But also, the apology is sort of - you know, if you are a child, that your parent can apologize to you and make it all better. We know there are things a parent can do that are so abusive and so horrible that the child is right to cut them out of their life. So I think what the film is smart about is it's smart about - A, the fantasy of any given sin can be covered up by an apology, when we know that's not true. ST JAMES: Now, it is a thing that can be repaired, and it needs to start with an apology, but that can't be where it stops. MICHELLE YEOH: (As Evelyn Wang) You are getting fat, and you never call me even though we have a family plan.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE") ST JAMES: So the movie is about this woman named Evelyn, and she has a daughter named Joy, who's gay and has a girlfriend and constantly feels like her mother is just too hard on her. And I think where "Everything Everywhere All At Once" really gets into the problems with that fantasy is in its depiction of the ways that the many - and here I'm going to have to get into the plot of the movie. ST JAMES: I think what makes it a fantasy is the idea that, when the parent apologizes, it fixes 90% of what's wrong. PARKER: What makes it a fantasy when so much of it reflects many of our everyday experiences and emotions? But I think that that fantasy - as all fantasies - has a different set of blinders on that we sort of need to account for. But now I think we are skewing in the opposite direction, and I think that that is a necessary overcorrection. And then the kid's like, thank you for buying me a Pound Puppy when I was 4. And then the parent's like, oh, I'm sorry. And then, like, there's, like, a nod toward, well, maybe the parent wasn't always great. And I think that we have had movies that are literally the parent waiting to say thank you. But, like, I guess that old adage - what was it? - like, kids are waiting to hear I'm sorry, and parents are waiting to hear thank you. ST JAMES: There are so many children who need apologies from their parents, and it's not just those of us born between the years of 19. PARKER: Emily and I talk about the shift in perspective in the way families are portrayed, how it came to be, what its limits are and how it could bring about new kinds of stories about family and trauma. It's interested in questions of how does bad parenting - how does that intersect with the immigrant experience? How does that intersect with race? How does that intersect with queerness? - and then also an interest in intergenerational trauma.
ST JAMES: One of the things I think marks it as a subgenre is it's very interested in questions of intersectionality. And recently, she wrote about this subgenre I'm talking about, which she calls the millennial parent apology fantasy. She writes about how family relationships, queerness and the trans experience are portrayed on screen. These stories are helmed mostly by millennials of color.ĮMILY ST JAMES: And core to the idea of them is a bad parent who apologizes eventually, and that apology kind of fixes everything. Marvel." One movie like this that really struck me is "Everything Everywhere All At Once," which is about a mother, played by Michelle Yeoh, who travels across the multiverse to save her daughter and discovers different versions of her family. These past few months, I feel like I've been watching these really involved stories about families of color finding ways to heal their generational wounds or to see their ancestors as people, from the animated films "Encanto" and "Turning Red" to the recent miniseries "Ms. You're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR.