We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021)
Directed Jane Schoenbrun
I cheated during COVID. At the start of lockdown, I would go on daily sabbaticals, walking to my favorite coffee shop, traversing from Wicker to Bucktown to Logan, and cataloguing the strange sights along the way as I sipped on java. I still had my j-o-b, sure, but my commitment to my screen, computer or phone, was minimal. I would see my girlfriend; sometimes she’d join me on these brisk walks as we strolled through Humboldt Park for umpteenth time. She’d come over to my place and we frequently cooked a complex dinner while drinking a cheap bottle of wine in between. I was sincerely, irrevocably happy. I was actually thriving.
Meanwhile, I had a roommate that did not enjoy this particular habit. He considered it to be selfish. I never said it wasn’t, though there was a certain hypocrisy to his logic. Nevertheless, he’d argue against having anyone over to the apartment and tempers began to flare. And so, in protest, he resigned himself to his bedroom. I paid no mind, as I worked on my laptop at the east-facing side of the apartment, with the large window providing ample Vitamin D and a decent enough view of the residential street. I would sometimes hear rattling from the kitchen, turn from my chair, and notice the door to his bedroom quickly close; he’d scurry into the kitchen, subsisting on a diet of sour cream and onion potato chips and granola bars, and retreat to his room with whatever haul he acquired. He didn’t leave the apartment to do his laundry, as piles upon piles of clothing amassed in the corridor leading up to the restroom. During the day, he rarely left his room. I’d pass by his closed bedroom door and hear him watching a sitcom or a movie. The moments that I would catch a quick glimpse of him I couldn’t help but notice how haggard he appeared, how unkempt and forlorn he seemed in his self-exile. Whenever he’d take umbrage with having my partner over, he’d text me (and our landlord) data on latest COVID statistics and was insistent on remarking on the unprecedented time that we were living in. This is how he lived. I found the whole thing compelling in its lunacy. A friend of mine was mindful and offered a notable reminder, “not everyone is going to take this situation the same way.”
Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is about the encased and lonely. It’s about a young woman who joins a “real-life” MMORPG. Initiation begins with an act of self-mutilation, where Casey (Anna Cobb) stabs the tip of her index finger and smears her bloody digit on her monitor. Those competing in this “World’s Fair” game make subsequent videos detailing their physical changes. Some turn into inanimate objects. Some begin to develop a necrotic rot on their skin. Ultimately, it’s a transformation akin to what you’d see in a David Cronenberg film like Videodrome or Crash, where the physical begins to blend and mutate with the ephemeral, the virtual. Casey’s “reality” is one rooted in the digital, in screens and videos that make the act of living simply one where we absorb content. It’s an ugly and despairing reality, but it offers a refuge. Schoenbrun dedicates the initial passages of the film to highlight the northeastern community in which Casey inhabits, a community filled with vacated big box stores and not a soul in sight. Only one other character inhabits the film’s narrative, an older man named JLB (Michael J. Rogers). He watches Casey’s videos and begins having Skype conversations with her. He doesn’t reveal himself to her, though we as the audience see the vast age difference between the two and clock something unsettling about the whole enterprise.
Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade immediately springs to mind as a comparison, and it’s the superior film, particularly if you found that film to be as horrifying as I did. Schoenbrun’s examination here is unsettling but too tedious to extend beyond the flatness of its imagery and repetitiveness of its insights. It is despairing, but also too vague. It’s 3am and Casey is watching a video on her laptop, and we only hear her father shouting through the walls. His presence, or lack thereof, doesn’t fill any gaps, but rather exists as another bizarre accruement to the litany of bizarreness. The fear and anxiety that the film provokes is no less scary than realizing that you’ve been watching tiktoks for so long that you’re getting the warning video after spending an indeterminate amount of time on the app. Has it been an hour? Or more? That’s when things get really chilling. With World’s Fair, it’s like watching someone reach that tiktok limit; there’s a preferred reality in this circumstance. Then again, not everyone is going to take this situation the same way.