On Monday, Edgar and I went in the evening to see one of the last possible big-screen showings of Everything Everywhere All At Once, directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (AKA “Daniels”). We both greatly enjoyed the film – if you have the chance, you should watch it, as I imagine it’s one of the more thoughtful and visually interesting multiverse-themed movies of the year (note: please do not contact me about Marvel movies. I’m not interested).

The film was exceptionally tight: every event had a call forward and a call back, and it managed to achieve this maximalism without making the movie seem overstuffed. This is at least partially supported by the sophisticated symbolic language that the movie managed to create within itself. It is an excellent example of the phenomenon of “symbolic language” in the arts, and an excellent illustration of the necessity of developing this within a work of art.

At root – and mild spoilers here, as I will be discussing initial situations and themes instead of events, but some people get worked up about that – the film is about Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), an immigrant from China, who manages a laundromat with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). The two of them are raising a thoroughly Americanized daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who is trying to convince her family to be more accepting of her lesbian relationship with Becky (Tallie Medel) – who doesn’t get much attention in the plot, but also avoids most of the worst of the film. On the same day as they are celebrating Evelyn’s father, referred to as Gong Gong (James Hong), they have to try to finish up an audit from the IRS, specifically under the watchful eye of Deidre Beaubeidre (Jamie Lee Curtis).

It’s around here that the multiverse intrudes, and I’ll leave it at that. The principle conflict, though, is between two strains of nihilism. Either nothing matters and so everything we do is meaningless and we should just give up, or nothing inherently matters and we’re free to decide what is and is not important for ourselves. These are represented, respectively, in the symbolic language by the “everything bagel” (a black circle with a white center) and the “googly eye” (a white circle with a black center.)

There are, of course, other elements to the symbolic language: the parallelism between fighting and dancing, the presence/absence of glasses, and a number of other, more minor elements. I could devote time to examining these (the fighting/dancing parallel seems fairly interesting, considering them both as the same thing, but one is zero- or negative-sum and the other is positive-sum.) What I want to look at more is the phenomenon of what I’m referring to as “symbolic language” in the arts more generally.

First off, I don’t know if I’m the one who originated the term “symbolic language”, I’m going to assume not. However, it might also seem redundant: every language is, by definition, symbolic. It’s inherent, at least to the Lacanian definition of the Symbolic Order: “The social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law (also called the ‘big Other’)” (taken from the Purdue website). What I mean overlaps somewhat with this – but a more accurate way to summarize the point I’m trying to get at here is that works of art make use of an inventory of symbols that help communicate their meaning.

This isn’t innovative. What might be somewhat new is that, at least to me, it seems that for a work of art to be “successful” it is far more important to use the chosen symbolic language effectively than to say anything terribly innovative. A novel message presented without artifice would not be as effective as a trite message presented skillfully.

What makes a work of art groundbreaking is making use of a novel symbolic vocabulary, or radically changing the way that the symbolic vocabulary is used. I believe that Everything Everywhere All At Once does this, saying more risks spoiling a movie, and not enough of you have gone and seen it – so go do that – and I’m going to use other examples. Let’s take Night in the Woods as our example. In that article linked there, I note that prevalence of leftward motion in that game for progressing (the character begins at the far rightward edge of the map every morning). This connects to the game’s theme of nostalgia and the feeling that the Appalachian setting has been left behind by a world that is moving on, meaning that all it has is the past. By inverting a basic prepositional metaphor of the anglophone world (right = future), the creators of that game loaded every action with a powerful symbolic payload: quite innovative for a video game about funny talking animals who happen to be burnouts and punks.

Another example is Disco Elysium, which creates a powerful feeling of “reality but a little to the left” largely through its environment design and world-building. For example, using “infra-culture” instead of “subculture,” or referring to their automotive machines not as “cars” or “automobiles” but “motor carriages” – not to mention the design of these machines. The use of this sort of thing alongside noted Britishisms like “lorry” make them seem more natural – as a midwesterner, I don’t tend to get a lot of those in day-to-day speech, but having a real-but-rarely-encountered-term like lorry next to “motor carriage” makes the latter seem more natural. However, the important thing here isn’t the new vocabulary used in the game: it’s the fact that all of this makes the experience of the protagonist and viewpoint character’s amnesia and dissociation feel more present.

Let’s look beyond film and video games, though.

In Cursive’s album The Ugly Organ (2003), there are a number of repeated motifs: Frankenstein’s Monster (“Herald, Frankenstein!”) and Pinocchio (“Driftwood: A Fairy Tale”) are most obvious. These are simulacra of human beings – specifically masculine human beings – as opposed to the ghostly, ethereal women depicted. This dovetails with the somewhat derisive repetition of “doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo,” which is only vocalized (as far as I can recall) in the song “A Gentleman Caller” (which also continues the literary/fairy tale motif by bringing up Rumpelstiltskin). However, it seems to me that the conjunction of the derisive riff, the whole of songs two and three – “Some Red Handed Sleight of Hand” and “Art is Hard” – and the simulated men makes the whole album about the feeling of being a fake. It is not the symbols themselves, but the interrelation of the symbols that portrays the thematic payload of the work of art.

This interrelation reaches its apex in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which made heavy use of text interposed upon text and labyrinths of footnotes to create three or four obvious narratives and one or two non-obvious narratives that interweave with them. Taking any one of these narratives – even the Navidson Record, which makes up the bulk of the text – as the definitive, “primary” story being told is a mistake. It is only through the interrelation of these narratives that the “real” meaning, if such a thing can actually be discussed, makes any amount of sense.

What I am saying here is that every work of art has a symbolic language that it makes use of: an inventory of symbols that are placed here and there, and while they might have a meaning that can be gleaned from them individually, it is only through their interrelation that anything like a “message” can be picked out. This is generally not something that can be easily put into words: it’s a sense, or a feeling, that can be intuited, perhaps even described, but putting it into prosaic, everyday language robs it of the depth and significance that it has otherwise.

This is the primary issue with the style of reading that privileges picking out the “themes” and saying “this is what it’s about.” If anything, this style of reading, where the definitive “meaning” is pinned up for easy consumption, defuses the payload of the symbolic language. Which is not to say that it’s useless, but is to say that privileging that over other styles of reading and analysis is a mistake.

Do I think the Daniels knew what they were doing with the everything bagel/googly eye distinction? Probably, but actually laying out that “this means X” and “that means Y” doesn’t communicate the experience of the work of art. We can discuss what these symbols mean, but if it actually meant exactly what we say when we summarize it, then the work of art would not be what it is. At most, when we do this kind of reading, we’re giving a chalk outline or a silhouette of something much more complex.

Some of you might be thinking the term “leitmotif” or “motif” here. I want to insert an aside about that: the motif is related to the symbolic language, but it appears to me that the motif is the ground against which the symbolic language manifests. If you were to change the motifs of a work of art – if you were to mirror the map of Night in the Woods, for example, or move the principle action of Everything Everywhere All At Once out of an IRS building – then the symbols that appear against that ground would change in their meaning. It may still be a work of art, but it would be a very different experience.

If you’re looking to build a symbolic language for your own work, I’m going to suggest you look elsewhere – a piece I wrote a long time ago, on the Principle of Minimal Contradiction, is my suggested starting point – I’m just describing the phenomenon a bit more in detail now that I have the right terminology to use.

There is one more major point I would like to bring up: if you look at the examples I have above, and think over the examples that have hopefully leaped to mind for you as you read, then I suspect that an additional factor in this discussion will come to mind for you. Specifically, innovative works of art teach you to use the medium in a new way. This usually comes, as in House of Leaves, by punishing you for using it in a traditional way (if you start in the upper left and proceed to the lower right, dutifully following the footnotes, you will be lost,) or, as in the case of Fight Club, which has been on my mind since the piece on Memory and Identity, by rewarding you for noticing something new (I remember noticing “cigarette burns” before then, but Fight Club made it seem more notable to pick them out as I watched, potentially distracting me from the action on the screen.)

Of course, sometimes the work instructs you ambiguously: should you read all the sequences in Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth page-by-page, or are some or all of the action sequences meant to be read as one continuous unit, one giant page spread across two leaves? If you sit and try to do it, a certain amount of sense is retained and the narrative shifts slightly. Is this intentional or unintentional? Is this an experiment, a distraction, or an accident?

A confusing work by a skilled artist is most likely the result of them using a new symbolic language. Identifying the important symbols, the repeated motifs, the way they are encouraging you to approach the work implicitly, can make it unfold for you and become more straightforward.

Symbolic Order: Logogenesis in the Arts