It’s become a staple of modern online counterculture to denounce the Oscars, let alone all established award shows, for being out of touch yet simultaneously overly commercial. Of course, the Academy is incredibly flawed as a source for deeming what is top-notch cinema, but despite the nay-sayers, they got this previous year’s Best Picture winner right; Everything Everywhere All at Once is awesome. After seeing it in theatres this most recent June – the first proper movie I’d seen in a theatre since the beginning of the pandemic – the movie just seemed implacably right for the times we lived in in June 2022. I think this is because of how overwhelming it is; the movie jumps between different dimensions with drastically different styles almost at random, all while managing to convey a wonderfully grounded story of working through family dysfunction. Everything Everywhere All at Once is only 140 minutes long, but by its end, you feel almost exhausted because it’s just all so much, and that’s the point.
Now, around a year after its initial release and many awards later, the movie strikes me as even more relevant, because it feels like everything is breaking everywhere right now, and it’s overwhelming to think about. As of writing, a group of fed-up students in my faculty, reluctantly including myself, are planning on launching a one-day strike against tuition hikes. Though the University’s administration deserves tremendous blame for raising prices only to deliver a worse product; the first two years of my undergrad were spent largely online, the upcoming strike is inseparably related to our provincial government which controls education spending. Though Alberta has an election in about two months, our provincial government is run, frankly, by morons. Incompetent, and maybe even corrupt morons. The premier is a quack who parades around pseudoscience amid a crisis of information consumption, and who is more concerned with trashing Ottawa than solving the cost-of-living and healthcare crises. Nevertheless, Ottawa is fucked in its own right; we have a spineless and corrupt federal government who have more ethics and transparency scandals under their belt than proper legislative achievements despite being in power for the better part of a decade, an opposition so uncertain of its identity that its leader lets legislators network with German fascists, and a third party that appropriates the imagery of hold the government accountable without any substance behind it. Canadian, Albertan, and Calgarian-student politics have hardly seemed so bleak, partisan, and cynical.
In my home-away-from-home, Israel is facing an existential crisis unlike any in its history. This time, the threat is from within. Indeed, after voting in a coalition including chaos-promising theocratic fascists, chaos has been unleashed. After introducing judicial legislation that would allow the Knesset to ignore Israel’s constitutional order with a simple majority, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to make sure their outrage is heard since. Like all Middle Easterners, my family has its own WhatsApp group chats. In ordinary times, the chats were mainly used to share pictures of the youngest kids and cheeriest times of the family, but since January, they have been dominated by pictures of protest. Now, with the final vote on that judicial reform package imminent, the Minister of Defence publicly called for the legislation to be halted, causing him to be sacked. The outrage has now exploded into fiery, spontaneous protests, all while the governing coalition has been brought to its knees. Despite a decisive victory for the Israeli right in November, the government, as well as the country, is on the brink. Likewise, the Palestinian lost decade has come to an end; the 2010s were defined by Hamas’ dead-end rule of the Gaza Strip and Abbas and Fatah resigning themselves to permanent kleptocracy. Now, their authority is being undermined by new terrorist groups, better in-touch with youthful Palestinian anger, an anger which has already claimed Israeli lives and has only furthered the cycle in the form of the Huwara pogrom.
This feeling of widespread, systemic discontent is not exclusive to my little corners of Earth, however. Though the Democratic Party slightly expanded upon its majority in the Senate and lost fewer than expected seats in the House, the Republican onslaught against democracy and basic human decency continues. Following Brexit, the British economy has entered a period of stagnation, where the country seems en route to becoming poorer than Poland all while its benevolent lawmakers try to give tax breaks for the rich. France has seen widespread protests as well after Emmanuel Macron subverted the French national assembly and forced through a widely unpopular change to the country’s retirement age; Paris has been lit on fire as a result. Anger is building in Greece after a disastrous train accident that was avoidable had their austere government not slashed regulations in the industry, along with attacks on the freedom of the press and a wiretapping scandal. Iranians, especially women, are still on the street, protesting their oppressive theocratic government that regularly hunts and disappears people. Ukraine, ever-valiant, is still braving down the Russians in Crimea and Donbas, and hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians face a humanitarian crisis as Azerbaijan tightens its blockade on Artsakh. Assad is now welcome again in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, with the hundreds of thousands of dead Syrians seemingly no longer weighing on no one’s consciousness. Haiti’s state apparatus has crumbled and no government has proven willing or capable of intervening. And so on.
Anger is universal right now, and it's exhausting to keep track of. That’s incredibly solipsistic, I know, as all things considered, Canada’s and my own situation could be far worse, but given everything aforementioned, I cannot help but feel like everything at the same time is breaking, and people have had enough. Like Everything Everywhere All at Once, the modern moment is overwhelming. But that people are fed up as they are means that change is possible. People are angry because the quest for a better life is universal, and only they can make it happen. Do I know that my tuition will go down, that the UCP government will lose re-election, that the extent of Liberal corruption will become clear in due time, that the Israeli judicial reform package will be halted, that American institutions will withstand the onslaught they are facing, and that Ukraine will promptly be free of Russian aggression? I don’t know if any of this is imminent, but all of it is possible. It’s simply up to all of us to make that happen.