Why Everything Everywhere All At Once Is Addicted To Color — And What It Means
For a movie that’s nominated in the Best Costume Design category at the 2023 Oscars, Everything Everywhere All At Once uses every single shred of clothing to reinforce how we perceive these characters.
Particularly the color of their clothing.
My thesis is that this movie uses colors like red, green, white, black, and yellow to tell a story within a story that you might not have noticed upon your first viewing.
By the way, if you want to watch the VIDEO version of this analysis, click the video down below (and consider subbing to my channel).
The Colors Of Jobu Tupaki
Jobu’s seen wearing vibrant clothing with no real common thread or pattern throughout the movie.
It makes sense for Jobu, because she’s the embodiment of chaos and pointlessness.
Jobu’s wild mash up of every color on the rainbow is like staring at a 2nd graders drawing from school with every bright color you could imagine.
It’s not the sistine chapel.
Funny enough, this movie does reference one of Joy’s 2nd grade drawings. Once when Evelyn sees fat fingers on it while doing her taxes and unwittingly uses that as a jumping pad to the hot dog finger universe, and another time when Jobu and Evelyn literally have a fight in a bright, vibrant, 2nd graders drawing universe.
Kids. What do we know about them? They’re kind of ridiculous, right? They do stupid stuff that doesn’t make any sense, and they rebel against the rules, so they use every color they can to make their drawings more interesting.
It makes sense Jobu would, many times, act like a child since the rules of society don’t mean anything to her and are pointless. Allowing her to flaunt bright, vibrant colors and clothing that most people would never wear in their lives helps drive that point home.
Now what about that bagel? It’s black, isn’t it? Did you ever mix up all the paints one time in elementary school? What did you get?
Black. That’s what happens when you mix every color together. You get black. It makes a lot of sense that the “everything” bagel, which Jobu Tupaki puts literally everything on, turns out to be black in the end.
There’s one other really important element to this thesis.
As we know, the Wang’s are a Chinese family, and Chinese culture is infinitely present throughout the entire movie.
It makes sense, then, to see what these colors mean in Chinese culture.
The Meaning Of Black and White In Chinese Culture
Let’s start with white. The color of Jobu Tupaki’s bagel dimension. White is associated in Western culture with brides and purity, but in Chinese culture it’s a completely different story, and the significance makes a ton of sense in the context of Everything Everywhere All At Once.
In Chinese culture, death is represented by the color white. It’s one of the unlucky colors, apparently, and is associated with mourning. Because of that, it’s the color worn at funerals by Chinese people.
It makes sense that Jobu’s bagel dimension, the center of truth in this movie that states nothing matters, is the same color representing death in Chinese culture.
The death of meaning. The death of our souls, since we no longer have anything meaningful to strive for.
What about black?
Black represents power, knowledge, and authority. It’s thought that black is associated with evil and destruction, which is why you shouldn’t wear it at a wedding or a happy event.
The bagel is truth, right? Nothing matters. It’s also the ultimate power, showing that it can devour Jobu Tupaki and anyone who gets too close to it.
The destructive nature of the bagel ties right in to what black means in Chinese culture, but there’s another important Chinese concept represented, in part, by black, and that’s the Yin and the Yang.
The Yin And Yang
You might’ve noticed all the googley eyes in Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s Waymond’s signature. His last name is Wang — a name that Evelyn later takes as her own. Wang — Yang. Evelyn — Ying.
The yang is the white side of the circle with the black dot in the middle, or the googley eyes. It represents a more masculine energy, and is generally looked at as the “positive” side of the yin-yang circle. It makes sense that this would represent Waymond, a guy who chooses to fight his problems with love, kindness, and optimism.
The yin is the black side of the circle, and represents a feminine energy that’s more mysterious, dark, and negative. That perfectly sums up Jobu Tupaki’s nihilitic world view. The problem is, she’s lost in that. There is no yang to balance the yin for her, and that causes the entire multiverse to feel the effects.
Evelyn is the yin, too. Which is why, originally, it’s so easy for her to get on the same page with Joy and believe that nothing matters. Evelyn and Waymond give balance to one another, it just took Evelyn the entire movie to see that. When she finally does provide space for yang, by putting the google eye on her head, she’s able to save Jobu Tupaki, and provide balance to the multiverse.
The Colors Of Waymond and Evelyn
Waymond, for most of the movie, wears a green long-sleeve shirt. When he talks to Evelyn in the alleyway, a green lighting scheme bathes them both.
He represents the color green.
In Chinese culture, the color green represents health, patience, sensitivity, harmony, and wealth. I think Wang is a great example of both patience and sensitivity in this movie. He’s the guy who brings their sworn IRS enemy cookies for crying out loud.
Eveleyn is shown wearing a flowery shirt with a red vest for most of the movie. She also wears red at her party and is shown in red during flashback sequences.
She represents red.
Red is the national color of China, as seen at the Wang’s party, and red means vitality, long life, happiness, and success. It’s also thought to bring luck, recognition, and fame.
It makes sense that Evelyn would wear red, China’s color, because she ends up being successful in saving the multiverse and finding happiness along the way.
So Wang represents green and Evelyn represents red.
What’s the opposite of red on the color wheel?
Green.
This color scheme drives home the yin/yang relationship between Evelyn and Wang even further.
What do you get when you mix green and red together?
Yellow.
Deirdre’s Color
Which brings me to Jamie Lee Curtis’ character, Deirdre. She’s shown in yellow for pretty much the entire film except for a few sequences. What does she do? She attempts to settle the Wang family’s taxes for that year. In their first meeting, she chastises their family for an unbalanced accounting of their expenses. She can sense something is “not right” with their family, or, in other words, something isn’t balanced.
It’s interesting that taxes are used in this movie at all. When you run a business, you need to keep receipts of every business expense — not to mention earnings, too.
At the end of the year, you bring all those receipts with you, do your taxes, pay what you owe the federal government, and all is settled, or balanced.
For a movie that’s all about finding balance and harmony, taxes might just be the perfect metaphor for that.
So, therefore, it makes sense that Deirdre would wear yellow as she’s the vehicle through which Evelyn finds her balance again. Evelyn’s red mixes with Wang’s green to create yellow — the fusion between yin and yang that Deirdre helps facilitate for Evelyn.
If you remember, Wang speaks to Deirdre when she’s about to arrest Evelyn and convinces her to let her go.
Then Deirdre and Evelyn have a conversation that starts Evelyn’s transformation. Not to mention Deirdre is the first person Evelyn fights with love and kindness at the end of the movie, marking the beginning of her openness to the yang. Afterwards she blocks the bullets from hitting Deirdre, and in that moment she takes one of the bullets, turns it into a googley eye, and places it on her forehead.
Deirdre is the vehicle through which Evelyn finds her balance.
In Chinese culture, yellow is associated with empathy, warmth, and good faith. Empathy. At the beginning of the film, Deirdre and Evelyn couldn’t have less empathy for each other. But by the end, they find a way to bridge the gap, understand each other, and develop, well, a friendship.
Color is so integral to Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s used to represent all the possibilities of the multiverse, and ideas like chaos, order, knowledge, empathy, success, sensitivity, and death.
I always used to think that the best costumes category at the Oscars was largely just a throwaway category.
It’s not.
When taken seriously, it can add a whole other level of meaning to the story, and I think Everything Everywhere All At Once represents that so perfectly.
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