelyn in the alleyway, and a green lighting scheme bathes them both (Fig. 3.2). In this scene, the two movie stars reminisce about their “good old days” together before attaining fame. The utilization of green here unfolds their inside relief and calmness from letting go of the past.
Interestingly, green is precisely the opposite of red on a color wheel. They require each other. They incite each other to maximum vividness when together. The passion between this couple has almost been worn away due to their completely different dispositions and nearly leads to the end of their marriage. However, while defending their universe from being corrupted by evil forces, they learn to synthesize and become the perfect battle duo. Just like green and red happen to be a set of complementary colors, Waymond and Evelyn have polished away each other’s rough edges and repaired their relationship at the end of the movie.
Yellow
Yellow is a secondary color obtained by mixing Evelyn’s red with Waymond’s green. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, it becomes the symbol of Deirdre, an IRS inspector in charge of settling the Wang family’s annual tax. Throughout the entire film, she is in an ensemble of yellow clothing and accessories: a golden turtleneck sweater, light yellow cardigan, beige, yellow hand brace, plus a yellow beaded necklace set (Fig. 4.1). Even the snacks she eats in the scene are staged to be a box of orange juice and a piece of butter cookie. During the first meeting in her office, she chastises their family for an unbalanced accounting of their expenses and claims that she could sense something is not right inside the family. Throughout the storyline, tax is tightly linked with the concept of balance. For the Wang family, settling or balancing the tax they owe the federal government is a metaphor for finding balance and harmony. In this way, Deirdre is the vehicle through which Evelyn finds her balance again. Deirdre’s yellow neutralizes Mother Wang’s red and Father Wang’s green, suggesting a solution to the problem and the ultimate harmony of the family. In addition, It is generally believed that yellow is the color of friendship. And in Chinese culture, particularly, yellow is associated with empathy, warmth, and good faith. At the beginning of the film, Deirdre and Evelyn could not have less empathy for each other. However, by the end, they find a way to bridge the gap, understand each other, and develop a precious friendship.
Rainbow
Another leading character in the story is Evelyn’s daughter Joy. As part of the LGBTQ+ community, her sexual orientation has been a taboo inside the family and is challenging the relatively conventional ideology defended by Evelyn and Grandpa Wang. In Alpha-universe, failing to stand the pressure from her mother, Joy turns out to be the villain, Jobu Tupaki, whose growing nihilism threatens the entire multiverse. Jobu wears vibrant and abstract clothing with no actual common thread or pattern throughout the movie (Fig. 5.1) since she is the embodiment of chaos and meaninglessness. The colorfulness of Jobu’s costumes strongly contrasts the monochromatic clothes worn by her parents, alluding to two sets of standards they believe in. Her mashup of every color on the rainbow manifests a rebellious nature and the longing for her own authentic way of living (Fig. 5.2).
Moreover, the rainbow-like outfits could also be interpreted as an intimation of the pride flag associated with Joy’s self-identification. Jobu’s bold fashion keeps reminding the audience of elementary school drawings in which every bright color one could imagine is used. The motion picture references Joy’s second-grade doodles (Fig. 5.3). Jobu’s pointless dressing style and young Joy’s colorful drawings reflect a state of freedom and autonomy. Throughout the film, Jobu does talk and acts like a child, and it is because the rules of society do not mean anything to her. Hence, it allows her to flaunt bright, vibrant colors and clothing that most people would never choose to wear in their lives.
Black and White
The villain’s evil plan in Everything Everywhere All at Once involves creating the ultimate Everything Bagel. Jobu shows her Bagel to Evelyn: a swirling mass of everything, which collapsed in on itself and became a pit of oblivion, pulling universes into it and annihilating them (Fig. 6.1). And in the middle of that everything, at the core of the oppressive black Bagel, is a white emptiness. On the one hand, It is the symbol of despair and nihilism that built up the character of Jobu. For Joy, who lives in the dominant universe, it represents her lack of identity, both as a lesbian and a second-generation immigrant, due to the culturally-laden pressure given by Evelyn. On the other hand, the Bagel is an infinite loop that denotes Evelyn’s meaningless, tiring, and repetitive life in the laundromat that she could not escape from. The ominous black circle appears several times throughout the film like a curse on the family: once as a cabinet ornament (Fig. 6.2) and the other time as an ink mark on the family’s tax files (Fig. 6.3). The conception of the black Bagel indeed reveals a fundamental idea in Buddhism that all things exist only through people’s perception of said things. Therefore, they have no inherent meaning and are all empty. Emptiness in Buddhism can often lead to nihilism because it seems to imply that nothing matters.
Black has a distinctly harmful and destructive aspect, recalling night, fear, darkness, and crime. In some circumstances, black also denotes strength and authority in Chinese culture, which explains the momentousness of the black Bagel in the story. Its opposite color, white, reflects the most significant amount of light. It emanates a luminosity that symbolizes the spirit and is associated with brides and purity in Western culture. However, in the traditional Chinese perspective, white makes people tend to think of solemn mourning, which originated from ancient times as the color of superstition. The room where Jobu displays her Bagel is designed to be in absolute white to establish a sacred atmosphere (Fig. 6.4). White color in China is a symbol of death and lifelessness. The centre of Jobu’s Bagel is white emptiness that discloses the truth of the universe that nothing matters. Nevertheless, when black color and white color appear together, they hold essential meanings in Chinese culture and are most often related to yin and yang (Fig. 6.5).
The yin is the black side of the circle with a white dot in the middle of the Everything Bagel. It represents a feminine or negative energy which implies Jobu Tupaki’s nihilistic worldview. The destructive and detrimental nature of this character is due to the lack of yang energy to balance the yin for her. The yang is the white side of the circle with a black dot in the middle, signifying more masculine energy, and is generally believed to be the positive side of the yin-yang circle. Accordingly, it stands for Waymond Wang, a male character who chooses to resolve problems with kindness, love, and optimism. Apart from the Everything Bagel, the black-and-white Googly Eye refers to the yin and yang philosophy as well.
The Googly Eye has a black centre surrounded by white, a direct mirror image of the nihilistic Everything Bagel (Fig. 6.6). It says that in the universe of meaningless emptiness, there is value, joy, and love where people choose to create it. During one of the spectacular fight scenes, Evelyn puts a Googly Eye, the symbol of her husband, on her forehead as the spiritual “third eye.” From this moment on, she is enlightened: she moves like a dancer, with effortless grace and a peaceful smile, fighting with love and kindness instead of hurting anyone. Evelyn begins to repair everything she has destroyed in each universe as well as her relationship with Joy, with acts of kindness and love. In Buddhist thought, it is compassion that makes everyone human, and emptiness is not the mark of nihilism and despair but an opportunity to leave behind the bad and cherish the good.
Conclusion
Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most serene films in years — it invites the audience to embrace the chaos and immerse themselves in the exploration of love and meaning in life. The daring and extravagant use of colors substantially contributes to the enormous success of the motion picture both financially and critically. The color that appears in the scenes influence the development of the plot and the emotional state of the audience while providing valuable insights into the interpretation of characters and cinematic themes.
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