[Content warnings for this page: mentions of predatory behavior, and discussion of dysphoria. There are also spoilers for We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.]
I went into We’re All Going to the World’s Fair expecting a straightforward horror film, following the genealogy of The Blair Witch Project’s found footage style into our era of social media, algorithms, and creepypastas.
Jane Schoenbrun’s debut feature film fits somewhere into that timeline, for sure, but as an outlier. It does not employ gimmicks, or exploit tragedy, or rely on a shallow attachment to a specific cultural moment. It is not straightforward horror (I’d hesitate to call it horror at all), and while it is definitely about interactive online horror narrative creation and play, the horror isn’t in jump-scares or unexplained phenomena——it’s in the way Schoenbrun dives deep into the loneliness that can draw people into these hybrid spaces.
So, really, Schoenbrun offers a space to sit in the complexity of our era of social media isolation, algorithmic black holes, and tenuous boundaries between the constructed realities we navigate daily and the constructed realities of creepypastas.
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Schoenbrun, subconsciously at first, constructed a trans allegory. She has been incredibly (and importantly) transparent about this, since its release. Schoenbrun came out during the process of creating the film, and the feelings of isolation and disembodiment We’re All Going to the World’s Fair explores are directly tied to her experiences as a young trans person who escaped into the internet.
It is because of this direct understanding of disembodiment, of feeling outside (of society, of yourself) that Schoenbrun was able to create a film which, in my mind, does a better job explaining in an embodied way, what might’ve led to the Slenderman stabbings, than the countless fearmongering articles and bad-take analyses that arose in its wake ever could.
Similar to the ways in which La Casa Lobo constructs a reality that points to the real of Colonia Digidad in an affective way that documentaries just can’t, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair does a better job at building an embodied sense of why someone might choose to become so invested in one of these explicitly non“real” narratives than any write-up about the Slenderman stabbings ever has.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair deals largely with the idea of being seen, and the loneliness of waiting to be seen. As a viewer, you are often watching the act of watching. There are long shots of Casey just setting up her camera, looking at herself through her screen, adjusting the lights, the angle, becoming frustrated, stepping away. You sit with her as she watches online videos that drag on for an almost uncomfortable amount of time. Her need for intimacy and protection is literally amplified when she projects an ASMR comfort video to be wall sized, the performer whispering affirmations that she is safe and held. Later, the perspective changes to JLB, and his finger traces Casey’s unconscious form on his screen, commenting on an uploaded video of her entire night’s sleep. The spinning arrow of Casey’s loading screen becomes an ominous being of its own.
A lot in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is intentionally left open: did something paranormal happen while Casey was sleeping? Did JLB have predatory intentions? Is Casey’s absence at the end because she killed herself, or her father? You’re allowed to speculate, build in your own narrative, the way JLB does in the last 10 or so minutes of the film, but the most likely answers, though less sensational, are somehow darker: that they were both lonely, invested in this separate reality, that JLB broke the spell it had over Casey, and she removed herself from that space, leaving him to continue worldbuilding, and her to potentially return to a repressive existence.
This is where the power of visibility, and being seen——or choosing not to be seen, becomes so essential to this work. We see JLB, but Casey doesn’t, he keeps his webcam off. Sticky notes across his desktop screen imply that he plays this role for others, and absent/present/omniscient game guide.
He is obviously getting something out of his engagement with the challenge and with the other players. The issue is that so is Casey, and his disruption of the reality she’s constructing for herself within the game space causes it to fray at the edges, and then finally fall apart and become useless. This disruption happens most visibly when he asks her to go “out of game”, but also occurs any time he implies that he knows things about the challenge’s world that she doesn’t (as seen through her aggression in the tarot reading, which is pretty clearly directed at him, and states that whoever’s watching her videos must be lonely, have mental issues, and be trying to deceive people). *Expand on how he not only performs knowing more than her within a constructed fiction, but tries to push her back toward existing “trailheads” rather than the more existential paths she’s trying to navigate her way down.
It is the visual presence of others that makes the World’s Fair Challenge so real to Casey: people document their symptoms (or “changes”) in vlogs, provide evidence of its creeping longevity (like a
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to add:
what it means to be isolated in a time when we’re supposedly hyper-connected (digitally) // role of screens, constant presence without presence
horror as a draw to queer people. (and how this can be seen really clearly even in popular culture right now) it creates an open door to frame this film as horror. maybe some people won’t get it but that’s okay, it’s literally not for them??? its unreadability within genre as a trans thing itself.
how i’d hesitate to call it a “slow burn” because what does that even mean in horror now? it’s more like an intentional slowing down of pace, to be out of step with the way the internet actually works now. it shows a disconnect between Casey and what’s around her (like how she reacts to JLB’s first message).
something about how these spaces ACKNOWLEDGE that they’re constructed, while the constructed reality(s) we navigate day-to-day often don’t. that maybe there’s more of a sense of autonomy and control when there’s this shared understanding that you’re standing within something built.
really dig into performance and performativity: Casey is constantly practicing, making adjustments to the lights, watching herself through her webcam. the awareness of being watched shifts how we act. the power dynamics of being viewed (JLB never turns on his camera).
the watching of watching (is there something performative just about watching a movie???) (watching her watch herself, watching her watch videos, watching the videos she’s watching, watching the laptop record her sleeping—which she stops doing because she asks aloud who wants to watch stupid videos, then walks outside muttering something about “32 views” lol). she puts this value on being watched (being seen?)
within the lens of transness: Casey as trying to learn to perform through observation and feeling this disconnect.
re: the end: ARE WE ALL JUST UNRELIABLE NARRATORS?
when she searches for symptoms and what comes up are videos with titles like “I can’t feel my body” and “I am turning to plastic” and an article on the “strange loop theory”
when she talks about sleepwalking (which could be true or untrue, because she relates it to paranormal activity then is pretty clearly performing that type of horror in her sleep journals) but how what it would be hard to be faking is saying something like “it was like watching myself on a tv all the way across the room”, and the sense of that feeling looming even when she isn’t actively feeling it.
the loading arrows (stand-in for the algorithm) become their own anxiety-inducing entity
the muddiness of whether she’s playing along or not (or whether she’s able to identify where those boundaries are, since she explicitly does not know the language of the game: is confused about the phrase move “out of game”, “MMORPG”, and “trailheads”) as really important to her internal constructions of reality——she isn’t stupid, she just doesn’t have this language which is an element of the actual construction that can’t really be grasped without that language.
the power of being seen but also the power of NOT being seen (not just with how it enables JLB to feel omniscient/powerful but also how Casey fantasizes about it: “I swear, someday soon, I’m just gonna disappear. And you won’t have any idea what happened to me” as a like, threatening reclamation of control over her visibility in a moment where she doesn’t have a lot of power)
her fear that she’s not in control (explicitly stated around the belief that she might murder her dad, despite that she doesn’t “want to”)
the challenge and its associated changes give her permission to perform and FEEL these things, the hatred toward her father, the silly (cringey) release of dancing in front of her camera, the destruction of her stuffed animal and the grief afterwards : all of which were likely repressed before that.
reference this interview which shines a lot of light on the last scene (in first Q)
"When I was the age that Casey is in the film, I was just feeling [dysphoria] and living it. And I think while working on the film, I very much felt it too. So in a lot of ways, I was trying to get a feeling that, at the time, I didn't exactly have words for, out through images and through performance," Schoenbrun explains. "I think it just shines because I wasn't trying to intellectualize it. I was just trying to represent it. But, you know, the deeper I get in my work -- and I'm now making work as a trans artist, from a very different place -- I'm feeling less dysphoria, but feeling, I think, the even more surreal feeling of becoming real. Which is its own strange thing to try to represent." via —this sounds like it’s about affect to me
like how they frame hauntology in this interview “I’m a Mark Fisher fan and love the concept of hauntology, sort of the opposite of nostalgia, which seems like an inherently conservative perspective. I can’t say that I’m not haunted by my childhood, which is mostly me looking into screens. So the film is trying to feel that haunting, represent that haunting, and not worry too much about what the internet was like in 2008 or 2018. It’s my internet, not the internet.”
connect her absence to the absence of the main character in the last act (acts?) of kentucky route zero.
separate piece?:
i read a review that said the right viewing for We’re All Going to the World’s Fair isn’t in a theater, but alone, on your laptop——as if it were something the algorithm divined for you in the dark of your bedroom.
this is true, imo, but i did see it in a theater, alone, surrounded by people, during a pandemic where i felt incredibly disconnected.