It’s been a while hasn’t it?
I must apologise to you, dear reader, for allowing this substack to join the purgatory of dead newsletters. It was for the usual reason of letting the death-drive engulf me in the middle of a pandemic. Think of this edition as a piece of necromancy. What emerges in the words ahead will be slightly different in format to my previous newsletters. We shall see if I can reanimate this corpse for more than a few minutes.
Wednesday 27th January We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021)
I’ve long been in awe of London’s Crystal Palace. Not the football team mind you, but the actual Crystal Palace built for the Great Exhibition in 1851. It was a magnificent structure made of iron and glass, unlike any other building in the world at the time. My stomach gets a little flutter whenever I look at photos and drawings of this monument to humanity’s progress.
The Great Exhibition was one of the earliest World Fairs and was basically a way for Britain to flex on the wonders of science and technology that the island nation had apparently produced. These types of fairs were held all over the world. I hear they had a sun sphere full of wigs in Knoxville. A hundred years later and while the Crystal Palace had long since succumbed to disrepair and fire, a new Festival of Britain was being held. This event was closer to the upcoming Brexit Festival rather than London 2012. It was a fairytale for the Brits rather than an international show. Esteemed documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings was commissioned to make a film on the theme of the festival, in which he framed the United Kingdom as a large family, with the festival constituting a reunion. The resulting film, appropriately titled Family Portrait, and the Festival itself served to conjure an optimistic, forward-looking vision for an exhausted postwar Britain.
At the heart of these extravagant displays was a techno-utopian outlook on the world, promising a future where technology would liberate us, bring us a happiness that we all forged together. Yet there has always been a flipside to such narratives. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was, of course, a product of the Industrial Revolution and an ascendent British Imperialism. The Festival of Britain meanwhile was a glorified pity party for a nation that had spent the last three hundred years plundering the world and killing millions of people. Add to that the fact that these public projects often demand the sacrifice of working-class homes to make space for the festivities.
Casually flicking through the last two hundred years of capitalist hegemony, you can sketch out a rough cycle between optimism and pessimism when it comes to technology and its effect on people. World fairs such as the Great Exhibition, and national events like The Festival of Britain represent the idea that technology will be our salvation. A good example of this cycle can be seen in the unifying jubilance at space exploration, epitomised by the 1969 moon landing, which in just a decade, morphed into the bleak corporate terror of Ridley Scott’s Alien.
When it came to the technology of the World Wide Web, 90s culture produced countless utopian dreams of cyberspace, and on the democratising effect this international forum will have on us all. Now in 2021, firmly ensconced in the clutches of Web 2.0 and The House That Jeff Built, we can see that such optimism was somewhat naive.
Which, after four long paragraphs, finally brings me to Jane Schoenbrun’s haunting debut feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Having just premiered at Sundance, World’s Fair represents a proper doomer perspective on the world we live in, and it is appropriate enough that we see that from the viewpoint of a chronically online teenage girl.
Casey, played impeccably by first-time actor Anna Cobb, introduces herself in the film by starting The World’s Fair Challenge, an online horror RPG. From there she begins to document the changes that she may be experiencing as a result of the game, and posting them online. Like Spree’s serial killer streamer Kurt, Casey’s viewing numbers never reach triple digits. However she soon attracts the attention of an anonymous player, and the two begin to skype as Casey’s changes become increasingly disturbing.
What follows is a probing exploration of performance, identity and reality in the age of online. In the aforementioned Spree, similar themes were explored through the prism of celebrity, but World’s Fair is on a different tack, one that offers something more meditative. The languid pace that accompanies long takes of Casey watching YouTube videos capture a more universal experience of online activity. With Spree, Eugene Kotlyarenko managed to capture the direct maximalist eye-injection of social media. Schoenbrun pulls the camera back, and through Casey, allows us to see ourselves as we are when we watch screens alone in the dark.
There’s a sense of utter isolation in the film. Casey and other cast members are mostly shot alone, with only the barest hints that other people inhabit this film world. Casey lives with her Dad but we only hear his harsh voice once. Such perpetual loneliness has now become more familiar to people in the wake of the pandemic, but its portrayal here speaks to a more general alienation throughout society. Pseudo-philosophers in recent years like to lay the blame for this at the feet of social media and internet culture in general, touting the paradox that online connectivity has made us more distant from other people. I suppose it’s oft-repeated because there is a grain of truth to it. Young people like Casey, who feel out of step with the real world, find themselves retreating ever deeper into the comfort of online. I know this because it was me as a teenager. It’s still me at 27.
Despite the mixture of bleak mundanity with hints of other-worldly horror, there’s a genuine human warmth to the film that sets World’s Fair apart from other recent films about being online. One scene I keep thinking about is when Casey tries to sleep in the garage, using a projector to play an ASMR video in which a young woman with a soothing urges her audience to go to sleep and dream good dreams. Schoenbrun dwells on this moment for a long time, allowing the video to take its effect on us as it would affect Casey. At the same time, we can see outside of Casey and despite the comforting voice from the ASMR video, there’s a palpable sadness as we watch a child try to sleep with the aid of algorithmic phantoms.
That drool about Crystal Palace and Humphrey Jennings at the beginning of this sorta-review was inspired by a single shot of an abandoned Toys R Us during the opening credits of World’s Fair. This site of fond childhood memories, now lying as a corpse picked apart by vulture capitalism, is reminiscent of a late Goya painting and embodies a general mood about the period of history we find ourselves in, that children like Casey were born into.
The Crystal Palace was built to make the dream of a techno-utopia seem real; a paradise of glass and iron built by capitalism. These dreams have come back in fits and spurts, but things look a little bit shittier every time we wake up. Yet Schoenbrun didn’t make a technophobic film about how we need to look away from the screens. The title We’re All Going to the World’s Fair hints at the horrific folly of going back. Rather, in expressing the sadness of where we find ourselves with such quiet intensity, World’s Fair forces us to think about how we can move forward and hopefully escape The House That Jeff Built.
Postscript
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading my scrambled thoughts on We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. There’s so much more to this film than what I have been able to convey here and you should seek out more writing about the film. It’s a special work, and I think Jane Schoenbrun tapped into something profund. There was a particular scene in the film that depicted one of my childhood memories with disturbing accuracy and it’s something I will have to reflect on for a while.
I would also like to thank Kaila Hier for reaching out, and giving me the opportunity to watch the film.
Lastly, I would like to thank you, the reader, for taking the time with me, and I hope that this newsletter has given you something.