Is Everything Everywhere all at once a Murdock’s heroine's journey?

Lets walk through Murdock's heroine's journey diagram and see if we can apply any of it to everything everywhere all at once. Separation from the feminine: As we saw when we analyzed quicksand, we can see separation from the feminine as separation from the mother, which definitely applies to Everything Everywhere all at once. In a way, the defining struggle of the movie was the disconnect between Joy and her mother Evelyn. In the original universe, Joy and Evelyn fight over how to introduce Joy’s girlfriend to Eveyln’s dad. Underlying this, is Joy’s belief that her mom thinks she’s a screw up. Joy’s alpha-verse self, also known as Jobu Tupaki, expresses this belief in a scene where she tells her original universe Evelyn that when one puts everything on a bagel it becomes nothingness. In this metaphor, Evelyn’s expectations of Joy/Jobu are the “everything” being put on a bagel. This leads to the bagel, or Joy/Jobu, collapsing in on itself and turning into a quasi-black hole. Separation from the feminine sets us up to believe that the heroine of this journey is Joy, but that doesn’t make sense for the rest of the story, where Evelyn is the one that ultimately brings the villain, Jobu Topaki, to rest. 

So, what about if the one separating herself from the feminine is Eveyln? Well that throws the mother-daughter approach kind of out the window since Evelyn wasn’t intentionally pushing her daughter away. The beginning of her adventure occurs in the elevator, when alpha-verse Waymond comes to her. I honestly don’t see this as separation from the feminine, since her universe isn’t feminine. The idea that the heroine’s journey centers around a fundamental difference between the masculine and the feminine forces me to ascribe a fundamental difference between the feminine and the masculine that I don’t believe in to apply any story to Murdock’s heroine's journey. So, for the sake of continuing the analysis, I’ll make a stretch by saying that Evelyn’s universe is “feminine” because it includes a lot of menial and domestic labor. In this case, her separation from the feminine is her “call to action” from alpha-universe Waymond when she decides to commit herself to working with the alpha-universe. I think that this step is also “Identification with the masculine and the gathering of allies”. 

From here on out, the road map is slightly clearer. The road of trials, which is one of the most unanimous steps in any hero’s journey, is Evelyn learning to navigate her new universe jumping powers, fighting the tax-collector, and then fighting her alpha-verse dad who was trying to kill Joy. Logically, her booms of success are when she does conquer her opponents in the fights. Similarly, another core part of the hero’s journey is the “death” step when something really bad happens that forces the hero or the heroine to come back from a loss they never believed they could’ve. In Evelyn’s case this loss happens when alpha-verse Waymond dies. 

Initiation and descent to the goddess can be seen in multiple ways, and this step in the hero’s journey was also very flexible. There is usually a lot of ambiguity when contemplating who the Goddess is, and Everything Everywhere all at Once is no exception. I believe the Goddess to be Jobu Topaki because she showed Evelyn what was wrong with her relationship with her daughter when she showed her the everything donut early on in the movie, which helped Evelyn reconcile with Joy in the end. On the other hand, Jobu is the villain so that complicates things. The other option for the “goddess” could be all the alternate versions of Evelyn. While Evelyn in verse jumping to use her alternate versions abilities in her fights, she also critically reflects on what her life would’ve been like if she hadn’t chosen to come to America or left Waymond. These experiences give her appreciation for her own life and her relationship with Waymond, which also helps them reconcile in the end. 

All this is to say that Everything Everywhere All at Once can be considered a Murdock’s heroine’s journey as long as one is willing to be flexible with the terms of masculine/feminine, and blurr some of the lines about what consists of a Goddess or not. All in all, hero/heroine’s journey’s are rarely worth contemplating if they fit the mold perfectly, so I don’t think we should discount the deviations from the heroine’s journey that Everything Everywhere All at Once makes, and instead celebrate them because they make for an interesting narrative. 

Murdock Template taken from Dr. E’s Uni High Wordpress