Why Do So Many Multiverses Center Around a Bagel?

The multiverse is a major trend in film right now, especially in superhero films. The Sony Animated Spider-man movies revolve around there being a multiverse of Spider-Variants, constantly interacting and causing trouble for each other.

This has also led to the creation of a new meme: the Bagel Effect.

Spoilers ahead for Everything Everywhere All At Once and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse!

Explaining the bagel effect

The villain of Across the Spider-Verse is known as The Spot, whose monologue reveals that he was an Alchemax scientist that Miles hit with a bagel in Into the Spiderverse.

This throwaway line to a throwaway joke from the first movie highlights The Spot’s traditional role as an unimportant “villain-of-the-week” or a temporary antagonist generally used as filler, who is of no real threat or consequence to the hero or the larger narrative.

But the difference is that the Spot is actually very powerful, thanks to Miles getting him caught up in the reactor explosion. Miles created the Spot, but the Spot also created Miles, having been one of the scientists experimenting with the collider that brought over the spider that gave Miles his powers.

This may be a subtle reference to the 1989 Tim Burton Batman, which had Jack Napier being the gunman who killed the Waynes, only for Napier to be thrown into acid by Batman decades later.

But the bagel reference has also ironically turned The Spot into the Spider-verse’s version of Jobu Tupaki from Everything Everywhere All At Once—a connection that has not gone unnoticed by fans of both.

Why a bagel?

Though this does beg the question: how did the bagel become the symbol of the multiverse?

Part of that is thanks to absurdism (the ultimate answer to what would happen if you actually tried to put everything on a bagel would be a black hole), but it also goes back to symbolism and Chinese philosophy.

In EEAAO, the Bagel is meant to be the opposite of the googly eyes that Mr. Wang decorates his home with, and which Evelyn eventually wears in the climax of the film. The Bagel and the Googly Eye are meant to be a kind of yin-and-yang, with the former being a symbol of despair and nihilism and the latter being a symbol of hope, optimism, and enlightenment. Ultimately, the enlightened and optimistic Evelyn is able to pull her daughter out of the black hole that threatened to consume her.

You could make a similar connection in the Spider-Verse, with The Spot being a white void with black holes that are portals to other locations across his universe and other universes. His power-up, likewise, is becoming a black void of rage and revenge, with only a few white spots.

But the bagel effect meme is also reminiscent of the butterfly effect, or the idea that every action has large effects on the world around us. Maybe if Miles hadn’t hit the Spot with a bagel, he wouldn’t have felt so disrespected and resentful of Miles. At the same time, the Spot doesn’t seem to take responsibility for his culpability in his fate, having been a scientist working for the evil Alchemax that almost tore apart Brooklyn, so it’s hard to say.

It may also help that bagels are basically the closest you can get to a Mobius strip in food form, being a ring with no start or end.

But it’s also probably just a happy coincidence that two of the best movies of the past year and a half have been multiverse romps with jokes about bagels.

Which bagel do you prefer: the Everything Bagel or the Bagel effect? Comment below!

(Featured Image: Sony Pictures)