Bagel Noir

Dear Diary –

You’ll be thrilled to hear this, the answer to my and all demolished lives: at least in theory, there are lots more!  Nah, not afterlives but parallels, infinite variations on the same life happening simultaneously.  What a relief, huh? This mess is only going on here, but in scads of parallel universes, it isn’t.  Good to know!

Of course I’ve read about parallel universes, but today I did Step1 in several icky guides for the recently divorced – “Go to a movie alone.”  The idea is to sweep into a theater full of people who still like each other as if you’re only there because your cousin is an extra in the escaped octopus scene and you promised her you’d see it.  At the end you’re supposed to watch the credits avidly, smile and nod at some name that at least matches your ethnicity and then appear to be texting somebody as you hurry out toward an important destination.

Unfortunately, I go to movies on weekday afternoons to avoid getting Covid, so I missed out on impressing hundreds of happy people with my Alone Cool.  In the entire theater were only three other people – two beefy guys in shirts with the name of a local solar panel installer embroidered across the backs and a very pale woman with a giant bucket of popcorn to which she spoke softly until they dimmed the lights.  We all four assiduously feigned ignorance of each others’ existence throughout the whole two and a half hours of Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Within the first ten minutes of this talked-about movie I already had a headache from the incessant jump cuts, but I didn’t care.  Because 59-yr-old Michelle Yeoh’s sweet (and strangely cast as too-young-for-her, at first I thought he was her son) husband has given up on their life and filed for divorce!  Oh yeah, this one is for me.

Yeoh is gorgeous and famous for those upscale martial arts movies (Remember her in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?), and I settled in to identify with her character.  Because she and the endlessly nice spouse, although he always looked and acted pretty much the same, had multiple parallel lives.  In all of which she had to save all the universes from destruction by a throbbing black “everything” bagel representing disillusion, nihilism, hopelessness and just giving up.  Baaad bagel.  And very familiar.

But Yeoh gradually stepped out of her current universe to become multiple other selves – a celebrated singer, sign-spinner, martial-arts superstar, speed-kniving Asian chef and even the partner of Jamie Lee Curtis in a sweetly domestic and (in my rather informed view) shamelessly unrealistic lesbian marriage, and finally, a rock, literally. Throughout, she wipes out armies of heavily armed guys in uniforms without breaking a sweat, no doubt due to her history in all those martial arts movies.  She totally kicks ass in all three named (“Everything,” “Everywhere,” and “All at Once”) divisions of the movie.  Which is all that matters because by halfway through Division 2 it’s impossible to follow any plot or narrative thread, but who cares?  She gets to be all her unrealized selves and save infinite universes at the same time while not a single parallel-universe spouse-self does anything but stick with her.  Go, Yeoh!

In the parking lot I karate-kicked my car and smiled at all my selves having a much better time in other universes where that dark bagel is probably just a glazed donut.