![]() As co-director Daniel Scheinert said (in the afore-referenced article by Puchko), “… we’re kind of always trying to just allow ourselves to inject playfulness, even into things we care deeply about.” A metamodern tonal braiding has the effect of protecting the characters’ interiority from being dissolved by any single one of the braided tones. Most obviously, this film braids together multiple tones/moods: silly, cosmic-trippy, intimate, and volatile. Please bear with me as I attempt to make my points in a way that will be meaningful to folks who have seen the film and also those who have not, while keeping spoilers at a minimum.ġ. ![]() But, that is just one of a number of metamodern elements strongly driving this film, which I’ll enumerate briefly now. ![]() Kwan was referring to the film’s version of intertextuality (or hyper-self-reflexivity) as metamodern. What Kwan is talking about sounds a lot like what, in my article, “Eleven Metamodern Methods in the Arts,” I have called Hyper-Self-Reflexivity, a version of intertextual self-reflexivity that goes beyond postmodernism’s penchant for referentiality that might be done simply for the wry, cheeky cleverness of it, and towards a metamodern version that serves the purpose of bringing viewers and characters closer together, via their shared experience of – but also in – that media-saturated world. I’m so glad that came through and it doesn’t feel like cheap references, because we love all those things we’re referencing.” ![]() It’s more about what is honest and what is personal. And this film is basically trying to acknowledge that weird thing that’s happening right now, where we are at peak media saturation, peak story saturation. We’re so film-literate that it’s really hard to surprise (the audience). “It’s us trying to grapple with the fact that we are film lovers, who’ve grown up watching so many movies, so much so that we can guess everything that’s going to happen. When I posed this to Daniels, Kwan pondered, “I think that’s the version of post-postmodernism that we’re hunting for - that metamodernism, if I’m going to be obnoxious.” However, the allusions that Daniels employ - be they references to their casts’ other films, a rampaging Racacoonie, or a DIY Jurassic Park theme - feel personal, like a poignant form of postmodernism. With allusions, there’s a danger that the filmmaker is using a cheap trick to engage their audience, referencing a popular thing the viewer already presumably loves. In discussing EEAAO’s intertextuality, Kristy Puchko, author of the aforementioned article, employs the term “poignant postmodernism” but then Kwan instead identifies “metamodernism” as a more apt description of the controlling epistemic sensibility of his film: The film is also chock-full of references to other films. Everything Everywhere All at Once is the April 2022 box-office surprise from writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (often referred to as “The Daniels” or just “Daniels”) that brings together existential explorations of multiple-reality theory and nihilism, with martial-arts action, comedy, and a touching story about an immigrant family going through a multidimensional, non-linear reckoning in which their shaky bonds are reconsidered.
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