We're All Going to the World's Fair

WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR   ***

Jane Schoenbrun

2021

IDEA:  A lonely, socially isolated teen girl named Casey becomes immersed in a horror-themed online role-playing game, blurring the line between reality and fiction.

BLURB:  The inclination to scorn the Internet for so many of our most harmful contemporary social ills is so strong, it can be jarring to see a piece of media express a discourse that’s anything less than purely dystopian. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is one of the most nuanced and ambivalent films in recent memory about digital technology and social media. Neither an alarmist, moralizing condemnation of online anomie nor a facile paean to Web 2.0 interconnectivity, the film regards the Internet as a catalyst and host for social activities and psychological effects that have a mix of implications. These implications are not high-handedly diagnosed, but suggested through Casey’s use of the Internet, which teeters between obsessive, reality-distorting absorption and the vulnerable self-exploration of a girl coming into early adulthood. Schoenbrun cannily plunges us into the digital rabbit hole with Casey by comprising a majority of the film out of Casey’s and others’ social media videos, which often appear in front of us, as they do on the Internet, divorced from linear time and space. We, and Casey, come to know no other reality than the online role-playing game she has immersed herself in, to apparently pathological ends. In the terror of losing oneself to this world - and to its various anonymous denizens, as personified by an enigmatic middle-aged man as alienated as Casey - Schoenbrun locates both a coming-of-age (and potentially trans) metaphor and a more specific kind of commentary about self-actualization in cultivated online communities. When the coda arrives, the horror of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair dissipates to reveal the longing our virtual spaces answer and frustrate in equal measure.