We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021, Jane Schoenbrun) (Patreon)

48/100

Bailed on this over a year ago, perhaps in large part because my designated W/O point happened to fall during the ASMR scene, and watching that woman gently stroke the camera lens as if it were the viewer's hair was just too damn silly for me to endure, at least in a context that seemed to be taking it very seriously indeed. Turns out I'm not as alienated as I'd imagined by the Extremely Online aspect, though these achingly vulnerable teenagers who have no friends or social lives continue to seem like pathos overkill. Where Eighth Grade acknowledged the greater world's existence and showed Kayla struggling to connect with people IRL, World's Fair very purposefully isolates Casey, affording us no access to what she does when not mediating via cameras; this contributes to a certain strategic fuzziness that eventually got on my nerves, though I can readily understand why others might perceive it as masterful ambiguity. Was on the fence myself, albeit leaning substantially toward "nah," even as the closing credits rolled, and then got triggered by one particular character "name": 

And Karen Cavanaugh as JLB's ??? Those question marks (well, one of them, anyway) appear in my own notes—we see this mystery woman just once, walking through the background of a shot, and it's telling that Schoenbrun both made a point of noting that the house has another apparent occupant and made a point of denying us any information about her whatsoever, even in the credits. "???" (as opposed to just calling her "Woman" or whatever) reinforces the film's desire for our freewheeling speculation, which extends to what Casey's doing with the World's Fair Challenge and how much (if at all) she's performing dissociation and anxiety as part of the game, merely creating a convincing character. Should we be concerned about this young woman's psychological welfare or not? On the one hand, she gets visibly flustered and then actively angry when JLB requests that they go "out of game" and expresses his own concern, which strongly suggests that she feels stung by the reminder that none of this malevolent-transformation shit is real. On the other hand...I dunno, are we meant to understand that Paranormal Activity-style sleep-journal video as something that genuinely happens to her, without her awareness? Or did Casey go to bed with the plan that if she spontaneously awoke at any point in the night she would execute that creepy move? (It occurs six hours into a nine-hour file.) Neither one seems terribly plausible to me, and I'm inclined to think that Schoenbrun just wanted to throw a conventional horror moment into the mix. 

Ultimately, I can't tell whether World's Fair is meant to be a deeply disturbing character study of a kid who's fallen down the wrong internet rabbit hole or a disarming cautionary tale about jumping to conclusions—JLB's about Casey, our own about JLB. Can't be both at once, since they're mutually contradictory, but it seems to be trying anyway. Shifting occasionally to JLB's POV feels fundamentally misguided, and ending on his oral account of meeting Casey a year later more or less negates any possibility of the film being "about" her, even as it fulfills her prediction that she'll just disappear one day and nobody will know what happened to her. I didn't really know what was happening to her before she disappeared, frankly. (Part of me thinks JLB should have been the sole protagonist, with Casey seen only via what she posts. It's kind of almost that already. Wait, is it that? Have I misunderstood the film completely? I might be talking myself into a landmark reversal of opinion here, not since The Prestige. Let's table that possibility for the moment.) Adding to this sense that Schoenbrun wants World's Fair to be all things to all people is the gender-dysphoria angle, which I confess would never have occurred to me had I not read about it elsewhere, and which I further confess does not make much sense to non-dysphoric moi; the World's Fair Challenge ostensibly inspires abrupt and undesired bodily changes, which doesn't seem akin to the trans experience. (Maybe in puberty, but that's an amplified version of a universal discomfort—everyone feels disconnected from their body as a teenager; it even works as a metaphor in freakin' Spider-Man.) Not getting it's my own problem, but I submit that this reading, while valid (Schoenbrun, who's non-binary, has confirmed it), doesn't readily connect to anything else the film is doing. I haven't even noted the intriguing but under-explored emotional valence of Casey (or possibly "Casey," the fucked-up game character) implicitly yearning to have her free will usurped by the Challenge, to not be responsible for her actions. Plenty of ideas at play here, but they don't coalesce for me in any kind of satisfying way. 

Except that, per the anguished parenthetical above, I'm now wondering whether the entire movie is actually seen from JLB's perspective. I don't think so, given that no review I've read has suggested anything of the sort, but a rug pull from "literally terminally online Zoomer" to "middle-aged semi-perv who only thinks he understands web culture" would be kinda brilliant.