Everything Everywhere All at Once's Bagel and Googly Eyes, Explained (2024)

Table of Contents

Summary The Meaning of the Bagel in Everything Everywhere All At Once What Everything Everywhere All at Once's Googly Eyes Represent Will Everything Everywhere All At Once Ever Get A Sequel? FAQs References

Summary

In Everything Everywhere All At Once, the everything bagel represents existential crises and emptiness.
The googly eyes in Everything Everywhere All At Once symbolize kindness and empowerment, simple things that make a major difference.
The massive success of Everything Everywhere All At Once, both critically and commercially, makes it very likely to get a sequel at some point.

Everything Everywhere All At Once led the 95th Academy Awards by winning seven awards out of 11 nominations across major categories. The film is about a woman who discovers how to access the multiverse while she and her husband struggle to file their taxes, and she uses this power to connect with her daughter. The concept of a multiverse has been a hot topic for the last few years and this film uses that big, bold concept to tell an intimate story of a family on the verge of collapse. It was a surprise box office hit and an award-season behemoth.

The film is dense with all kinds of metaphors and references that expand the concept of the story to its maximum potential. These metaphors are rich and complicated, yet they can also be used for comedic effect, deepening their impact. Specifically, the concept of a bagel and googly eyes on the surface seems like a funny way to talk about the nature of what it means to be a human. Still, when cracked open, they reveal so much about the characters whose perspectives they represent. Their inclusion in the film allows a deeper understanding of the characters and their perspectives. Here is what those metaphors mean in Everything Everywhere All at Once and how they frame the themes.

Updated by Jordan Iacobucci on March 29, 2024: Two years ago, Everything Everywhere All At Once redefined a multiverse movie, taking viewers on an epic and colorful adventure through thousands of different realities. The film set itself apart from the many other multiverse-centric movies in Hollywood by focusing intently on its core themes, including existential crises and small acts of kindness. Characteristic of its generally bizarre and quirky nature, the film represents these themes through a cosmic everything bagel and a series of googly eyes.

The Meaning of the Bagel in Everything Everywhere All At Once

Everything Everywhere All at Once's Bagel and Googly Eyes, Explained (1)

Everything Everywhere All At Once was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning seven, including Best Picture and three Best Acting Oscars.

Every Oscar Everything Everywhere All At Once Won (Or Was Nominated For)

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a unique film that managed to capture the audiences' attention and an immense number of Oscar wins!

Evelyn and her husband Waymond are Chinese immigrants living in the United States, they have a daughter named Joy, and they operate a laundromat. While attempting to file their taxes, a version of Waymond from an alternate universe visits Evelyn to teach her about the multiverse and prepare her for battle against an entity known as Jobu Tupaki. It is revealed that Joy is actually Jobu Tupaki, and she took on that identity when she could not find any meaning in any universe. She brings together all she has learned from her multiverse travels and puts it on a bagel. It's a joke that an everything bagel literally contains everything. The bagel is black with a hole in the center and Joy explains that since nothing in life matters, life has no point.

The bagel represents the notion that there's nothing but a pointless void to see when you look at life. The hole in the center of the bagel is a metaphor for herfeelings of nothingnessand the general sense of emptiness in the face of basic existence. It's an existential crisis manifested into a baked good. The concept is comical when it's first introduced, but as the film digs deeper into Joy's depression and desire to connect with her mother, it becomes a beautiful portrayal of her perspective on life. The film uses the bagel to explore these negative feelings, giving them a tangible, relatable visual that represents what the film attempts to combat. The bagel is the setup, and the googly eyes are the payoff that marks the film's main theme.

What Everything Everywhere All at Once's Googly Eyes Represent

Everything Everywhere All at Once's Bagel and Googly Eyes, Explained (3)

After starring in Everything Everywhere All At Once, Waymond Wang actor Ke Huy Quan returned to the multiverse in the second season of the MCU Disney+ series Loki, portraying the TVA agents known as Ouroboros.

From Everything Everywhere All at Once and Beyond, James Hong Is a Trailblazer

In an interview with CBR, legendary actor James Hong talked about his upcoming film Patsy Lee & the Keeper 5 Kingdoms, and reflects on his career.

The film creates an opposing viewpoint of the bagel via the metaphor of googly eyes. Waymond is seen adding googly eyes to various items around the Wang home and business. Evelyn thinks it is silly and even annoying, but by the end of the film, she embraces the googly eyes and when she fights for her daughter in the climax, she does so with a googly eye on her forehead. The googly eye is the inversion of the bagel. The eyes are black dots within a white void instead of the bagel, which is a white void within a black bagel. The consistent and simple color inversion links these two seemingly unrelated objects.

The googly eyes represent Waymond's perspective on life. Like Joy, he also believes that life is big, scary, and often confusing, but instead of filling him with dread, it empowers him to be kind. He says if nothing matters, then you might as well be kind. When Evelyn embraces this idea, she defeats Jobu Tupaki's army with acts of kindness. Googly eyes are a perfect item to carry this metaphor because they are so simple, and their singular purpose is to bring a little levity and joy to something.

oy is struggling, and she has difficulty seeing the googly eyes instead of the bagel, but when she and her mom finally find a way to talk to each other and work on extending each other kindness, both can see the googly-eyed version of the world. Everything Everywhere All At Once is a visual feast ripe with metaphors, and the bagel and the googly eyes are the most central and most important in explaining the movie's theme, which is to choose kindness, especially when life is tough.

Will Everything Everywhere All At Once Ever Get A Sequel?

Ke Huy Quan quit acting for twenty years before finally returning in Everything Everywhere All At Once, eventually winning an Academy Award for his work therein.

Everything Everywhere All at Once's Real Villain Isn't Jobu Tupaki

Despite appearing to be the main antagonist of the movie, Jobu Tupaki is not the actual villain of Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Everything Everywhere All At Once was one of the best sci-fi films of the 2020s, earning extensive praise from critics and audiences. As such, the natural question is whether or not the epic multiverse-hopping film will ever get a sequel. There have been no official announcements regarding a follow-up to the original film, but nothing is ever impossible when the multiverse is involved. Everything Everywhere All At Once tells a tight story about one family and, therefore, works as a standalone film but could be the beginning of a terrific franchise. As more and more films feature their versions of the multiverse, EEAO can keep raising the bar for its genre.

A sequel to Everything Everywhere All At Once could explore the multiverse more deeply, including the many different universes that audiences only got a glimpse of in the original film. Realities like the Alphaverse and the Martial Arts Universe are intriguing and could make terrific settings for future films. Conversely, if the filmmakers behind the original film feel there is no need to continue the story, perhaps it would be best if Everything Everywhere All At Once remains a standalone feature.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Adventure

Comedy

Drama

Action

A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led.

Director: Daniel Kwan , Daniel Scheinert
Release Date: April 8, 2022
Cast: Michelle Yeoh , Ke Huy Quan , Jenny Slate , Jamie Lee Curtis
Writers: Daniel Kwan , Daniel Scheinert
Runtime: 2 hours 19 minutes
Main Genre: Adventure
Production Company: A24, IAC Films, AGBO

FAQs

Everything Everywhere All at Once's Bagel and Googly Eyes, Explained? ›

The googly eye is the inversion of the bagel. The eyes are black dots within a white void instead of the bagel, which is a white void within a black bagel. The consistent and simple color inversion links these two seemingly unrelated objects. The googly eyes represent Waymond's perspective on life.

What is the lesson of Everything Everywhere All At Once? ›

The moral of Everything Everywhere All at Once is that life is only meaningful because everything we do is meaningless. The movie shows that it is because there's no meaning to anything we do in the end; no matter what we do, every moment is worth cherishing.

Know More ›

Is Everything Everywhere All At Once about ADHD? ›

In the context of ADHD, “Everything Everywhere All At Once” starts to make sense not just as a bizarre trip through the multiverse but as a powerful expression of how the ADHD mind functions. Kwan does this by drawing on his own personal experiences to depict what living with ADHD is like.

Get More Info Here ›

Did Evelyn and Waymond get divorced? ›

Upon looking into the bagel, Evelyn is initially persuaded, and acts cruelly and Nihilistically in her other universes, hurting those around her (she even signs the divorce papers with Waymond and proceeds to destroy her own laundromat).

What does the bagel symbolize in Everything Everywhere All At Once? ›

The literal answer is that Jobu Tupaki, bored by life and its lack of meaning, wanted to build something. Of course, that something ends up being an everything bagel. An object of worship that sits just behind the veil in Jobu Tupaki's shrine, the cosmic everything bagel swirls in place. It's an object and the void.

Show Me More ›

Why is Jobu Tupaki a nihilist? ›

Multiversal Consciousness: Jobu's fractured consciousness splits her existence across all parallel universes simultaneously. Jobu experiences every existence and has the memories of every variant of Joy which ultimately drives her to nihilism.

Get More Info Here ›

What is the theory behind Everything Everywhere All At Once? ›

Overlapping reality with quantum superposition

The film depicts the quantum concept of superposition. This is through Evelyn being one person in multiple, parallel universes.

Discover More Details ›

Why did Jobu Tupaki create the everything bagel? ›

She intends to commit suicide by entering the bagel, with the hopes that it will destroy every instance of herself throughout the multiverse simultaneously.

Know More ›

What is the everything bagel concept? ›

One night I was screwing around with different combinations of toppings – sesame, salt, poppy, onion and garlic – making braids, onion flats, and other unorthodox concoctions. Then, after a while, I had the thought to throw all the toppings on a bagel at once. That's how I invented the everything bagel.

Get More Info ›

What exactly was it that the bagel man saw? ›

Paul F. saw that throughout economic changes, ups and downs, people paid for their bagels. Not all of them, but always most of them, and he's the one who has reaped the rewards. It shows that people participate in the system, but there are cheaters, too, and people suffer from those who don't play by the rules.

Get More Info ›

What is the bagel universe theory? ›

A simpler model of the everything bagel was proposed in 1514 by a Polish priest, Nicholas Copernicus, who postulated that there was a hole in the center of the everything bagel ( he circulated his idea in anonymity out of fear he would be branded a heretic by the Einstein Bros.) .