We're All Going to the World's Fair

After watching We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), I found my Letterboxd review naturally starting out like an essay. So I’m going to use it to start an irregular series of reviews of movies which aren’t new releases, dubbed Backlog Thoughts. There’s no unifying theme of these movies: any year, any genre, any theme. The connective tissue will just be I have something to say which others may find interesting.

Warning: this post contains mild spoilers.

Filmmakers have been trying to use the internet and people's relationship to it as a storytelling device for a while now. Of course they have: it's become so central to our lives, it's now weirder for a character to not have a computer than to have one. Even more so with the near ubiquity of smartphones (in the US). See the rise of the screenlife genre, beginning with Unfriended, and reaching its pinnacle (so far) in the far superior films Searching and Missing. Some individual aspects have even been well captured as the main narrative, such as connection and parasocial relationships.

But few have succeeded at truly capturing the experience of the internet. “Internet culture”, as it were. The closest I can think of is Mainstream. Maybe John Mulaney & The Sack Lunch Bunch? The tricky part is internet culture is more of a vibe than anything else. Which makes it hard to communicate and reason about, especially if you haven’t seen the films I mentioned above. So let’s take a stab at defining it.

Internet culture is characterized most uniquely IMHO by the hyper-evolution of ideas. Most often, this is in the form of a meme, be it image macro, text/video reply, collaboration video, or anything else which easily and swiftly spreads online. These mutations takes place over days or even hours, and involve the contribution of hundreds or thousands of people, making the source hard to track down, if possible. Most often, your only option is to give in and go with the flow, be it as a participant or an observer. In this short time, memes may collide and remix before re-separating, both somewhat unrecognizable.

There’s a sort of reality distortion that comes from this. Culture seems to have no beginning and no end, it just magically happens. And there’s a lot of it. You constantly catch glimpses of people experiencing their own stories which you’ll never know any more about. Stripped of context, they hint at an even larger world of which you have no knowledge.

All of that is to say We’re All Going to the World’s Fair may well be the first truly internet-native film.

The two most important internet traditions for understanding how it accomplishes this are Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and creepypasta.

In an ARG, players create elaborate, fictional worlds, full of unexplained and bizarre happenings, hiding right within our own. They scatter breadcrumbs in plain sight, any one of which seems a bit off, and as a whole imply a larger mystery to be unraveled. Most often, they’ll use public and popular forums for these games, meaning anyone can stumble into them and get wrapped up in the mystery, diving deep to figure out what the hell is going on. So it’s possible to not even realize you’re playing.

That all interactions take place on your screen is important. That separation gives people the ability to present whatever version of themselves they wish, to acknowledge as much or as little as they want, and for you to be none the wiser. If someone is playing a character, it’s impossible to know. And this effect is heightened when they’re surrounded by a world seemingly in keeping with their actions. The results can be quite unsettling.

Creepypasta is a form of internet-based horror storytelling, popularized on the early internet. Most often, they’d be posted to various message boards or blogs and “recounted”, as if they actually happened to the poster, or maybe to a friend. They might be broken up into multiple parts, or framed as if they’re suppressed memories coming back to the poster over time. They tend to have a very informal writing style, and also be very, very slow builds. Children or teenagers are often at the center, be it as the perpetrators or the victims of some otherworldly force (or both!). They’re almost always supernatural, but usually by way of madness; more Lovecraft than King.

Coming across a creepypasta for the first time (or second or third) is haunting. You start out thinking this person is letting you in on your life, before it morphs into something truly disturbing. Many of the settings and characters are mundane and recognizable. Which makes it all the more horrifying when things start to go wrong.

In keeping with all this, the World's Fair is presented as an internet legend. It doesn’t seem Casey knows anyone who’s done it, just watched a bunch of videos online. They mostly make vague claims about the game “changing” them, or are staged such that the visible changes could be fake. But they feel very raw, like personal diaries, similar to what Casey is making. So there’s no way for her to know if they’re real, even more so because she clearly is predisposed to falling down such a rabbit hole. As for how it impacts the viewer, given that every time she searches the site a bunch more videos come up, it reinforces this sense that we’re being dropped into the middle of an established phenomenon. And gives us no hints as to how real the game is.

This focus on Casey’s (and JLB’s) use of the video site is the key piece of establishing the vibe of the movie, and accurately capturing how the internet feels. The autoplay feature walks us through videos, many related to the World’s Fair game, just like her searches. We see others experiences and interpretations, and get hints of how culture is reacting. Some seem to be engaging in a larger conversation of which we’ve no knowledge, like the Dark Signal webisode. We also get a few snippets that aren’t obviously related, connecting us to the larger world, and just the strange experience of looking in on the most intimate moments of a person’s life.

There are some signs that Casey is playing a game, though. Most notably, when she takes off her coat right before making a video in which she talks about how she should be cold but isn’t. More subtly, when we see her start to incorporate elements of videos she’s watched into her narrative. It feels like she’s in conversation with other players of the game. Because that’s the other thing; people who do the ritual are referred to as players, and media concerning the World’s Fair is referred to as “in-game”, implying an element of fiction. Of course, people can and do refer to reality as a game, especially when they have the illusion of control, which is why those statements don’t break the spell of uncertainty.

All of these reactions are represented in the JLB character. He is us. He seems to know more about the game at first, but we start to understand that like observers of ARGs, he’s trying to separate fact from fiction. We don’t know why he’s fixated on Casey, but he seems particularly anxious about her well-being, culminating in directly questioning her grip on reality, and by extent his own, and thus our own. His existence implies to the audience there is more to dig into, more that can be understood. But we’ve no ability to explore this world more deeply, so that hint is all we’ve got.

And similarly, we’ll never know for sure what the deal was with Casey specifically. How much of it was her own isolation causing her to get lost in the character she created, and how much was purely acting, or even how much of it was real (if any). JLB recounts their recent meeting at the end, but how do we know he’s telling the truth? Couldn’t it just be another layer of the game, a separate offshoot game that he’s involved in? Hofstadter’s strange loops are invoked more than once in the film, and JLB’s tale seems like it could be a prime link in that chain.

This open-endedness is another facet of internet culture. You come into things once they’ve begun and will almost certainly leave before they complete, so there’s no sense of closure. It will go on without you, continuing to morph and change in ways you can’t fathom, such that even if you encounter it later it will be unrecognizable. Many people who are Very Online have spent time investigating some breadcrumbs of a meme or fake story or whatnot, only to have the trail go cold, and leaving us with more questions than when we began. Such is the experience of this film.

One last thing I should acknowledge. Despite all I’ve said here, the director (Jane Schoenbrun) has themself said they wanted to craft a narrative which felt true to their own process of coming out as nonbinary. That’s also the dominant read of it online, and one which definitely exists within the film. It just wasn’t my personal interpretation.

Regardless of anything, Schoenbrun has crafted an incredibly unique and remarkable film, which I’ll be chewing on for a while yet, as I eagerly await their next feature I Saw the TV Glow, coming out in 2024.