We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
“I want to go to the World’s Fair.”
“I want to go to the World’s Fair.”
“I want to go to the World’s Fair.”
Recording for her social media channel, Casey (Anna Cobb) repeats the mantra, smears blood on her screen, and watches the initiation video. The trailer she has watched for the World’s Fair, “the Internet’s scariest online horror game,” has warned her: “We can’t be held responsible for what you become.” Casey cheerfully tells her subscribers that she’ll watch for any changes before signing off. Throughout the rest of director Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature, we monitor Casey for these changes as she researches “World’s Fair Symptoms,” takes solitary walks through the woods, records video diaries for her channel, and interacts virtually with JLB (Michael Rogers), a fellow player of the game who is concerned about Casey’s well-being. The release of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair concluded a film series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) programmed by Schoenbrun, Photographing the Ether: The Internet on Film, 1983-2022, which showcased films that they say “interrogat[e] the emotional center of why [the Internet] exists and what we use it for” (New Yorker Radio Hour). Speaking of the earliest film in the series, Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), Schoenbrun states, “our relationship with technologies is inherently somewhat symbiotic, or at the very least the technology is an extension of ourself—we built it for a reason […], because we desire something, and then in turn it’s changing us.” Non-binary and trans, Schoenbrun told Alex Barron of the New Yorker Radio Hour that, though the film’s protagonist is not necessarily a trans character, World’s Fair’s themes of boundary crossing and “identity play” resonate with trans experience of liminality. Indeed, the changes underway in the film are unclear—is Casey’s engagement with the game a means of self-discovery? an invitation to manipulation by other players? a portal to the ghost in the machine? Schoenbrun offers unreality, isolation, and “purposeful ambiguity” in place of straightforward answers (New Yorker Radio Hour).