EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, the absurdist sci-fi cinematic romp through the multiverse by a Chinese American laundromat owner in the L.A. mega sprawl, garnered seven Oscars this year, including for Best Picture. I’ve seen Everything Everywhere eight times. I’ve introduced it to friends. I did not think my favorite film could do anything wrong. What could be better than to be wrapped up in the spectacle created by directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and their amazing cast?

The directors’ over-the-top approach embraces the “too muchness” of its title. Laundromat owner Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) lives with her husband, daughter, and recently-arrived-from-China elderly father in a small apartment above the family business. Their dining room is cluttered with the American dream — workout equipment, inspirational business books, beeping electronic kitchen gadgets, a TV droning in the background, and a live security feed to the washers and dryers downstairs. “The Daniels,” as the directors are known, wrote in the original script, “It is a still life of chaos.”

Evelyn and her family are slowly spinning apart, and now the IRS is auditing the Wangs and their business. The forces of chaos are spreading beyond their little apartment. Later, while Evelyn is explaining to an IRS auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis) why her receipts are not in order, she gets a message from her husband (well, an alternative version of him) that she may be in grave danger and that she may hold the key to saving not only her own world but also the worlds in multiple universes and parallel time frames.

Despite its zany premise and on-screen absurdities (from anthropomorphic racoons and talking rocks to people with hot dogs for hands), Everything Everywhere never lets the spectacle eclipse the emotional story at its center: Evelyn is learning to find contentment in her own universe with her real family, even if she has the power to be elsewhere all at once.

‘No need to feel anything at all’

WHILE I DON'T regret my zealous championing of Everything Everywhere, film critic Justin Chang gave me pause. While Chang said he appreciated that the film centers an Asian American mother-daughter storyline and addresses “the social fragmentation and narrative oversaturation of the internet age and its attendant, all-consuming feelings of apathy and despair: the sense that ‘nothing matters,’” he also pointed out that the film is “so eager to bare its soul, to show you just how much its heart breaks for [its characters] and everyone in the whole damn multiverse, that it practically does all your emoting for you. There’s almost no need — and no room — for a viewer to feel anything at all.”

I had never considered — or even imagined — any other possible reaction to the film other than to be enraptured by its maximalism. While I think Everything Everywhere holds its emotional core, perhaps it caters too much to “the society of the spectacle,” as French philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord put it in his book of the same name, where (quoting Ludwig Feuerbach), “illusion only is sacred, truth profane.”

Spectacle is often deployed as a sleight-of-hand trick to keep passive subjects distracted from the truth of what is going on. It has been used by industries and people in power to distract from the harm and abuse they perpetrate. You don’t need to look further than Hollywood itself for examples. While Harvey Weinstein was producing blockbusters such as Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love, and Gangs of New York, he was also sexually abusing scores of women in the film industry. Why would a multibillion-dollar industry want to risk its profit margin by investigating a few rape cases?

Churches — where truth should be central — have also at times become places of spectacle. For example, charismatic religious leaders such as Ravi Zacharias and Bill Hybels used the spectacle of their ministries to cloak systematic sexual abuse of women. Jean Vanier, founder of another global Christian ministry, designed his early communities to provide opportunities for abuse of women in his pastoral care. The spectacle, Debord wrote, “is the affirmation that all human relationships are merely an image of relationship ... a complete negation of life that presents an appearance of life.”

Last year was not short on cinematic spectacle, including the Indian Telugu-language epic RRR (for “Rise, Roar, Revolt” in English) about revolutionary heroes battling the British Raj (it will not be the only film to run more than three hours mentioned in this piece) and Top Gun: Maverick, the explosive muscle movie that Steven Spielberg credited with saving the post-pandemic film industry. But three recent movies of note unmask the insidious danger of spectacle, revealing it as a way to control human thought by providing distraction and catharsis toward compliance.

Spectacle vs. the prophetic imagination

JORDAN PEELE'S SCI-FI horror film Nope, Rian Johnson’s murder mystery Glass Onion,and Damien Chazelle’s period epic Babylon highlight how the spectacle of control, entertainment, and wealth kills “prophetic imagination,” as biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann called it, and the pursuit of justice.

Director Jordan Peele has described Nope, his third film, as “the great American UFO story.” Peele uses the trope to unpack aspects of spectacle and “the good and bad that come from this idea of attention,” he said. The film opens with a quote from the prophet Nahum spewing God’s judgment on the city of Nineveh: “I will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle” (3:6). Nineveh here stands in for empire with its military, economic, and cultural hegemony. Nineveh is “the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims!” (3:1), a city that enslaves “peoples by her witchcraft” (3:4).

Nope is set on a horse farm in Agua Dulce, Calif., a rough desert landscape on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Hollywood horse-wranglers and ranch-owner siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) detect weird happenings on a neighboring ranch and then attempt to capture evidence of a UFO that killed their father. Peele’s first images of spectacle in Nope are flickers of the first moving picture ever created. “Did you know that the very first assembly of photographs ... to create a motion picture was a two-second clip of a Black man on a horse?” Emerald asks at the start.

The implication is that the very birth of the film industry holds the danger of spectacle — the Black jockey on the horse has been seen by all and remembered by none, while the white photographer, Eadweard Muybridge (later convicted of murder), is heralded. Peele is interrogating the spectacle of exploitation and control, identity and erasure. The flickering images focus the viewer on the masterful technique, not the human story at the center.

While Emerald is excited at the prospect of fame and fortune if they capture the world’s first UFO footage, OJ is more cautious. Aware that they could be dealing with a force outside of their control, OJ reins in Emerald’s enthusiasm. They proceed, but with caution for the lives at risk.

At the neighboring ranch and amusement park, owner Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) takes the opposite approach. Enamored by potential glory and fame, Jupe attempts to lure the UFO before a live audience — with horrific results. Let’s just say it’s hard to repent when you’re being digested. Peele filmed Nope with large-format IMAX cameras that add to an immersive experience that echoes the “ideological totalism” described by Brueggemann, a totalism that monopolizes our imagination.

Captivated by power and wealth

GLASS ONION RETURNS to the murder mystery genre of Knives Out (2019) to examine the spectacle of obscene wealth. A coterie of friends arrives at an island in Greece owned by tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) for a weekend getaway. (Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison owns 98 percent of Lanai, an island in Hawaii. Media mogul Richard Branson owns two islands in the Caribbean.) Bron has curated an experience for his friends to captivate them with his power and money — including his display of the “Mona Lisa,” on loan from the Louvre. To this, one friend, Claire (Kathryn Hahn), says, “Every time you’ve gotten to the point where I’m going to strangle you, you pull something like this and it’s magic.” All remain transfixed by the increasingly audacious displays of wealth that Bron exhibits. And, of course, in the heart of Bron’s architectural glass temple to affluence, someone dies.

When it’s revealed that Bron plans to go public with an alternative “sustainable fuel” that is unstable and untested, his friends are frustrated and concerned, but they remain silent. Bron’s extravagance takes a darker turn as the audience watches how he manipulated his friends into silence. Just when the friends have every reason to reject Bron’s delusions or lash out in righteous anger, he distracts them with the next surprise and maintains his position to exploit his power of spectacle.

Exploited by the ‘magic’

NO FILM OF the past year better captured the way exploitation, numbness, and spectacle are tied together than Damien Chazelle’s Babylon. Set in late-1920s Hollywood, the film follows a series of characters involved in the film industry’s transition from silent film to “talkies.”

Chazelle explores the magic of filmmaking while never hesitating to show how glamour is tied to exploitation. In one sequence, director Otto Von Strassberger (Spike Jonze) is filming an intense outdoor battle sequence requiring hundreds of extras, one of whom gets killed. When the producers and director see the dead body, they shrug it off, saying, “he did have a drinking problem.” The scene cuts to the crew refilming the sequence as if nothing happened.

In another scene, Hollywood’s “it girl” Nellie (Margot Robbie) arrives on set to film her very first sound picture. For Nellie and the crew, this represents an uncomfortable and difficult transition. The bulky new sound technology keeps the stage overly warm. Everyone sweats. Even if the scene is filmed perfectly, an unexpected sneeze or sudden movement could ruin the audio and the whole thing would need to be re-recorded. In one sequence, Nellie and the crew must film a scene more than eight times. The viewer feels the excitement and exhaustion of the crew as they relentlessly pursue the perfect take. As they wrap the scene, they learn that the take has come at a tragic price: A cameraman has died of heatstroke after hours trapped inside an unventilated booth designed to mute the sound of the camera. No one could hear him call for help.

Chazelle calls Babylon a spectacle about “a wrecking ball hitting a fragile society still in its infancy, still figuring out its own parameters, and surveying the damage that wrecking ball causes.” He weaves a damning yet necessary narrative about the “magic” of films. Making the magic happen is relatively easy, but at what cost? The question is not whether people are being exploited, but who is being exploited.

Opening ourselves to awe and wonder

SPECTACLE — IN THE movies and in “real life” — is often used to distract from critical issues. It keeps one’s focus on oneself, providing a numbing narcotic for our human angst. It shifts our gaze away from other people and from social injustice. The greatest danger and misuse of spectacle is when it becomes a tool of empire to not only hide exploitation in the name of glory but to use spectacle to impede the power of our moral, spiritual, and prophetic imagination.

It was the role of the prophets, Brueggemann explained, to resist succumbing to empire’s all-encompassing, totalist, disempowering view of the world. The prophets can only be understood, Brueggemann said, “if you understand that their context is an ideological totalism that intends to contain all thinkable, imaginable, doable social possibilities. That totalism always wants to monopolize imagination, and it wants to monopolize technology, so that there are no serious alternatives that seem on offer.” Spectacle demands little of us. It ultimately appeases and pacifies, providing distraction, yes, but at great cost.

Biblical prophets repeatedly face down the spectacle and renew imagination. Prophets open themselves to the awe of God’s revelation and dare to imagine better. The prophets, Brueggemann said, “are able to imagine the world other than the way that is in front of them. The word prophetic alludes to the reality of God. And what the prophets believe deeply is that God is a lively character, and a real agent who acts in the world, who causes endings and who causes new beginnings. And that’s worth thinking about, because that is not ordinary thinking among us — that God is a lively agent and a real character.”

To open oneself up to awe and wonder is a scary thing. It puts us in a place where we are not in control, where we realize how inherently fragile and small we are. To be in awe is to not numb oneself but to instead feel fully our smallness and our creaturely-ness. Awe fully engages one’s senses. Rather than a distraction, awe is a call toward right relationship, showing spectacle to be a tool of empire. Awe is never self-serving. Its purpose is to recalibrate who we are before God and galvanize our work of justice.

In our daily lives, it is much too tempting to be numbed, to press further into the pacifying nature of being overwhelmed. It’s easy to be wowed by the spectacle of control, wealth, and entertainment. But, as these films show, this state of being overwhelmed only leaves one vulnerable to manipulation. We can be so focused on the thing at hand that we miss the exploitation before us. Spectacles, as outlined in these films, not only can be used to hide or cover up exploitation, but they also represent an empty feedback loop; they only ever point to the spectacle at hand and never something greater.

Awe, rather than spectacle, is what is needed to restore the world that God intends. Experiencing and leaning into awe, which demands more from us than mere spectacle, open the human heart to God’s prophetic imagination.