We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022)

directed by Jane Schoenbrun

Juniper Viernes

There’s a moment in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair that feels very online, even if it’s outdoors. Casey, the teenager at the film’s core, is sitting on a lawn. It’s a clip from a vlog of hers: “tour of my high school.” The footage is low-res, static. She’s taping herself on a tripod camera she brought along, and earlier, she pointed out spots—the lockers, the office (“uh oh!!”)—as she walked around a cemetery bathed in weak wintry light. Now, leaning on one of the gravestones, she holds up a fallen leaf. Dead-eyed, a slight snark in her voice, she says, “Oh, a leaf.” As if it were some deep-fried meme.

To the people online for too long, those with a bizarre hill to die on, those who have shared something out-of-bounds, we say: Go outside and touch some grass. At this point in the movie, weeks into the World’s Fair Challenge, Casey is past that point. Touching grass isn’t enough.

*

I first heard of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair on Twitter, bubbling up in my circle of queer artsy mutuals, generating intrigue at film festivals. Curious, I took the bait. It was the feature-length debut of its director and writer, Jane Schoenbrun, a trans filmmaker; it’s scored by Alex G, known for his cryptic, unsettled songs; it drew influence from mid-2000s online horror. I sunk into a well of Wikipedia pages, forum rooms, and creepypastas. A drowned self swam up. By the time I saw World's Fair in early 2022, I was already deep.

*

Casey enters the World’s Fair Challenge, a viral game that allegedly changes its players and fulfills their desires. In an attic somewhere stormy and northeastern, Casey prepares. She adjusts the lights in her room, the angle of her webcam. She takes a pin, jabs it under her nail, smears blood on her screen—watches “the video,” a glowing sequence of colors that swashes over her face. In a follow-up vlog, she explains her motive: Casey always wanted to “live in a horror movie.”

As she describes the changes ensuing initiation—a loss of bodily sensation; disturbing nocturnal behavior—Casey’s home life of dread and avoidance creeps in around the edges. When a message from JBL, another Fair player, autoplays in her suggested videos, blazing “YOU ARE IN TROUBLE,” it’s less a fear-inducing alarm and more a notification confirming what we already know. It finds her on a sleepless night, gazing at her father’s rifle and searching for sleep in an ASMR video.

*

It’s always felt easier sharing vulnerable facets of my identity with strangers—easy when they have no stake in me, no context. (Or rather, only the context they bring themselves.) The internet has frictionless channels for oversharing, from prompts like “a/s/l” to identity litanies on bios. Tender revelations can go into “offtopic” or #vent. You can put out whatever you want, release unaired episodes of your life with no one irl knowing.

Tumblr was the first social media platform I had a conscious desire to join, even more than Facebook. It was the cool one where my older sister blogged about rock music. I reblogged photosets and GIFs (hard G) for Doctor Who, Homestuck, Night Vale. On Tumblr, I sensed the absurd breadth of the web. The first post I liked was a ridiculous photo of James Franco taking a shit and smoking a cigarette; the second post was a Harry Potter photoset.

The purported anonymity online—I remember being told not to post my real name anywhere; look at us now haha—was freeing. I felt myself stretching, my eyes wandering, lingering. Reading the word “bisexual,” finding androgynous fashions, an interest in cross-gender cosplay. On Tumblr, I learned to surveil the border between my online and real self. At that time, I was a child actor touring the country, and questions like “Who’s performing this weekend?” and “How was your matinee?” filled my inbox. I first obliged with curt replies before straight up ignoring them. People prying into my life ticked me off—the point of Tumblr, for me, was geeky fandom and nerd niches.

*

Mid-way through World’s Fair, Casey vanishes for awhile and the scenes resemble a YouTube tab on autoplay. An iMovie jump scare, hand pulls you through the screen. An angel with self-made wings, smiling. A man sitting on a tile floor, telling us about something climbing up his throat. He scratches at his forearm like a lottery ticket, and oh God, it’s a winner.

*

In 2018, journalist James Bridle investigated a disturbing pattern in YouTube’s autoplay feature: for a toddler watching children’s videos unsupervised, the content starts with puppets and alphabets and Disney clips before devolving into unholy mashups with violence and promiscuity. The algorithm has learned that this is what holds the eye and accumulates views, and while human moderators do their best against the deluge, it’s virtually futile. The lowest common denominator of a person the algorithm imagines is someone strange and obscene… but recognizable. Like a neural network rendering, everything is horrid and unbearably familiar.

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In an interview about World’s Fair, Jane Schoenbrun commented on the film’s trans resonance. Casey’s descent into the Fair is, like transitioning, a journey that could be “viewed as horrific.” I like to joke that the algorithm knew I was trans before I did—that same algorithm terrorizing kids. It pushed me into style boards and femme fashion before I even entertained the notion that I could be trans. “It’s a movie about this desire to express something that when I was feeling it as a teenager, I didn’t have a name for it,” says Schoenbrun. I’ve felt that nameless need. I followed all those incognito rabbit holes to name it, to tumble in, to get somewhere.

This is what struck me hard about the movie. Innate impulses we all have—to get scared, to be obsessed, to learn, to find kin—to really see yourself, even if it’s on a computer screen across the room—are urges in need of outlets, however twisted, urges the internet is ever ready to help satisfy. To gratify them feels like an act of simultaneous recognition and immolation, lighting yourself aflame in order to see your reflection at night.

*

In their conversations about the challenge, Casey and JBL remark on the weather outside. “It’s snowing.” “It’s raining here.” And the wind taps at the window, the snow crunches underfoot.

*

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair oscillates between webcam footage, handheld sequences, and YouTube-like clips, and I appreciate its loose visual tether to computers. Unlike Unfriended or Searching—so-called screenlife movies composed of screencap videos and webcam recordings in the confines of a desktop or a smartphone—World’s Fair shows how the web is still present when you’re afk. Casey recounts her Fair symptoms in the woods, a young Lear on the heath. Casey shakily films herself walking through New Year’s fireworks. The movie feels better kin with Eighth Grade, another directorial debut about an online teenager. Both films capture the peculiar, half-submerged feeling I felt growing up with the internet, when I made cafeteria plans to hang out later at the Club Penguin pizza parlor. Between the fossilized Boomers and the digital natives of Gen Z, we cuspers explored an amphibian state: surfing the web more and more, getting deep, the water filling our lungs.

Jia Tolentino writes that even if you avoid it completely, “you still live in the world this internet has created.” To reject online life is like fleeing a rising sea, the blue of the screen always shining. Capitalism’s internet has “no land left to cultivate but the self.” Existence today comes with an account: “What’s your username?” “Where can I follow you?” (Analogous log-in question for infants and adults alike: “Are you a boy or a girl?”) We can’t swim forever. To borrow the words of Susan Stryker, in raging against a totalizing sea, the only option might be to change: become furious flow, “one with the darkness and the wet.”

*

Which brings me back to the weather. Climate change, in Timothy Morton’s writings, is a hyperobject—too large and impactful to be comprehended in mundane terms. Our closest point of contact is our local conditions, the minute changes affecting our everyday lives. Likewise, the internet has become weather; like a giant cavern making its own rain, the web has its own self-sustaining vectors of existence. The net flux of its activity is too large.

Occasionally, though, you meet someone on a comment thread, in a forum, through a DM, and you recognize the horrifying miracle we’ve enabled—of baring your soul online, of sharing your raw self with a faceless stranger. You ask what time it is there. You ask about the weather. You try to connect.

*

In my Tumblr drafts I have a log of an Omegle conversation. (On Omegle, if you’re unfamiliar, you could chat with a Stranger. Most of the time it devolved into inane meme exchanges, half-assed come-ons, or, with the right opening phrases, fandom roleplay.) I had matched with someone having a rough night. They were young, they were queer, they were alone. (I was young, I was closeted, I was alone.) The web had thrown us into a chatroom together, where we talked about harassments we endured and ideations we shared. In my room under the lamplight, I felt sweat dripping down my neck, realizing I had a very real stake in another person’s survival.

I hope that they got through the night. I also recognize the self-soothing in my hope. World’s Fair ends in the voice of another player, who concludes Casey’s story for us—but, to me, it feels like a counterfeit ending, stolen. That night on Omegle, what was real were the words we decided to press “Send” on, the anticipation of “Stranger typing…”, the fear and joy of true recognition. At some point in that conversation, my stranger mentioned the sky, how they wanted a name that rhymes with the word.

*

“I swear, someday soon,” Casey says in a voice over, “I am just going to disappear.” Another upload, titled “dumb waterfall.” The waterfall in question is tinted orange by the street lamps on the bridge above it. Streaks of cars passing each other in the night. Rush of water. “And you won’t have any idea what happened to me.”

If the last image left of someone is monstrous, otherworldly, transient—so be it. We find our ways to the fair. We all do.

Juniper Viernes (they/she) is a trans performer and writer from the Bay Area. They dance with General Mischief Dance Theatre and were a nonfiction fellow with the 2021 Kundiman Mentorship Lab. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. Find her on Twitter @jpvfriday