We’re All Going to the World’s Fair: A Film About an Uncinematic Decade
The 2020s have been a decade where the majority of human communication within it has been made uncinematic. Throughout the years, those who spend the majority of their time online were seen as a demographic living in the underbelly of the actual physical world. The real world is still out there, with all its real touchable grasses and real communicable humans, and those too online to enter it were merely the minority, or so was the belief. But the accelerated migration of all communication onto the Internet thanks to the pandemic had fundamentally transferred the social status of the terminally online. Whether COVID-19 had tipped the favor in increasing the amount of people more online-than-offline, or whether it had exposed the more online-than-offline as having been the majority the whole time, we have collectively reached an unspoken consensus where we all stopped pretending our lives beyond the Internet are any realer than our lives within it. Emotionally speaking, the Internet has been made a lot more real to people than the “real world” itself.
This quasi-pleasure-cube existence has been made the norm of life in the 2020s, and the great vanguard directors of both our days and the olden days have been unable to put a cinematic spin on it. Because making a film that takes place in the 2020s while ignoring the cinematically mundane way the majority of the people living within it communicate to each other would obviously feel dishonest to the audience. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the great directors all seem to acknowledge this, and pivoted to the more cinematically applicable aesthetics of their favorite decades accordingly. The 2020s so far has been a decade profoundly hostile to being captured by cinema. Jane Schoenbrun sure tried, though. And their attempt is probably the best we are going to get for a while.
Fandom Moms and Groomers
Casey and JLB are both fascinating mediations on how the Internet shaped both Gen Z and millennials respectively, but we will start with JLB first. JLB is a fandom mom (or fandom dad), an epitome of cringe that reminded me so much of the Harry Potter adults deep in protecting that vanguard institution of their childhood years. Someone who has been so deeply stuck within a subculture for such a long time that still having such unfiltered emotional investment within something so ephemeral at their age would be perceived as ginormous cringe. But their response to being perceived as cringe is not to move on and touch some fucking grass, but to continue indulging in that cringe even further and seeking out new entrants within the subculture as an outlet to feel cool again. That isn’t JLB’s son’s old room. That is JLB’s room.
This fucking guy literally drew analog horror-ass “le creepy” texts by hand for the purpose of making a video to get Casey’s attention, and the original papers he scanned for that video are proudly displayed within his Chris Chan-esque room, he is late-stage Among Us Girl. Those trying to theorize that JLB is someone who feels care and affection towards Casey due to trying to fill a hole ever since his son (presumed to be the original occupant of that awful room) moved out of the house are extremely far off point. There have always been plenty of JLB’s out there in the recesses of Tumblr, 4chan and Reddit, and none of them did what they did to fill a dependent-shaped hole in their heart. They are all always simultaneously friendly, helpful, off-putting, creepy, and obsessive. The overt attempts to reach out and be helpful, but also demanding attention and being overbearing. That is what being a fandom mom turns you into.
I would actually posit that JLB is an unrealistically self-aware representation of the actual phenomenon. Most people like JLB in real life do not possess the same degree of awareness he does. He sees in Casey the danger of someone being guiled into over-larping so much that they may end up posing as a risk to themselves or their loved ones. Many of the real-life people that inspired JLB’s character would simply let Casey do whatever she wants because it enhances the communal larp.
And in the end when Casey’s Internet presence disappears, JLB does decide to lie, and shits out what is very obviously a five-minute Freudian slip. In his attempts to make it seem like everything is okay to his viewers, JLB chooses to lie and tells everyone that he did meet Casey afterwards and that everything went fine. But he embellishes the lie, he embellishes it with extra lies that he feels safe to express (possibly because he is confident Casey is no longer “around” to contradict him) but ultimately embellishments that betray an initial emotional truth: JLB wanted her. This Patrick Boyle-looking motherfucker indulges in this fantasy that him and Casey went on a coffee date and made plans to go to the cinema together later. What the fuck is he trying to convince people of? That not only is Casey safe and sound, but is also down to fuck him?
Ultimately, JLB is a character with permanent cognitive dissonance that engages and indulges in fandom mom behavior while realizing that it does come off as cringy and creepy, with his solution to that being to merely find new people who doesn’t think of it as cringy and creepy. And through such people does JLB find what seems to be the closest thing to actual genuine human connection for him. And the efforts he puts in to preserve that breadcrumb of human connection keeps making him dig an even cringier and creepier hole for him to fall into. Let’s move on to Casey.
Deterritorialization as a Character Arc
My Casey hot take is that she wanted to kill her dad all along. How the World’s Fair challenge affects Casey is a fascinating analysis of the concept of the “magic circle of play”. Let me drop by a quick definition of what that is, nicked straight off of this blog called Humans Who Play (first result on Bing, don’t @ me):
The Magic Circle of Play is a concept in game studies that refers to the imaginary boundaries that separate the world of play from the outside world. It’s the idea that when you are in play, there is a shared understanding between players that they are entering a context where different rules and behaviors apply.
Casey joining the World’s Fair challenge and documenting herself going through the changes caused by it is very much Casey entering a magic circle. One where abhorrent change in physical and mental states are to be seen as expected and normal, where behaving like a normal human being would be tantamount to breaking the rules of the game. And it is only through this context of entering a magic circle does Casey reinterpret her own identity through a different lens. Instead of a depressed teenage shut-in who chooses not to delve too deep into her intrusive thoughts due to needing to maintain what she understands (poorly) as social kayfabe, she instead lets those intrusive thoughts take over to see where it takes her, mistakenly perceiving that process as the World’s Fair challenge inflicting changes upon her. I am not saying Casey faked it for attention, I am saying that Casey had lived with immense psychological baggage for so long that the World’s Fair ended up leaking it all out like water bursting through a collapsing dam.
Letting such intrusive behaviors take over is not something commonly discussed in media because it is ultimately something hard to explain through a character whose personality and psychological identity would have to be articulated to the audience as somehow rationalizable. It is intrinsically unrationalizable. But everyone implicitly understands what is being spoken about when flurries of American Psycho memes talking about “letting the intrusive thoughts win” hit the Internet. It is very much like that. Appearing in speeds of milliseconds that disappear just as fast as long as you don’t elaborate upon it with further thinking, “Wouldn’t it be really funny if I did this?”, “I have literally no reason to be doing this, but I am doing it anyway.”, “I feel so much turmoil that I have to express it through this action somehow.” all are potential examples of lightspeed thought lines for someone about to make either the funniest or the worst mistakes of their lives.
There are multiple different ways to interpret arguably the most famous scene of the movie, the dancing sequence. Did she “plan” to dance, only to be disrupted by a scream-worthy horror? Or was the dance itself (of a song whose music video seems to deeply contrast Casey’s own gender expression of trying to exhibit as little femininity as possible through her clothing) also an intrusive thought that she was acting upon? It is unclear whether the scream was the only “intrusion”, or whether the dancing was an initial “intrusion” that ended up overlapping with an opposing “intrusion” to scream in horror and pain. As a matter of fact, she could have planned out the whole thing, with scream and dance premeditated in-hand to creep out as much of her audience as possible. But the degree of premeditation isn’t the point. The point is that she suddenly feels free to do all these things. She is deterritorializing.
On that note, Casey’s relationship with her father is not presented as great, but only through the World’s Fair challenge do we see that her resentment towards her father is so big that her uncensored thoughts include the repressed fantasy of being rid of him, whether that is through killing him or killing herself. Casey’s character arc is reminiscent of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber and his accounting of living with schizophrenia, which philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari cite and analyze as a prime example of deterritorialized thought.
Ultimately, she is not left quantifiably happier for finally letting the intrusive thoughts take her over. But JLB’s attempt to break the circle by trying to tell her that the World’s Fair challenge was fake the whole time is tantamount to saying that all of the odd behaviors that Casey allowed herself to indulge in is because Casey herself is a fucked-up person deep down. Something she clearly takes great offense to. It is because ultimately, no matter how terrifying and tumultuous it all felt, no matter how much harm she inflicted on herself physically and emotionally, the exit from what she believes is the kayfabe of normal human beings had liberated Casey, to a degree, from her learned and automated responses of self-censoring and self-repression.
It wouldn’t be correct to assume that Casey stays deterritorialized. As Deleuze and Guattari frequently note, deterritorialization is soon followed by reterritorialization. For even though she found herself comfortable to break formerly self-imposed behavioral boundaries thanks to the World’s Fair challenge, her behavior is imminently reterritorialized. The magic circle of expressing disturbing mental and physical changes soon turns from something Casey uses to experiment with self-expression, to something she feels she needs to cater to in order to preserve the rare sense of communalism she got from it. Now, she either has to confront the issues that laid dormant within her all this time that she can no longer deny, or continue the larp towards its eventual conclusion, taking a life, whether that’s hers or someone else’s.
We never get to know what she did, and for her sake, we shouldn’t. Casey remains a haunting character for me precisely because of the ambiguity of her fate. We are left to assume about what happened to her the same way many of us are left to assume what happened to everyone else in our lives who stopped leaving digital footprints. The Steam friends who last logged in years ago, the Facebook accounts that stopped reacting to Happy Birthday posts, Instagram pages obsolete since before the pandemic. Like them, Casey left a small but tangible haunt upon the Internet for a select few. And it is appropriate that a blurry loop of her expressionless face watching the World’s Fair video in pitch black darkness is the last we see of her. Because that’s how she will be remembered by the Internet. That’s how she will be remembered by me.
Silence is a Symptom of the 2020s
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair pulled a nasty trick on me that only aesthetically consolidated filmmakers like Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino had done to me before. Back when I first started off as a teenage film buff more than a decade ago and began making my way through the IMDb Top 100, Tarantino and Anderson ended up being the directors that affected my real-life social behavior the most. As a dumb and socially awkward teenager, I would be internally evaluating the conversations I just had with people on whether it would belong in a Tarantino flick or not. I would be walking outside while imagining myself in third person traversing in front of symmetrical vintage buildings as if I was a Wes Anderson character. There was an imminent larpability within the works of both directors that affected my awkward teenage self a lot more than the rest of cinema at the time. It made me perceive my own life through that director’s eyes.
But We’re All Going to the World’s Fair does not aesthetically shout out its own existence like the films that defined those teenage years of mine. It is empty and deafeningly silent, perhaps too reserved for its own good. Even until the very end, I found myself chafing at its pace.
After finishing the film that night, my Bluetooth earphones would run out of battery, while I had to go outside for a quick grocery shopping. I always listen to music, audiobooks or video essays to fill the silence of long-distance walking, always on something, always ready to fill in the absence of noise. That evening when I walked out onto the sleepy dingy city to buy myself some convenience store dinner was when I realized that the silence of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is the same one that permeates my own life. Because it is very explicitly the silence of life sans online stimulation.
Silence and emptiness have always been a part of humanity, no matter the century, let alone the decade, but it is only within the 2020s does this silence feel like an aberration because of the endless tools and methods available in the modern day to drown it out. But no matter how many Youtube icebergs we listen to continue stimulating ourselves through the liminal moments where our ears aren’t getting much use, no matter how many shitposts we make or share to earn likes and reactions, no matter how much Internet drama we live through inside group chats and servers, those on the outside looking in wouldn’t be able to help but notice just how silent life in the 2020s really is. Only by forcing us to witness the effete noiselessness of modern-day life for an hour and a half does Jane Schoenbrun show why consenting to hearing only silence and mundanity in the 2020s feels so aberrant. The horror was that I already lived in Jane Schoenbrun’s world without ever having to larp. As a matter of fact, throughout my whole adult life, I was arguably larping as someone who didn’t.
NOTE: This is the first and hopefully only long-form Letterboxd film review I will ever write.
