Essay: The Menopause Multiverse
On Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Via A24
Get the fuck out of my head, A24.
That was my first thought when I heard that their latest film was called Everything Everywhere All at Once. I doubt if many–if any–reviews will say it so, I will: THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT PERIMENOPAUSE IS! It is everything, It is everywhere. And it is all at once.
There is a wonderful scene, early in the film, when Evelyn, a Chinese-American woman played by Michelle Yeoh, is called on to jump between universes–”’verse jump” in the film’s vernacular–to accumulate skills from the alternative lives all the other Evelyns are living to save the multiverse from a “great evil.” It just so happens that a version of Evelyn is given this monumental news in a janitor’s closet just down the hall from the open-plan office where Evelyn of this universe, her husband Waymond, and her father are in a meeting with an IRS agent–played by the delightfully unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis.
As the IRS agent drones on about receipts that don’t add up, Evelyn of this universe appears to have drifted away. The agent and Evelyn’s father both think she’s incapable of focusing in the here and now and yell at her, whereas she is in fact learning to ‘verse jump. Hello! Superhero in the making! Who can focus on tax receipts?
What if that is what brain fog, one of the myriad impacts of perimenopause, is? The difficulty concentrating and thinking clearly can be disconcerting, yes. But I like to think of brain fog as the liberation of our imagination by perimenopause, nudging us into mental avenues we have not had the power or the audacity to tread before. It is called brain fog because it is non-linear thinking that does not pay attention or stay focused in the ways that we are “supposed to,” and patriarchy demonizes and pathologizes what is different.
And it is not just brain fog that I saw on the screen–perhaps “chose to see” is more accurate because I am in the throes of perimenopause and it is kicking my fucking ass. Quick explainer: menopause is a point in life that marks 12 months without a menstrual cycle. The time leading up to menopause is known as perimenopause, and once you’ve reached the point of 12 months without a menstrual cycle, you are post-menopausal. It can be difficult to explain the ways perimenopause, which can last between 10-14 years, affect the body, mind and emotions of a person going through it.
But now, whenever I want anyone to know how utterly wrenching–and also liberating– it is to go through perimenopause, I will say, nay YELL: EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE.
Everytime Evelyn rolls her eyes, says she’s not ready to fight, picks herself up again, bloodied but becoming steadily determined to break more bones of anyone who gets in her way, I want to point to the screen and shout “That’s it!” Between crushing anxiety, hot flashes, red hot rage and brain fog, who does not want to beat the whole world up?
Everything Everywhere All at Once is the perfect menopause allegory film. I don’t care if that’s not what The Daniels had in mind when they wrote and directed it. It’s art. It’s out there. And my menopause claims it!
And I don’t know if Michelle Yeoh has ever talked about her menopause transition. I don’t care, I love her. She’s four years older than me so I’m claiming her too. It is enough for me that Evelyn gets to beat people up AND have a breakdown of sorts because fuck, yes please! That is the essence of my perimenopause on any given day.
Evelyn left China and her controlling father for the U.S. with her then boyfriend, now husband, Waymond. As the film starts, she is in her 50s, mother to a queer daughter, co-owner of a struggling laundromat that is threatened with seizure by the IRS, and still trying to be dutiful to her father. How many films do you know that centre an Asian woman in her 50s? As Michelle Yeoh puts it, “... an aging Asian immigrant woman. When was the last time you saw that, right?”
Women of colour–older ones at that– are rarely allowed options and yet here is Evelyn with multiple universes, unbeknownst to anyone, including herself. It’s not just that you can’t be what you don’t see, it’s that she is so flattened from every angle–from her father who has flown all the way to the U.S. to continue the haranguing that was put on hold when she left, to the IRS agent auditing her laundromat and now this evil that is threatening to destroy the universe. If three dimensions once existed, they’ve collapsed into one, leaving us with barely-there Evelyn.
She is a woman who knows only what the world allows her to be and who has no time or privilege to know that she could have been something else. And then bang–’verse jumping!
I see that bang as perimenopause–that snapping into being as we become superheroes. The multiverse might not need us to save it, but our internal multiverse needs us to have a similar reckoning, to stand in the power of a self that has made it through the perimenopause and everything it threw at us, and to emerge as our own superheroes.
It is enough for me that Evelyn gets to beat people up AND have a breakdown of sorts because fuck, yes please! That is the essence of my perimenopause on any given day.
As she “‘verse jumps,” Evelyn is the perfect avatar for us folk on our menopause transition, being wrenched from one “what if” to another. An Evelyn in another universe is a glamorous film star and martial arts expert; another Evelyn is an opera singer whose father proudly introduces her on stage, rather than yelling at her for his breakfast in our world or cutting her down with biting remarks about her inability to finish anything.
I am 54 years old. I can barely watch films or TV shows these days because they are about either high school students or people who are 31 years old. Their dilemmas are so far in my past and the parents in the films or shows are too peripheral to the narrative to be worth my time. High school students and 31 year olds are not helping me with perimenopausal fuckery.
The rollercoaster of a film that is Everything Everywhere All At Once is the first time I feel someone has heard and given voice to the flood of “what if’s” that perimenopause has brought as well as the physical and emotional changes we are squeezed through to emerge as the superheroes we need to be.
“I saw my life without you. I wish you could have seen it. It was beautiful,” Evelyn tells her husband after one of her ‘verse jumps. And fuck me if that didn’t grab my heart and stomp on it. We laughed, yes of course we did. Because how dare an “intensely ordinary” Asian woman in her 50s imagine better for herself?
There is just no filmic universe that has housed such audacious ambition, hence the multiple ones The Daniels created.
What if my parents had never moved to London when I was seven years old, and had stayed in Egypt instead, like most of my extended family?
I regret nothing. But watching Everything, Everywhere, All at Once was cathartic. It made me imagine all those alternative Monas out there in their respective universes and I like to think that at least one of them winked at me as we fist bumped when she learned I am polyamorous, queer, and childfree by choice.
To see an Asian woman in her 50s ponder her other selves and the lives she could have had, is subversive. During a time when pandemic bigotry and violence in the U.S. is targeting Asians, especially women and elders, a film that centres an Asian woman in her 50s is subversive.
White women are allowed sliding doors in mainstream films, wherein Gwyneth Paltrow can have one life if she gets on a London Underground train, and another if she stays on the platform. Gwyneth Paltrow was 26 years old when she starred in Sliding Doors in 1998. Michelle Yeoh is 59. To ponder “what if” and take stock of your life at 26 is not the same as when you are 59.
To see an Asian woman in her 50s ponder her other selves and the lives she could have had, is subversive. During a time when pandemic bigotry and violence in the U.S. is targeting Asians, especially women and elders, a film that centres an Asian woman in her 50s is subversive.
“I felt that this was such a perfect opportunity to give a voice to the very ordinary mothers and housewives who are out there, you know, doing the most mundane things and get so taken for granted,” Yeoh told NPR. “And then let her discover that, oh, my God, she is a superhero.”
Evelyn is dragged kicking and screaming into realizing she is a superhero. Reluctant hardly covers it. Again and again she complains “I am not ready to fight.”
How many of us are ready for perimenopause? I am a feminist and until shamefully recently, I thought menopause would take a few months or so during which my period would sort of peter out and boom I’m done. Wow, have I learned.
But once Evelyn gets a taste of options–the What If’s–available to her alter egos in other universes, we understand why women are denied a three-dimensional life, why their imagination is flattened out of daring to want any more than what they have.
Because we would want more, we would want different, and how would our universe handle that, huh?!
Every time Evelyn sees her alternates in other universes and then beats the fuck out of someone in our universe, I feel vindicated. I know she’s doing it to save the multiverse from evil, but who wouldn’t want to beat the fuck out of everyone for all the lost opportunities and regrets that women are socialized into thinking are life?
The multiverse might not need us to save it, but our internal multiverse needs us to have a similar reckoning, to stand in the power of a self that has made it through the perimenopause and everything it threw at us, and to emerge as our own superheroes.
During that “brain fog” episode, when Waymond from Alpha verse is in the janitor’s closet explaining to Evelyn about ‘verse jumping, he picks up her frustration and impatience because Evelyn down the hall is being called by the IRS agent to “focus” and to not be distracted.
“My dear Evelyn, I know you. With every passing moment, you feel you might’ve missed your chance to make something of your life. I’m here to tell you: every rejection, every disappointment, has led you here, to this moment. Don’t let anything distract you from it.”
And Evelyn smiles, chuckles, and looks genuinely happy for the first time since the start of the film.
I like to think it’s because she understands that the next two hours are an allegory for menopause. Evelyn knows that this film is actually The Multiverse of the Menopause.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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