The Lost D
Anxiety terminable and interminable
Steven Swarbrick
Anxiety, of all signals, is the one that does not deceive.
—Jacques Lacan, Anxiety
The grip of anxiety is everywhere. It is “the very air we breathe,” writes psychoanalytic theorist and cultural critic Mari Ruti in Penis Envy. Ruti is not referring to climate anxiety when she speaks of troubled air, but her suggestion that anxiety constitutes an atmosphere—one inescapable—speaks to the greater concerns registered by climate activists worldwide. Activists with Youth Climate Strike, Fridays for the Future, and Extinction Rebellion have gathered millions of activists across the globe to protest government inaction on climate change. The time to mitigate global warming is now, the youth activists argue. There is no planet B, the strikers contend. About this they are right.
Although there are plenty of reasons to be anxious about the future, Ruti helps us linger on what is less evident in discussions about anxiety. Many of us, probably all, deal with anxiety, but rarely do we consider anxiety worth sustaining. This, however, is what Ruti and others working in psychoanalytic criticism, including Todd McGowan, encourage that we do. Anxiety, they argue, is interminable; like it or not, it stays. Though it is clear there are exacerbating conditions that trigger anxiety, like overwork, or lack of accessible childcare, housing, and prescription drugs, less clear is that our usual ways of dealing with anxiety may prolong anxious feelings. Rather than mitigate anxiety like carbon emissions, psychoanalysis teaches a counterintuitive practice of sustaining anxiety that could help combat the atmospheric pressure of our daily lives.
One way to sustain anxiety is to embrace what Ruti, following Jacques Lacan, calls lack or absence. Usually, we think of lack as antithetical to enjoyment. Eating or drinking excessively, chain-smoking, or binge-watching TV seems, on the surface, to have nothing to do with lack. Capitalist society places supreme value on excess and commands subjects to enjoy excessively at any cost, even if that cost is a habitable planet. An SUV, for example, is wildly excessive and enjoyable for that reason; most city dwellers do not need it, and its carbon emissions are exceedingly high. It is, therefore, an easy target of environmental criticism, which tends to preach modesty, conservation, and limits.
Rather than see excess and lack as antithetical, and instead of countering excess with more excess (as green capitalists advocate), McGowan takes a dialectical approach to capitalist enjoyment and asserts that lack instigates desire. If nothing were lacking, there would be nothing to desire, and thus no impetus for excessive behavior. We enjoy excessively, McGowan asserts, because deep down, lack is what we enjoy. Instead of separating excess and lack, McGowan suggests that the true leftist act is to illustrate lack’s libidinal appeal.
My argument, following McGowan, Ruti, and others, is that an anxiogenic climate such as ours requires a psychoanalytic intervention, one that Lacanian psychoanalysis is uniquely equipped to provide. Whereas the main currents of social critique, including Marxism, try to alleviate our social symptoms through visions of excess, psychoanalysis maintains that the secret to our enjoyment is radically immanent. We enjoy not despite the symptom but through it. We enjoy the lack that anxiety and vexation give. In what follows, I explore lack’s counterintuitive appeal in three examples, starting with the romantic comedy The Lost City (2022), continuing with the popular television show Yellowstone (2018–present), and ending with the multiverse film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Although heterogeneous in form and content, these examples furnish a common insight. They attest to the radicality of desire when lack and excess combine.
Waiting for the D
One of the clearest examples of Lacan’s thesis on anxiety comes from the cinematic deconstruction of phallocentrism in The Lost City, starring Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, and Brad Pitt. Bullock plays Loretta Sage, a romance novelist who would rather be writing serious scholarship and feels, despite her popularity, that she has not lived up to her potential as a writer. Tatum stars as Alan Caprison, a wannabe romantic hero. He is the face, chiseled torso, and persona printed on the cover of Sage’s bestselling romance-adventure series, The Lost City of D. Despite Caprison’s cover-model good looks, he is only a “want-to-be” in Lacan’s sense of manque-à-être because he lacks the being of the phallic hero imagined in the novels. Put simply, Tatum’s character lacks the D.
When the fictional universe of The Lost City of D becomes a reality, and the plot turns to finding the lost D (the twenty-first-century’s comic answer to “The Purloined Letter”), Sage and Caprison embark on an adventure that they are ludicrously unfit to accomplish. Enter Brad Pitt as Jack Trainer. Trainer plays the phallic hero—the real-life embodiment of the fictional hero of the Lost City of D novels. He fights, he wins, and he does not fear danger. He has the D. Until he doesn’t.
The Lost City proves its cinematic greatness by killing the phallic hero swiftly and unceremoniously. After (spoiler) Trainer is shot dead, the film and its characters go on without the phallus to protect them. The film’s plot is of little importance compared to the anxiety-producing castration that it inflicts on viewers (who were expecting to see Brad Pitt) and the characters in search of the lost D. The D does not come, and that is the film’s message. The Lost City combines the excess of the romance genre with the lack that most films, especially romance films, try filling before the final credits. Instead, The Lost City invites viewers to find humor in the constitutive and anxiety-inducing lack that the lost D represents.
Of course, phallic authority takes on many different guises in capitalist society, not all of them as obvious (or funny) as Pitt’s character in The Lost City. Donald Trump is the clearest example of right-wing phallic authority (jingoistic, sexist, cruel). However, the reach of phallic power is widespread. It can include girlbosses, men with man buns, environmentalists, and woke liberals. Indeed, one of the possibilities imagined by The Lost City is that we have entered a new phallic order, in which the old phallus (represented by Pitt) has been replaced by a newer, softer phallus (represented by Channing Tatum). Hard or soft, the phallus has one function: to conceal the lack in the Other, either by externalizing it, minimizing its visibility, or both.
Figures like Jack Trainer in The Lost City or Trump in real life occupy the role of the Lacanian big Other by convincing desiring subjects that their desire has an answer and that that answer is accumulation. By accumulating a lot of things, we can, the big Other tells us, overcome the trauma of castration. Consequently, capitalist subjects search for objects that will satisfy not only their desire but the Other’s desire as well—objects, that is, with the sublime power to confer the Other’s recognition and approval. For example, I desire the new job or the new commodity not because of its intrinsic value but because I believe unconsciously that it is what the Other (the parent, the life coach, the social media influencer) wants from me. In this way, the Other outfits capitalist subjects with a fantasy of future fulfillment while obscuring the trauma of their enjoyment—an enjoyment that they already obtain through loss.
The Lost City is largely a response to psychoanalysis’s baseline question of subjectivity: What does the Other (the figure of social authority) want from me? The film tells us. The Other wants the D.
Put simply, Tatum’s character lacks the D.
However, assuming the position of the phallus proves difficult. In Lacan’s view, what is blithely called frustration anxiety in object-relations psychoanalysis is not the frustration of a need but the frustration of a lack that no object can fill. Lacan calls this primordial lack objet a. As the signifier of the Other’s desire, objet a causes the subject to want. But the objet a has no signified. Instead of conveying wholeness to the subject who seeks it, the objet a causes the subject to want what is, for lack of a better word, missing—a hole. The phallus is a substitution, a veil concealing the lack that confounds subjectivity. As such, it has no substance of its own.
A great deal of ink has been spilled propping up the Lacanian phallus and chopping it down. But the point of the Lacanian phallus is that it is already divided. The phallus is an empty signifier—the empty signifier par excellence. Unable to possess the objet a, the kernel of the Other’s desire, the subject disavows castration through substitution. I cannot have the Other’s desire, but I can have the new car, job, or house. Lacan calls this act of substitution “phallic jouissance.” It is the pittance of enjoyment given to us by the symbolic order, which, importantly, enjoys in our stead. Phallic jouissance is the jouissance of the idiot, according to Lacan, because phallic jouissance believes it has solved the mystery of the Other’s desire, that it wields phallic authority, and that there is, in fact, more to the phallus than meets the eye; there’s not. Phallic jouissance obscures the trauma of enjoyment by casting that enjoyment onto others. It is, therefore, the paradigm of right-wing enjoyment, as we shall see next.
Between Two Anxieties
The popular television show Yellowstone (2018–present), an update on the Western genre starring Kevin Costner, gives a compelling image of phallic jouissance as it attempts to mask the anxiety at its core. The show indulges in the lasting myths of white settler colonialism, featuring a ranching family in Montana, the Duttons, beset by the encroachment of real-estate developers, a Native American casino, and the castrating power of global capitalism with its terrifying symbols of detumescence, i.e., high-end boutiques slinging faux-Indigenous wears, pour-over coffee, and stuffy wine bars, all of which contribute to the castration anxiety suffered by the Duttons, who are the embodiment of white phallic power in America: Christian, possibly God fearing, gun toting, violent, and hell-bent on preserving the family. The patriarch, John Dutton (Costner), is the show’s center of phallic authority. As the show’s master signifier, he divides the world between family and foe and wields excessive violence to maintain the privileges of the Dutton name. His children fear and love him; they fear his retribution even as they love and idealize the image of strength, ruggedness, and authenticity he upholds. To his children and most others, he is the sovereign exception, both in and outside the law of castration, which he seems (for the most part) to escape. Moreover, his exceptionalism grants his children and followers a surplus of enjoyment.
Although they live in fear of what their father, the phallic Other, wants and spend their lives trying to fulfill their father’s impossible demands, they enjoy the barrier that the Dutton name erects. This barrier or limit is epitomized by the ranch, an emblem of Dutton identity and its contested boundaries.
The phallic figure not only creates a mythic inside (those who pledge allegiance to the Dutton name, some of whom literally wear a brand) but also produces an outside that his followers can enjoy through exclusion. In this way, the phallic father divides the structure of anxiety: between a menacing and castrating “other” (everyone who wants to steal the Duttons’ phallic enjoyment) and a protective, if no less frightening Other who demands loyalty in exchange for inclusion (John Dutton himself). By projecting the threat of castration onto others, the phallic father can wrap himself in the illusion of paternal care and offer coherence against a menacing outside.
But this external “other” beyond the border of the Dutton estate masks a far greater problem with phallic authority that the show exposes. The phallic father is already lacking. John Dutton, he fears, has cancer, and worries his days are numbered. Although he cares for his family’s land, his business (cattle ranching) is destructive to the land and the endangered species inhabiting it. He claims to do everything (bribery, blackmail, intimidation, murder) for his family, but no clear successor is willing to inherit and preserve the family estate. Lastly, he paints himself as a defender of American identity, even though his and his family’s identities derive from stolen Indigenous land. This apparent contradiction is not a problem for the show. In one episode, after a particularly harrowing series of attacks on the white settler family, Dutton’s Indigenous daughter-in-law turns to him and says, “You’re the Indian now.”
The phallic father in Yellowstone is the perfect example of idiotic jouissance. Although he appears to have so much, his power is empty. The show reveals phallic imposture as just that, illusory. Beyond cowboy hats, chaps, guns, and whiskey, the thing that defines phallic power on the show is exclusion—the fact that, as an impossible masculine ideal, the phallic figure cannot be a signifier among other signifiers but must stay concealed, hidden behind cowboy hats and belt buckles, for phallic authority to work. Furthermore, to the extent that we, the viewers, want this phallic authority to work, it is because we sense that something is missing from the Other. We sense an echo of our own lack, the anxiety of which is too great. Exporting lack elsewhere is the essential trick of phallic authority.
The Lack of Lack, or Worse
Lacan defines anxiety as the lack of lack because the overwhelming presence of the Other eliminates the modicum of absence that gives us the freedom to send our desire elsewhere.
However, that anxiety-inducing situation becomes far more bearable when the threat of castration is projected on someone else. By projecting the threat of castration onto an external other, the excessive presence of the Other becomes bearable, even desirable. Yes, I am discomfited by this excessive presence of the Other about whom I would like to know, What do they want from me?, and yet I prefer this excessive presence to the lack embodied by those whom the Other excludes.
According to Lacan, the structure of anxiety contains both poles: excess on the one hand and lack on the other. I am anxious before the Other because, first and foremost, the Other is lacking, and so am I; second, because the Other demands something of me that I would like to give and be, namely, the phallus. The genius of Yellowstone is that it splits the structure of anxiety so that excess and lack stand in opposite corners. It shows the falsity of that opposition and the racial, genocidal, and environmental violence that stems from treating anxiety as external.
Arguably, this is the fundamental trick of our anxiety-fueled capitalist age. Although we work and work anxiously, driven by the question “What does the Other (the boss, the stock market, parents, professors, police, social media, dating apps, the wellness industry) want from me?,” most would prefer this form of anxiety to the threat of castration. In other words, capitalism’s staying power results from the fact that it tricks people into seeing excess (enjoyment, power, wealth) as separate from lack. If (the story goes) we could figure out how to make the boss happy, invest properly, be a better partner or lover and live a happier, healthier, sexually fulfilled life in accord with nature, then, we imagine, anxiety will abate. Capitalist anxiety is excessive because it fuels endless searching for phallic mastery—a phallic mastery that does not exist.
Compare capitalist anxiety to its supposed opposite, and we start to see how capitalism depends on the very figures of lack it excludes. In Yellowstone, dispossession by white settler colonialism makes indigeneity a perfect symbol of the threat of castration. Capitalism depends on excluded figures like the Indigenous subject in Yellowstone to give coherence to the excessive demands of the phallus. By externalizing lack, capitalism masks its internal contradictions (the fact that, as an anxiety-producing structure, it is both excessive and lacking). Without the excluded other, vividly portrayed in Yellowstone by the menaced border of the Dutton ranch, capitalism would cease to function. It would cease to function because it could no longer promise a way out of anxiety.
Capitalism promises an escape from anxiety while confronting capitalist subjects with something equally if not more anxiety provoking: the obscene excess of capitalist authority. Donald Trump can fill the White House with McDonald’s burgers, support white nationalists and domestic terrorism, enrich his private interests using the office of the presidency, abuse women, disparage journalists, bully the disabled, and build golf courses in vulnerable areas of the planet while dismantling basic environmental protections and still garner the love of his followers because he pins their lack on others: immigrants, BLM protestors, anti-fascists, and so on—subjects who, according to Trump, enjoy excessively and want to steal his supporters’ enjoyment too.
Splitting the structure of anxiety into two external positions (one aspirational, the other threatening) is the greatest trick performed by capitalist society, and it explains the inextricable bond between capitalism and racism. The worst nightmare for racial capitalism would be if these external positions, excess and lack, came together. Of course, they do; dialectically speaking, they are never separate, since lack fuels excessive desire and desire desires what is unobtainable in the Other. Nevertheless, much ideological work goes toward keeping these dialectical poles separate.
We are thus left with a choice between two different anxieties (one lacking, the other excessive) or a third, worse anxiety that is interminable and corrosive to the capitalist system. This essay is about interminable anxiety, which, from Freud’s essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” to Lacan’s Seminar X, is a stumbling block to subjects (all subjects) divided between excess and lack.
What the Multiple Misses
Crucial to note, however, is that when it comes to anxiety, theory stumbles too. Insisting on multiplicity over and against the tyranny of the One, radical theory (from Foucauldian desubjectification techniques to Derridean différance) offers numerous ways to escape the anxiety-producing demands of the Other. In doing so, however, theory repeats the split structure of anxiety. It relegates lack elsewhere, allowing the Other to occupy the master’s position. Multiplicity theory places itself in a reactionary role, endlessly deconstructing the very thing that it depends on to give it its radical guise.
The popular film Toy Story (1995) articulates what is most at stake in the turn to the multiple in radical theory: “To infinity and beyond.” This quixotic catchphrase, uttered by Buzz Lightyear, stands in stark contrast to Toy Story’s other phallic hero, Woody. In Western phallogocentric culture, has there ever been a better, more emblematic name for phallic mastery than “Woody”? Looking at this arborescent figure, it seems clear that Buzz’s intoxicating name and embrace of the multiple makes him a preferable Nom du père for theory. If Being and Event were a toy, it would be Buzz Lightyear.
Still, history is not always kind to theory, and this is true of the multiple also. Consider an example: On June 14, 2022, Patricia Heaton, costar of the American TV show Everybody Loves Raymond, tweeted her outrage about Disney/Pixar’s decision to drop Tim Allen (of Home Improvement fame) as the voice of the new Buzz Lightyear, asking: “Why would they completely castrate this iconic, beloved character?” The reason for Heaton’s objection is not immediately obvious. As the comment thread to Heaton’s post points out, the new Buzz Lightyear, helmed by Chris Evans, is a cartoon ode to the masculine ideal—a far cry from Heaton’s castrated Tool Man. He is cut, the commentators argued, but not that kind of cut.
Nevertheless, Heaton’s tweet raises a valid point about the direction of the new Buzz Lightyear, even if her concern is couched in conservative gender ideology. For the question keeping many of us up at night: Is Buzz bald under that purple space cap (baldness being a common symbol of castration)? The movie answers, he is not. So, arguably, the new Buzz Lightyear dramatizes the concern registered by Heaton’s tweet: that the figure of multiplicity is least equipped to accept castration and would rather go to outer space than reckon with it. Just look at Jeff Bezos.
Although the multiple seems like the most radical position that one could adopt against phallic authority, the multiple mirrors and so legitimizes that same authority. The multiple promises more—more newness, more surprise, more pleasure—and thus delays the subject’s traumatic encounter with lack. McGowan points out that even a thinker of radical absence like Jacques Derrida still holds on to the promise of the to come—thus minimizing the threat of lack. Derrida’s specters are always promising more on the horizon. In this way, the multiple echoes the metonymic structure of capitalism, promising subjects the opportunity to enjoy without limits. What the multiple misses, however, is that subjects only enjoy when there are limits—when, in other words, lack and excess combine. Buzz Lightyear is a comic instance of the multiple repeating the phallic pursuit of more. Yet he also highlights a pervasive trend in contemporary theory.
As the comment thread to Heaton’s post points out, the new Buzz Lightyear, helmed by Chris Evans, is a cartoon ode to the masculine ideal—a far cry from Heaton’s castrated Tool Man. He is cut, the commentators argued, but not that kind of cut.
Eugenie Brinkema’s Life-Destroying Diagrams represents the high point of multiplicity theory today. Reading Life-Destroying Diagrams, one may be titillated, surprised, or more likely frightened by the dizzying array of epigraphs, ornaments, creative typography, stage directions, parentheticals, lists, and negative space, which seemingly scream from the page, “READER, BEWARE.” Yet within this unfolding multiplicity, a thread runs through the labyrinth connecting essential points. The thesis? It is an avowedly Heideggerian one: form has been forgotten. Brinkema challenges the ossification of thought as bone, spinal column, and “neck”—her metaphor for the horror critic’s obsession with upright, cervical meanings like those derived from history or etymology. What, you might ask, is horror according to the horror critic? Brinkema tells us, unfolding the usual answers. It is the shuddering body, the threat of otherness, the cadaver of history lurching forward.
Such readings—in turn biological, ethical, political, and historical—serve as stubborn supports for the forgetting of form and so lose everything, Brinkema argues—everything but the neck. “Neck essentialism” converts form into allegory; it is, to adjust our terms, lacking, whereas the multiple of radical formalism is excessive, luxuriant, and new. Sorry, but if you go to horror films to feel tingles down your spine, you have been duped, Brinkema argues. In fact, we all have, just about. Even the most Deleuzian among us sacrifices the luxurious nonsense of form for a series of mundane “me” statements like “It thrilled me” or “It shocked me.” In so many ways, then, theory betrays its speculative calling. Like Heidegger, whose philosophical demolition begins with forgetting (“[The question of Being] has today been forgotten,” Heidegger writes in Being and Time), Brinkema breaks our present-at-hand concepts to unleash the radicality of the unready-to-hand: forms not obfuscated by use. Radical formalism breaks form from function and severs head from neck. Break the neck, Brinkema argues, and we break the slumber of theory. What else is a neck good for, except for breaking?
Though Brinkema’s goal in Life-Destroying Diagrams is to return thought to its speculative foundation, on this matter, the question of the neck, there is no room to speculate: the neck is good for nothing and has nothing to say. It is dumb. Let’s stop talking about it.
A thinker more interested in the idiocy of the everyday, G. W. F. Hegel, would disagree. Though Hegel does not theorize the neck per se, he does theorize the bone, that ossified column that supports our neck-like propositions. Hegel writes: “The being of Spirit is a bone.” Read dialectally, Hegel’s statement cuts in two directions: Spirit is mediated by bone, alienated by it, and, importantly, there is something of bone in Spirit. Hegel fractures the cervical column: it is and is not mere bone. But he also fractures Spirit: it is and is not Spirit. In Hegel’s dialectic, both sides (Spirit and bone) fail to escape the obfuscation that Heidegger attributes to the tool. Even our dumbest, most forgetful, present-at-hand activities contain a kernel of truth in Hegel’s philosophy. Dumb affect is not a mistake of theory; for Hegel, there are only mistakes. Consequently, theory succeeds not by cutting its enemy’s throat but by cutting its own throat. Only losers win in Hegel’s philosophy.
At an eventful moment in Life-Destroying Diagrams, Brinkema offers arguably the starkest formal account of multiplicity in the language of universal quantifiers. Although it is the same formal language Lacan deploys in Seminar XX, Lacan is nowhere cited. This observation is of more than bibliographic interest, for, according to Brinkema, no one (not me, not you, no one in the history of humanity) escapes death’s design, a truism Brinkema represents with the symbol ∀x. Death comes for all (∀). Although this seems inordinately obvious, Brinkema’s point is that being-toward-death gives life (and film) structure. The very structure of life is being-toward-death; its eventuality is immanent, its scythe ever at our tender necks.
But there is an exception to the ∀x: at least one who is not subject to death, who escapes it. Brinkema uses the existential quantifier ∃x to represent the exception to the rule. To be clear: the exception is a lie; it is a fantasy. Yet the fantasy of the ∃x persists. Heidegger’s whole philosophy is a meditation on the persistence of ∃x—that is, on the forgetting of Dasein’s authentic temporal existence. Likewise, Derrida’s grammatology reveals the repressed being-toward-death of writing. And Giorgio Agamben lays bare the ∃x as the sovereign exception.
Although there is no exception to radical formalism, there is, nonetheless, the recalcitrant, bony neck of theory, symbolized by the ∃x, and that neck is, unfortunately, broad. It includes affect theorists, phenomenologists, object-oriented ontologists, film scholars, philologists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, Marxists, historicists… the list goes on. I will spare you the ignominy of your inclusion. After all, the confederacy of dunces in Brinkema’s book is widespread, and we are all in it. The brilliance of Brinkema’s book is to show the idiocy of the exception. For, there is no exception in Brinkema’s argument. No one escapes formalism’s cut.
But there is a key difference between Brinkema’s radical formalism, illustrated by the universal quantifiers ∀x and ∃x, and Lacan’s. For Lacan, death is of little importance. The unconscious knows nothing of it, is unconcerned with Dasein and our original temporal thrownness. The unconscious knows no seasons. Instead, it is castration that the “all” of ∀x symbolizes in Lacan’s mathematical formula. While it is true that death frightens, only castration cleaves the subject from himself, constituting a much more disturbing (and lasting) cut than death.
The upshot of radical formalism is clear: it gives the reader freedom of thought without object, commodity, or utility. Oddly, this life-destroying formalism gives life to theory. By contrast, the neck and all it metaphorizes is ossifying, impossibilizing, restrictive, and deadening, a mere fossil of radical form—form with a boring necktie.
Multiplicity theory promises everything, yet it retrenches a basic dualism, opposing itself to Others who become bigger and more anxiogenic as a result. The radical formalist position sustains the anxiety-inducing Other because there would be nothing to deconstruct or multiply without the Other’s imposture. Consequently, theory feeds and destroys the very thing it opposes.
It is not clear, then, that the turn to multiplicity moves the dial toward radicality. After all, who cares about multiplicity when multiplicity is all there is? As Alain Badiou argues, the infinity of differences isn’t extraordinary; it is a banal fact of existence. Difference alone does not ensure the event. Instead, it keeps the structure of anxiety firmly in place by opposing excess and lack.
Left Enjoyment
No film better captures the misery of the multiple than Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). The film pretends to celebrate the multiple by taking the multiverse as its narrative conceit. But it takes the multiverse on by critiquing the multiple as a reactionary and doomed political and aesthetic response to anxiety.
The film centers on a Chinese American family living in California. They are the real-world embodiments of the multiverse: multilingual, multigenerational, multicultural, and multiply divided by their competing dreams and aspirations. They run a failing laundromat. The mother, wife, and daughter of the family, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), is overwhelmed by anxious feelings about her father’s excessive expectations, an audit on the family business, and her perceived lack of success. Meanwhile, her husband, Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), is planning to divorce her, and her daughter, Joy Wang (Stephanie Hsu), anxious about her mother’s demands to be thinner, more successful, and less queer, is slipping toward the only thing she has left: nihilism.
When Evelyn, the film’s unlikely hero, enters the multiverse, it all sounds eerily familiar. Her contact from afar, the intergalactic multiple of Waymond, nicknamed Alpha Waymond, explains to Evelyn what is at stake: “I know you have a lot of things on your mind, but nothing can matter more than … the fate of every single world of our infinite multiverse.” Alpha Waymond explains the situation like a would-be Peter Sloterdijk. He speaks of bubbles: “This is your universe, one bubble floating in the cosmic foam of existence. Every surrounding bubble has slight variations. But the further away you get from your universe, the bigger the differences.” This differential foam would not be a problem if not for the sudden sliding occurring throughout the multiverse, brought about by the film’s villain, Jobu Tupaki, who we learn is Evelyn’s daughter, Joy. “She’s been building something,” Alpha Waymond laments.
Alpha Waymond: We thought it was some sort of black hole. . . . We don’t know what exactly it is. We don’t know what it’s for. But we can all feel it. You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? Something is off. Your clothes never wear as well the next day, your hair never falls in quite the same way, even your coffee tastes wrong. Our institutions are crumbling, nobody trusts their neighbor anymore, and you stay up at night wondering to yourself…
Evelyn: How can we get back?
Alpha Waymond’s description of the multiverse as a chaotic system in which “institutions are crumbling, nobody trusts their neighbor,” and no one can sleep at night sounds a lot like the anxiety-laden conditions of present-day capitalism. Less obvious, perhaps, is that it’s also a pretty good description of a wide range of theory, from Bergsonian élan vital to Butlerian performativity, insofar as nothing in these theories truly repeats—nothing “falls in quite the same way”—except multiplicity. The brilliance of Everything Everywhere is that it treats this unending multiple as the anxiogenic condition of our time. Though the multiverse in lesser films saves the day by deconstructing the mendacity of the One, the turn to fragmented multiples repeats rather than ruptures the problem of anxiety, leaving us one of two bad choices: appease the demands of the Other, or resort to cynicism.
Joy takes up the latter position. “Commanding the infinite knowledge and power of the multiverse,” the film’s version of a Twitter account, Joy has “seen too much” and “lost any sense of morality, any belief in objective truth.” When Joy reveals her master plan to her mother, Evelyn is surprised to learn that there is no plan: no black hole, no Death Star, only boredom.
Joy: I got bored one day, and I put everything on a bagel. Everything. All my hopes and dreams, my old report cards, every breed of dog, every last personal ad on Craigslist. Sesame. Poppy seed. Salt. And it collapsed in on itself. ’Cause you see, when you really put everything on a bagel, it becomes this. The truth.
Evelyn: What is the truth?
Joy: Nothing matters.
Joy is the film’s radical formalist. She puts everything on a bagel, the sphincteric form of the universe, only to show the nothing at its center. Joy tears down the obfuscations of the world. There are no anchors, no quilting points in Joy’s multiverse, only the infinite plurality of forms.
Everything Everywhere is unique among multiverse films because it is critical of the multiverse concept. Pitting Evelyn (the impossibly demanding Other) and Joy (the teenage cynic) against each other, the film shows that the two positions are structurally interdependent and mutually reinforcing. The multiverse does not relieve the anxiogenic demands of capitalism (remember: Evelyn, too, has big Others in her life, including her father and the IRS); it intensifies it. As Alpha Waymond states, “we can all feel it,” the multiple without anchorage. “You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you?”
McGowan argues that comedy is the one genre that brings excess and lack together. Everything Everywhere is a good comedy for that reason. Though everyone in the film feels a sense of lack and believes that life’s excess is enjoyed elsewhere (in romance films, in other universes), it ends by dialectizing excess and lack. Much like other heroic archetypes (Luke Skywalker in Star Wars and Neo in The Matrix), Evelyn lives up to her promise by mastering the multiverse and becoming a powerful wielder of différance. However, this proves a losing battle against an enemy, her daughter, who, like your average capitalist, believes in nothing but the proliferation and psychoticization of the multiple. They exchange blows, but nothing changes. True change only happens when Evelyn stops being multiple and accepts the deadlock of her subjectivity. By rejecting the multiverse, Evelyn gains access to the one affect that does not deceive: anxiety.
Near the film’s final sequence, Evelyn recognizes that an infinite array of universes is no match for the sweet imbecility of her husband, Waymond. Waymond acknowledges his shortcomings but explains that what others perceive as weakness (his lack of phallic mastery) is his strength, his means of survival. Waymond enjoys the constitutive anxiety that Lacan and Ruti align with the subject’s internal division. In other words, Waymond brings lack (castration) and excess (enjoyment, jouissance) together. What had seemed like a deficit on the part of her husband, a lack needing to be filled, Evelyn reimagines as a vehicle of radical transformation.
Evelyn stops fighting like a reactionary. Instead, she upholds her constitutive anxiety—a sign of her inner division—and says to her daughter: I am that. An echo of Freud’s famous “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (“Where id was, ego shall be”), Evelyn acknowledges what she could not acknowledge before (her failings as a mother) and, as a result, finds relief from the exhausting demands of the Other and the reactionary demands of the multiverse. Anxiety brings her to this discovery, signaling the lack that had fueled her excessive striving and obstinance toward her daughter. The film’s true radicality occurs at this moment, not in the sliding of the multiverse, not in Joy’s refusal to anchor in the here and now, but in Evelyn’s decision to bring excess and lack together before her daughter.
A subject riven by lack may look to the Other to complete them, but this is a losing strategy. The strength of Everything Everywhere’s ending and what makes it a leftist film is that Evelyn and Joy find a common cause in each other’s lack. Instead of fleeing their constitutive anxiety, either in the Other or the multiverse, they embrace it by embracing each other. Although left theory rejects the big Other and does so in defense of those who are lacking, it could, following Evelyn, learn to make lack part of its political agenda.
This is not an easy task for left organizing, yet its implications for left thinking are profound. What would the Green New Deal look and sound like if it rallied for lack instead of excess? The tendency on the Left is to promise more: more happiness, more downtime, more luxury, more sex. These are vital concerns since they bear on the Left’s commitment to freedom and equality. However, the promise of more cleaves lack from the equation. A similar antinomy appears in the rhetoric of the youth climate strike. Not only its emblematic figure, Greta Thunberg, but also its rhetoric of futurity dovetail with a morbid strain in queer theory, metaphorized by Lee Edelman as the figure of the Child. The youth climate strike movement insists on the future, understandably so. But a strike for the future echoes rhetorically the very thing that the climate strikers attack. Fossil capitalism is also a futural form; its inner child demands endless growth.
Admittedly, lack is a hard term to rally around since the very mention of lack sends most people running (often to other anxiety-provoking activities that promise more). Doing so would involve sustaining anxiety rather than obliterating it. It would mean recognizing the D (singular and multiple) as a lost cause.