음식 서사와 유동적 디아스포라 주체성: 영화 <에브리씽 에브리웨어 올 앳 원스>를 중심으로

Food Narrative and Fluid Diasporic Subjectivity: A Study of Everything Everywhere All at Once

In some Chinese diasporic films that address migration experiences, food and the family dining table function as signs that evoke cultural roots and traditions. Everything Everywhere All at Once demonstrates changes in diasporic subjectivity through the shifting functions of food imagery as the narrative unfolds. This study examines how food imagery in the film participates in the characters’ identity conflicts and changing relationships. First, drawing on Hamid Naficy’s theory of accented cinema, it explores Evelyn’s circumstances and her anxieties about survival. The food-preparation scenes at the beginning of the film are analyzed as a defensive performance through which she attempts to manage these anxieties. The study then examines, through Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, how the “Everything Bagel” both reveals Joy’s identity conflict and her loss of meaning and disrupts existing boundaries and orders. In addition, based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, it analyzes unconventional scenes of ingestion, including the act of swallowing a tube of lipstick and bodily transformations such as hot-dog fingers. In this process, the study considers how the existing “habitual body” and body schema are unsettled and reoriented toward new modes of action and relationship. Through this analysis, the study argues that the food narrative in Everything Everywhere All at Once depicts a process in which the subject continually adjusts her position and behavior in response to different cultural demands and relationships. This process is understood as the self-reconstruction of fluid diasporic subjectivity, as proposed in this study.