Very few films succinctly capture every emotion and feeling an entire generation, more or less, possesses. Two of those were released this year, namely, ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ and ‘The Worst Person in The World’. Their long titles themselves reflect the messiness and the ‘tough to summarise’ characters of the movies.
Both the movies have female protagonists, and both of them are far from your typical heroines. Calling them ‘flawed’ or ‘grey’ would be a cliché and disservice to both of them. They are so unique to a particular generation yet so timeless.
Very few films succinctly capture every emotion and feeling an entire generation, more or less, possesses. Two of those were released this year, namely, ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ and ‘The Worst Person in The World’. Their long titles themselves reflect the messiness and the ‘tough to summarise’ characters of the movies.
Evelyn (Everything Everywhere All At Once) and Julie (The Worst Person in The World) are too dreamy, distracted, and dilettante for their own good. Julie was a brilliant student who got into a medical college but threw it all out when she realised she wanted to deal with the human ‘soul’ and not human ‘anatomy’. It seems cringe to think like that when you are 30, but you are not 30, not at that point of time when you think like that.
Your brain is too idealistic to be so boring and clinical. We despised such realistic oldies and called them boomers back then. Julie soon realises how uninteresting even the human ‘soul’ is when wrapped around the terminologies and gibberish of an academic discipline, that is, Psychology. She jumps off to her next hobby, that is, photography, all along supported by her patient single mother. Meanwhile, her relationships and interests in men last as long as her interest in her new passion, till she finds herself settled with one and working in a bookstore. Her greatest achievement by the time she reached 30 was the one feminist article she published on a website. Relatable much?
Both the movies have female protagonists, and both of them are far from your typical heroines. Calling them ‘flawed’ or ‘grey’ would be a cliché and disservice to both of them. They are so unique to a particular generation yet so timeless.
Evelyn, on the other hand, is in her late 40s. She works in a laundromat and has a husband and a daughter. The work is tedious, customers are painful, and her life is drab and boring, nothing like she expected when she was young and moved from China to the US with her partner. Early in the movie, we are shown that Evylen has several interests, she bought a karaoke machine, joined a teaching class, and did a cooking class, but reality has its own cruel way of creeping up.
So, Evelyn never pursued any of her interests with the full commitment to turning them into a profession or at least monetising those. Thus they remained just ‘hobbies’ with no tangible benefits. She has been called the worst version of herself in the metaverse full of the better and accomplished version of ‘Evelyns’ who have achieved everything that our protagonist could not. Evelyn shows that there is no definite age to come of age.
These ostracised women could not find bliss in a supposedly happy married life while they also stuttered their way on to becoming the financially independent and strong women that they dreamt of. This in-betweenness, the feeling of being neither here nor there, becomes the source of unfathomable sorrow, meaninglessness as well as a very female-specific alienation.
Noah Baumbach made ‘Frances Ha’ back in 2012, which had a female protagonist who was in a constant struggle against the mediocrity she had thirsted upon herself. When asked what she does for a living? She replies with a hesitant “it’s hard to explain”. When asked, “Is it because what you do is complicated?” She says, “No, because I don’t really do it”. This string of conversations is not only sardonic but also encapsulates the heart of the movie and resonates with many.
Why have these stories suddenly found so much resonance in our times? What exactly has changed?
The choice of a female lead
One of the most common things about these movies, which are usually thrown into the category of “coming-of-age”, is that most of them have female protagonists. It asks the question, why is this binary feeling of “everything and nothing” best conveyed through a female character?
Julie summarises this feeling in one of her statements where she says, “I feel like I am playing a supporting character in my own movie”. It is true for many of us who lack the essential qualities of the main character by being neither extremely good nor bad, neither talented nor dull, neither everything nor nothing.
One answer could be found in the ‘Post-feminism’ that had been thirsted on the women who were born in the 90s and also faced the brutal reality of the #metoo era while growing up and after they were grown-ups. Women felt both the false promises of post-feminism and the totally different reality up close. They