Jocasta's Silence 2

party review: positivist jamboree

I am sitting in a San Fransisco apartment with a low dose of acid wearing off texting Mom: “you have to watch this film, it will make you understand your whole life. thank you for sacrificing everything interesting about yourself to let me be interesting”

Freud believes the oedipal desire is “kill father fuck mother” but Oedipus didn’t desire either of those things. Those things happened to him by bad luck. Oedipus Rex was a play Freud walked out of that gave him some thoughts, like art is supposed to do. Freud’s art gave me different thoughts, so I use his word oedipal to invoke the parent-child conflict. In the context of art, oedipal parent-child conflicts are archetypal like Freud’s, not literally rooted in the banal realities of each particular parental relationship, because the banal realities of the conflict are curated by the artist.

This year’s Best Picture winner, instant millennial classic Everything Everywhere All At Once, is a “my parents can’t possibly understand me” oedipal narrative. There are four meaningful characters in Everything Everywhere All At Once: the asian immigrant mother, her loyal husband, their rebellious college dropout daughter, and the mother’s traditional patriarchal father who never immigrated to America. The oedipal conflict is between the mother and the daughter, but unlike most narratives about a child who isn’t understood by their parents, it’s told from the perspective of the mother. 

The mother is struggling to find fulfillment in her difficult life, and is pushed to a breaking point when she visits an IRS office. Her family’s boring old laundromat is being audited for financial inconsistencies, her husband wants to divorce her, her father may soon die so he is visiting them in America, and most importantly, she cannot relate to her daughter. Her daughter dropped out of college, got tattoos, is dating a girl, and the mother does not accept her for these things. In her moment of weakness the mother is sent on an interdimensional vision quest, during which she learns appreciation for her life and her daughter. 

The vision quest shows the mother the other lives she could have lived. In the main reality, her father encouraged her not to marry her husband, and she sees the love that resulted from the choice she made to be with him. In alternate universes where she did not marry her husband, she’s more successful but less fulfilled. She visits one universe in which she is a successful actress and her husband is a successful businessman. While both of them are successful, they are not happy because they are not together. The husband of this dimension tells her “in another life, I think I would have really liked just doing taxes and laundry with you”.

The antagonist of the vision quest is the daughter. In an alternate universe, the mother was a great scientist, one of the pioneers of multiverse-jumping technology. She pushed her daughter too far, tiger mom style, and the daughter became an all-powerful interdimensional being who feels all universes at once. This daughter has felt the failure of her mother in all universes, all the ways she’s been let down, the oedipal failure of the parent an interdimensional inevitability.

The daughter kills the mother as revenge in her main universe, but seeks across all universes to find a different mother, one that could understand her worldview, her belief that nothing in the entire multiverse could matter. She finds the mother of this universe, a laundromat owner who has failed to achieve any of her own dreams, and shows this mother her nihilistic vision. 

Briefly, the mother succumbs to the nihilistic vision as she begins to relate to her daughter, but she’s pulled out of it by her husband’s unfailing love and morality. As her daughter attempts to commit suicide into a black hole, the mother informs her own father that “I am no longer willing to do to my daughter what you did to me”, meaning that she’s unwilling to put up oedipal walls like her father did when he questioned the mother’s young love for her husband. 

The mother pulls her daughter out of the black hole to save her from nihilism with love. The rest of the family joins the mother, and the daughter is held from suicide by a familial chain of mother then grandfather then father. At first, the daughter still rejects her mother. Her mother has made progress, but the daughter still feels wrong: “For some reason, when I’m with you, it just hurts the both of us”. The mother lets her daughter fall into the black hole, to give her the space she wants. Then, with her own agency, once her mother has let her go, the daughter comes back. 

In that moment, the vision quest collapses, and the story returns to reality. The mother returns to the tax office with her daughter and father and husband at her side. Family facing the boring problems of the world. 

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The oedipal “my parents can’t understand me” narrative is gender-neutral and parent-neutral. It is about rejecting the feeling that your life is defined by your parents, it is about assertion of adolescent identity. But in narrative fiction it matters which parent is chosen when. 

Oedipal conflicts with the father are around judgmental parental authority. In many Disney films built around the “my parents can’t understand me” conflict, the parent is the father.  High School Musical and Jump In! have fathers that desire their sons spend their time on masculine physical interests rather than feminine artistic ones. The Little Mermaid’s conflict is that Ariel’s father forbids her from going to the world she desires above the ocean. 

Oedipal conflicts with the mother are conflicts of emotional understanding. Children come into conflict with the mother not because of a specific judgment of the mother, but because they can’t relate with the mother’s world. These are harsher and more thorough rejections of parental authority because they aren’t centered around one single event. 

Lady Bird is a masterful mother-daughter oedipal conflict. The daughter believes she belongs to a world more cultured than Sacramento, and her mother is the most common place where she lays the blame. The film begins with the daughter jumping out of a car to escape her mother, when the mother says her daughter’s dream of going to college on the east coast is impossible. Lady Bird navigates the mother-daughter oedipal conflict with admirable grace, showing how silly the daughter is in her teenage desires for austerity while also giving her dignity based on her desires. 

The daughter achieves her dream of going to school in cultured New York City, but faces challenges there too. On her first day in New York, the daughter leaves her mother a voicemail, thanking her mother for everything she’s done for her. You can say that because it's a voicemail the narrative is silencing the mother’s voice for the child’s soliloquy, and that's true but it’s wrong. The mother doesn't speak because she has nothing to say. At the end of the conflict it's the daughter that needed a final moment of appreciation. It’s sad that the moment of appreciation only comes when the daughter crosses the country and leaves her family, but the film recognizes that it's sad. Lady Bird’s audience is rebellious teenage girls so a message of love between daughter and mother pointed at the daughter is a powerful ending. 

While Lady Bird silences the mother at its ending to put the final responsibility on the daughter for its mother-daughter conflict, Everything Everywhere All At Once silences the daughter through most of the narrative to put the oedipal responsibility on the mother. For most of the vision quest, the mother struggles with the way she’s let down her daughter, while the daughter starts valid and stays valid. This is a story of a mother learning to appreciate her daughter. The daughter as character has no story besides embracing the love that her mother has failed to give her.

This narrative would be okay if this were a story were oriented at mothers, about their unyielding responsibility to their children. But Everything Everywhere All At Once was not made for parents of college-aged children. It’s made for people in their twenties and thirties, which I know because it quotes lyrics from “Story of a Girl” (2000) and references Ratouille (2007) and whiplashes through quirky *holds up dildo* humor in a way that’s meant to evoke internet overexposure. Its audience is the child of its narrative.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is pretty mean to its immigrant mother, for supposedly telling a story from her perspective. Her english is worse than the father’s, and she’s mean and practical to customers of the store while he’s nice and idealistic. The film’s famous “raccaccoonie” joke is first played as a misunderstanding by the immigrant mother who doesn’t know enough about American pop culture and thinks the movie Ratatouille is about a raccoon, and the daughter and father share a laugh at how crazy and misinformed she is. Through the vision quests, as she learns the moral lessons of the film, she’s learning things her husband already knows.

The poorly-spoken naive mother is that of the main reality. The mother in all other realities is more successful; a scientist, a great actress, talented in kung fu. Through the vision quest she’s given her powers from other universes and becomes powerful. The film prefaces certain dimensional jumps with a character saying “that sort of jump would fry most people” and the husband speaking admirably about his wife “she’s not most people”. 

The result is that the mother is built up as an intrinsically valuable person who sacrificed her potential to build a stable and loving family with her husband and daughter. The mother herself has lost sight of that stable love, and that’s why she needs a vision quest, but the vision quest exists to unfold that truth to her and the viewer. Once the mother understands that, she can again love her daughter and appreciate her truth, that she’s the mom meant for laundry and taxes. The child still has chances to do something greater, but the mother’s strong spirit was converted into opportunity for her child. 

By telling this story from the perspective of the mother, its moral arc is comforting to the child because it puts the blame for the oedipal conflict on the parents and removes the child’s agency. It tells the child that their parents have failed them, and must atone for their failure. Everything Everywhere All At Once silences the mother while purporting to tell her story, pretending to be about love for mom while really loving the guilt you want mom to feel towards you.

The only moment of agency for the child in Everything Everywhere All At Once is the very end, where the daughter can choose to reject her reformed mother’s love even after her atonement.

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I’m being mean to Everything Everywhere All At Once, but this is how all oedipal “my parents can’t understand me” narratives end. One phone call to mom at the end of Lady Bird doesn’t change the direction of the eternal story. The child has a moment of love with their parents first, but we end where we started, with parent and child in different worlds, and the parent’s world is decidedly more boring.

This is a sad ending to the story, and a little bit mean to the parents, but I think kids are allowed to enjoy mean art as they define their own identity. Parents understand.