Upon rewatching Peter Weir’s ‘Truman Show’ I found myself asking many of the same questions as after reading Samuel Becketts play ‘Waiting for Godot’, and frankly, I found myself with many of the same questions after watching ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ too. They all ask, and in my opinion, answer that true existentialist mystery – what makes life worth living?

Beckett shifts the focus of the theatre - why do we seek entertainment? Is it all a big distraction? Photo: Tyler Callahan / Unsplash

Philosophical background information
So, let’s begin by diving into the deep end of the pool first and look at some philosophical context these works can, and need, to be put in.

Søren Kierkegaard (born in 1813) is often regarded as one of the first existential thinkers, even though this idea was before his time. Kierkegaard was interested in the crushing responsibility of making choices in your own life. He found concepts such as freedom, anxiety and what it means to be human fascinating, noting that to him:

‘All existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation […].’

Jean-Paul Sartre (born in 1905) – one of the first to actually call himself an existentialist – sees the world as something godless and vacant – ‘man is condemned to be free’. He claims that we are thrown into this world, responsible for everything we do. Existence thus precedes essence; existing becomes merely an accident.

Albert Camus (born in 1913) then in ‘the myth of Sisyphus’ explored the absurd. He focused his energy on the idea of suicide, claiming it to be the most prevalent philosophical problem of his time, that ‘all other questions follow from that’. Because if life is meaningless, suicide is almost logical.

Camus meant that looking for meaning, going to work, having children becomes ‘the absurd’ when existence is deemed meaningless. In that sense we become Sisyphus – pushing the meaningless boulder up the meaningless hill. And yet, if we accept the absurdity of life, he means there’s bound to follow some sort of acceptance – therefore ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy’. The absurdity and continuity of the struggle is what makes life worth living.

Waiting for Godot
Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus all explored the subject of existentialism and absurdism – Samuel Beckett (born in 1906) brought these themes to life with his infamous play ‘Waiting for Godot’. Beckett wrote the play ‘En attendant Godot’ or ‘Waiting for Godot’ between the fall and winter of 1948 and 1949, and it was first performed at a small theatre in Paris in 1953. His writing shared the absurdist element with other playwrights of his time, like Adamov and Ionesco, and Beckett was heavily influenced by Sartre and Camus. What I’d like to shed my focus on is that Beckett introduces waiting onto the stage, instead of explanations, clear plot, or even a coherent story. I’d claim this is what puts this play in a league of its own. By stripping the world in ‘Waiting for Godot’ of work, children or even meaning – what is then left?

In ‘Waiting for Godot’ two men, Vladimir and Estragon, wait around a desolate stage for a man called Godot. They talk about nonsense, they can’t recall if they were here yesterday or not, if the sun was there, and they contemplate, several times, killing themselves. But they also always forget to bring enough rope. The play plays on boredom, on two men trying to entertain each other as they wait for a man who never shows. The role of the theatre as a space to forget the ‘realness of life’ is here inversed – Beckett forces the viewer into a desolate state of unrestfulness and uncertainty. Do we, as if grasping at straws, wish for some referential mania to release us into a blissful existence full of answers by the end of the play? As part of the audience, we want to believe that the characters’ babbling and waiting will be exquisitely tied into some neat, easily digestible lesson. But it isn’t. Godot never comes and the talking has been for the sake of talking. I believe a sense of ‘melancholy, coloured by a feeling of futility born from the disillusionment of old age and chronic hopelessness’, as Martin Esslin, who wrote ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’, put it, is what anyone who is not used to the theatre of absurd will be left with.

People often assume that ‘Godot’ might be an allusion to God, but Beckett famously stated that:

‘If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot’.

The human experience runs like sand through our hands. Photo: Enoch Denzil / Unsplash

The Irish word for ‘forever’ is ‘go deo’, and Beckett was Irish, so a likely explanation is that the name Godot is a play on words – therefore the title becomes ‘waiting for forever’ or simply ‘waiting forever’, which is exactly what Estragon and Vladimir do.

The way Beckett’s play reaches into our hearts of hearts and squeezes and points at something fundamental in us is eerie. But the haunting sensation relieves some honesty, and begs us to confront it – what are we waiting for in life to make decisions? Are we, like those two lonely and confused men, simply entertaining each other as we wait for answers that we deep down know, or maybe simply sense, will never come? We wait for someone or something to give our life meaning. It reminded me in many ways of lockdown during covid, that feeling of having an insurmountable, indefinite amount of time.

The ‘Truman Show’ and the art of waiting
In what ways is ‘Waiting for Godot’ then mirrored in cinema? My claim is that many of the same themes, combined with the crucial new element of surveillance and media, can be found in the 1998 film ‘Truman Show’. Truman, played by Jim Carrey, leads a full life that is a carefully detailed TV-show, that seemingly everyone in the world watches and loves. A struggle to find purpose with life, a sense of repetition, irony, and satire, questioning what is real and what is an illusion, and the portrayal of a limited and controlled environment are all elements that run straight like a line down the middle of both ‘Waiting for Godot’ and ‘Truman Show’. Determinism becomes equivalent with something being scripted, and a TV-show producer is shown and praised for playing God. Now, in the same way Beckett wasn’t the only absurdist playwriter of his time, the ‘Truman Show’ doesn’t stand alone. ‘Groundhog day’ (1993), ‘The Matrix’ (1999) and ‘Eternal sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004) all incorporate themes of existentialism, absurdity and the futility of life. Worth noting is that all of these movies are twenty to thirty years old, but we’ll get back to that.

The play begs us to ask ourselves the question: what is relevant? Human action becomes irrelevant – both acts end with the infamous decision to leave, followed by the stage direction ‘they do not move’. Effective communication becomes irrelevant – Estragon and Vladimir constantly repeat each other, without ever being on the same page. And finally socioeconomic status is irrelevant – noticeable in the character of Pozzo. So, what is relevant then? Yes, the very thing that made us accept that if life has no meaning there is still some point in living in it – human connection. Without each other the characters would have nothing left and no reason to continue waiting. In much the same way, it is only because a woman felt something real for Truman, that he in the end escapes it. A woman whom the showmaker wanted to eliminate from the story, to keep the ruse going and eliminate any possibility of Truman making a choice. He is cursed to unwilling stardom, a cyclic, repetitive life filled with actors instead of people and at times ads instead of genuine conversations.

Which timeline is it that you are living in right now? Photo: Annie Spratt / Unsplash

Why is it then of any importance that the easily noticeable common denominator in the films I mentioned is the fact that they’re all from circa twenty or thirty years ago? I wonder what this same existentialism looks like in cinema today and I drag you along this brief history of philosophers, dramatists and movies just to ask: is this why Daniel Scheinert and Dan Kwan’s ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ (2022) won so many Oscars this year? I believe so, because on some level, existentialism has moved out of art and into our lives, our gen-Z humour, into our politics and it doesn’t need to occupy the same space as it has before. ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ explores, in a much more tongue-in-cheek-goofy way many absurd ideas about the human experience, focusing on parallel universes. In the same way ‘Waiting for Godot’ is incredibly naked, in its simplicity and stage décor, and even in plot – in the same way is ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ extremely layered. It becomes a mirror to society.

Reliving and waiting; and for what?
If ‘Waiting for Godot’ ends as a question, ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ works as an answer. In all our lives, if we got the chance to relive it, to throw the dice again, what would be the things we hold on to? What is the thing we are waiting for? The antagonist of the story Joy Wang (or Jobu Tupaki), the daughter, played by Stephanie Hsu, holds onto her hate, her complicated relationship to her mother, and lets it grow universally big. Evelyn Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh, the mother and protagonist, however, doesn’t know what to hold onto in this life. Because in this one she isn’t famous, rich, or successful; she isn’t necessarily suicidal, but she feels tired and hopeless. The unravelling of evil versus good in this universe relies on the fact that this is the universe where Evelyn is most normal. The way that human connection becomes the answer to all of our questions is grounding. Connectivity becomes the answer to the meaninglessness of life, the absurdity of it, the thing that keeps Estragon and Vladimir waiting, that breaks Truman out of his insane life, and it is the thing that in the end connects Joy and Evelyn again… it is so incredibly human of us. To again and again say ‘all we have is each other and that’s plenty’. It is divine.

The paralysed darkness that ‘Waiting for Godot’ leaves us in, ‘Truman Show’ sails a ship through. Yet when Truman leaves ‘the set’ that has been his hometown for all his life, we don’t see him anymore. We don’t get to see what his life looks like when finally, one day, he reaches the top of the mountain, and the boulder doesn’t need to be pushed anymore. What a life beyond this struggle, acceptance, looks like is unclear. But ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ believes us worthy of an answer: acceptance is simple. Accepting life’s absurdity is a lot easier than we want to believe it is. As Waymond Wang, played by Ke Huy Quan puts it: ‘in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you’. Acceptance is to accept your role in the absurdity, and to search for love in it. To live in denial of life being meaningless (waiting and waiting for Godot) is followed by a suicidal extremism (Truman doesn’t want a safe, controlled life, but to brave freedom) and in the end we reach acceptance.

The answer of acceptance
Acceptance is humanism. Acceptance is realising that life is not only meaningless but boring, it is waiting. It’s a struggle to be free and to realise that this is the hand you were dealt. We experience in Evelyn the loss of a thousand selves, as we rapidly flash through a montage of her different parallel timelines. What is left is a woman who needs to remind her daughter that she is loved, in this life, that she has someone and something to hold onto in the dark. Acceptance is a godless and vacant state of mind, but it is then filled with the empirism of love. The people around us become the only thing that can save us from falling over the cliff, into the abyss.

Waiting for Godot, Truman, and Joy – existentialism, absurdity, and the waiting game.