I mentioned We’re All Going to the World’s Fair in my last post about The Deviant, but I wanted to expand on that. (SPOILERS AHEAD.)
World’s Fair is a marvellous low-budget horror film about a teenager who takes part in an online augmented reality game which is supposed to drive you mad (the idea being that you get to pretend you’re the protagonist in a horror film). Casey, the lead of World’s Fair, starts out acting, but as the film goes on, the boundary between what’s happening inside the game and what’s actually happening to her begins to blur, both for her and for the audience.
The film is about a lot of things – I wrote in the other post how it reminded me of my own teenage where I was trying to figure out who I was in terms of what I now understand as my queerness. That’s obviously a part of this, and the relationship between Casey and JLB – a game “mentor” who watches Casey’s performances obsessively and then tries, in his mind, to protect her when she might be going off the deep end – recalls queer mentorship and even predation of teenagers by older people who know how to weaponise empathy and understanding.
Just as much, this movie is about showing you how it feels to be alienated. It’s full of long shots holding on people sitting alone, desperately trying to connect to others through a screen.1 There is little feeling of real-life companionship here – Casey’s father, for example, is heard once and never shown, and JLB’s only contact in the massive house he lives in seems to be with a cleaning lady – which is most hauntingly portrayed in the scene where Casey walks among a New Year’s Eve crowd, not interacting with anyone, while telling the camera how she plans to murder her father and/or kill herself.
There is the element of performance – we’re never sure how much of what Casey is doing is real and how much is done for the people she thinks are watching (which we begin to realise is a pitifully small number). So, performance? Or is it a desire to feel real by being witnessed? Or is it both? Performance for the sake of being witnessed.
Finally, there is the aspect of boredom, of life endlessly lived without variance. Why does Casey seek out the World’s Fair? And how does Schoenbrun’s idea of allowing the audience to luxuriate being within the film (paraphrasing from one of their interviews, they mention wanting to make a film someone can fall asleep in) tie in with the lives of socially awkward people seeking excitement and connection without actually meeting anyone?
World’s Fair grapples with all these questions – Am I here? Am I real? Who am I? Can I escape myself? Can I live with myself? If I change, will I still be me? – without trying to provide an answer.
The final scene is perhaps the most horrific, though it seems quite tender. In it, JLB, a year after the main events of the film, tells us that contrary to his (and our) fears, Casey is fine – he met her and befriended her, and he wants to tell us she’s okay. Except we don’t know if this actually happened. We don’t know if she actually survived and thrived, or if her story is being mediated and overwritten by someone with his own agenda for wanting to be seen as a good person.
As much as we crave being seen, being witnessed, being connected, the horror might be that someone who we connected with now gets to tell our story, and make it whatever they want.
- I particularly loved the way this film is shot – it alternates between being in-universe footage and regularly shot footage, but the difference between those two keeps wavering, and by the second half it is obliterated. You are still able to tell which shots are being shot by the characters and which are “real”, but they feel the same by the end, as if the machine that they are filming themselves with has escaped and continued to film them outside of their control. ↩︎