Everybody Loves Waymond
Some thoughts about masculinity, marriage, and the multiverse
Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert—known together as DANIELS—have always had a thematic interest in masculinity. That is to say: you can usually expect their films to explore male sexuality in the weirdest way possible.
The “Turn Down For What” music video (yes, that was them) is somewhat infamous for the bevy of throbbing body parts it contains; there’s the short film “Interesting Ball”, wherein a bunch of manly bodies combine á la Voltron to help a bro win over his ex; and of course, in Swiss Army Man, the titular corpse guides our wayfaring protagonist home by pointing him in the right erection. I mean direction.
Their propensity for body humor might be off-putting for some (being squeamish, I’ll admit I often respect their craft more than I enjoy watching it), but my point is that it’s intentional. Whether it’s to make you laugh or gross you out, Daniels want their audience to think about masculinity, and Everything Everywhere All at Once was no exception.
Everything Everywhere (hereafter EEAaO, an abbreviation which I realize looks like a Looney Tunes scream) was originally written to star Jackie Chan. During the writing process, however, the Daniels decided to swap the lead couple’s roles to make the husband–wife dynamic more relatable. That decision turned out to be the right one, not only because it put Michelle Yeoh in the spotlight as Evelyn Wang, but because it allowed the audience to underestimate her husband: Ke Huy Quan’s Waymond Wang.
Nearly all the reviews you can read of EEAaO sing his praises, even among those who didn’t enjoy the film. Quan channels a wholesome charm in a role that would give Ted Lasso a run for his money. There’s a real behind-the-scenes beauty to it, too: that Quan—who played, lest we forget, the best Indiana Jones character—came back to acting after decades to give an Oscar-winning performance is astounding.
But my love for Waymond goes deeper than the winsome performance that brings him to life, and I suspect it’s a reason underlying his wider popularity as well. Whether the desire has been verbalized or not, I believe that our cultural moment has had a craving for this type of male character—a holistic, wholesome depiction of masculinity all too lacking in representation. In many ways, the character speaks to questions posed by the zeitgeist, and offers a reasonable response to our uncertainty around the idea of maleness.
Let's be real: a lot of men today aren’t sure how to be men.
Okay, I know how that might sound. I promise you I’m not some boomer bemoaning the loss of ‘real manhood’ these days. That our ideas about masculinity are in flux today is not necessarily a negative thing. Several generations into the fight for gender equality, more and more men are learning to shed misogynistic ways of thinking, and patriarchal ideologies are being rightly recognized as a problem rather than a punchline.
At the same time, however, a lot of men are left wondering where they fit in. Aggression, domination, and violence have been intertwined with our ideas of manhood for so long that disentangling those things is, to some, tantamount to destroying manhood itself. Many see changing gender dynamics as a threat. And equating feminism with effeminacy—that boogeyman of stoic American machismo—these men have doubled down on their insecurities and toxic traits. They fall down the Jordan Peterson rabbit hole, buy into the myth of redpilled alpha maleness, or otherwise convince themselves they have an evolutionary prerogative to subjugate women. Andrew Tate is just one example of a grifter who garnered an audience of boys by embracing male domination as a brand.
I do volunteer ministry with middle schoolers, and I’ve seen these poisonous ways of thinking reflected in how my 8th graders talk about and treat women. I’ve seen gentleness give way to crassness, care and curiosity exchanged for apathy. It's a disheartening thing to see unfold in front of your eyes. But so the culture wars rage, with toxic attitudes and treacherous algorithms abounding.
All of this is to say: the Western world is in a period of re-assessing what a man should be, and everybody is throwing out their best suggestions. Look no further than the other prominent films of 2022: the biggest movie of the year, Top Gun: Maverick, is lauded as a good old-fashioned ‘dude movie’; The Banshees of Inisherin and RRR are critically acclaimed for their portrayal of male friendship; Women Talking and Don’t Worry Darling each attempt to grapple with male abuse in some capacity; Glass Onion gave us Dave Bautista as a men’s rights activist; The Batman gave us Rob Pattinson as an incel caped crusader; and The Northman was nothing less than pure cinematic testosterone. And though I didn’t see it, I would be remiss not to mention Alex Garland’s cheekily titled (if critically maligned) horror feature Men.
While those films may vary in their tastefulness in handling the subject matter—naming Wilde’s film in the same breath as Polley’s is probably cruel of me—this theme is an undeniable undercurrent in the cultural moment. This brings us to 2022’s Best Picture Winner. Enter Waymond Wang.
When his character first appears, he seems to fulfill a familiar trope. While Evelyn is introduced to us as a hardworking mother and laundromat owner, Waymond is the goofy dad simply getting in the way. She’s trying to run a business, and he’s dancing with the customers; she’s trying to do their taxes, and he’s sticking googly eyes on everything. You’ve seen this character in a dozen sitcoms—the bumbling husband alongside an eye-rolling wife who really gets things done around here. It’s a classic 20th century hole-poking in the idea of a family patriarch. Dad’s comedic relief, not someone we’re meant to respect.
The Daniels are purposeful in giving us that impression. In Scheinert’s words, "We needed someone who was convincingly sweet, kind of a beta male, who you'd almost laugh at and dismiss”—and indeed Evelyn dismisses Waymond. Her demeanor makes it clear that while she may have once loved her husband, she no longer takes him seriously. And neither does the audience.
Until, at the end of the first scene, we learn that Waymond has divorce papers in his hand.
The revelation is surprising, not only because Waymond had previously seemed optimistic about his marriage, but because we’re frankly not used to seeing characters like this make proactive decisions. Having grown used to dim-witted and lazy fathers in popular media, it’s clear that Waymond cuts a different figure. The full picture comes into view when we learn the reason behind the papers: presenting the option of divorce is Waymond’s last-ditch effort to save his marriage. He knows his wife is unhappy, and hopes their conversations will bring them back together. In his excellent video essay about the film, Jonathan McIntosh dubs this ‘actionable empathy’, pointing out that “Waymond isn’t actually quiet or submissive. He’s been quietly proactive throughout the movie. . . he knows what he wants and he never stops trying to get it; he just doesn’t do it in a domineering way.” Far from being idle or complacent, Waymond is actively fighting to save the relationship and do what is best for his wife.
Quan’s portrayal of Waymond Wang could be likened to a squirrel: optimistic, eager, and always scurrying about in his attempts to make others happy. But this is not the only animal Quan embodies, nor the only role he plays in the film. As the story expands into the multiverse, we meet a Waymond from a universe (amusingly) known as the Alpha-Verse. If ‘beta’ Waymond was a squirrel, then Alpha Waymond is an eagle: imposing, assertive, and dangerous. Evelyn is initially much more taken with this Waymond—I mean, he knows kung fu!
Now, were EEAaO to follow a traditional arc, we would expect our ‘beta’ Waymond to become like ‘alpha’ Waymond by the end of the film: our nonviolent character trading his naïve nice-guy view of the world for a more cynical perspective, and probably learning to throw a punch along the way. Male character development often comes hand-in-hand with a growth in a capacity for violence, and as moviegoers, we are used to seeing that presented positively. (And hey, I’ll admit I enjoy a training montage just as much as the next guy.) But the Daniels make the counterintuitive choice of giving Waymond a static character arc: his outlook on life never changes during the movie, and he never gains any fighting abilities. Rather than idolizing the eagle, our squirrel remains a squirrel.
Waymond’s philosophy becomes fully realized by the end of the film. At this point, we’ve jumped over to yet another universe: one in which Evelyn refused to marry her childhood sweetheart Waymond, and he went on to become a business mogul on his own. Evelyn feels defeated and despairing when she meets this version of her husband, declaring that she has accepted the world as chaotic and meaningless. Would life be worth it, Evelyn asks him, if they were destined to a life as an immigrant couple running a laundromat and doing taxes?
Waymond offers this response:
“You tell me that it’s a cruel world, and we’re all just running around in circles. I know that. I’ve been on this earth just as many days as you. When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naïve. It’s strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight.”
This idea—that kindness isn’t naïvety, effeminacy, or weakness, but a way of fighting, a strategy, and a strength—is the revolutionary core to Waymond’s character. His answer is not to refuse to fight; it is to learn to fight differently.
Said Scheinert in an interview, “When I watch a movie about a guy rescuing his family and fighting for what he believes in with guns, I don’t relate with it much. I don’t know what lesson to learn from it. Those stories, the subtext is violence is an answer, which I’m not that psyched about.” He’s onto something here. As satisfying as it might be to see a bully get his just desserts, the loser who delivers a climactic punch at the end of the movie is just reciprocating the violence and humiliation that created the conflict in the first place. Bringing an end to the cycle requires one of the parties to disarm. To use the old phrase, it means turning the other cheek.
Waymond’s monologue to Evelyn is sealed with a tearjerker line: “In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.” I’ll confess that this is why I’ve returned to the film so many times. Simply put, it’s a gut punch of unconditional love so full of feeling that it makes me want to fight the universe and kiss everyone I know. To see that radical love displayed in a male hero is something I, and many other moviegoers I imagine, had an unspoken longing for.
Whether or not EEAaO was the best movie I saw last year, it was certainly the movie that made me cry the most. I mean that both volumetrically and quantitatively. I saw it four times in theaters, and not one of those visits failed to choke me up. It’s about as much movie as you can pack into one movie, but remarkably, its emotional core never collapses under that weight—a success that has everything to do with Waymond Wang. His character embodies the actionable empathy we need—and in particular, men need—to confront our questions of meaning. Waymond puts a masculinity on display that boldly faces the pain of the world without becoming an instrument of pain himself. For amidst all the everys, through the nonsense and noise, there is a single note that rings out: the promise that even if nothing about life makes sense, all of it is important. Human kindness, in the end, is the only thing unexpected enough to counteract the chaos.