You need to enable JavaScript to run this website.
Art & Entertainment, Good Culture

Finding My Self in "We're All Going to the World's Fair"

montigone

Anna Cobb as Casey in "We're All Going to the World's Fair"

A personal essay in response to Jane Schoenbrun's 2021 film "We're All Going to the World's Fair"

Sometimes I still think about Erick. At least, I think his name was Erick. His email is still in my contacts, though it’s been a decade since we last spoke. Back then, I was a junior in high school, on my first antidepressant, and doing everything I could to distance myself from me. There was no big trauma, no life altering mind fuck to inspire the absolute hatred I had for living in my body. Just a suffocating loneliness. That’s when I found the tumblr roleplay community. I was raised on fanfiction and had written my fair share, but there was something different about roleplaying. I became that character, immersing myself in that fictional world. The numbness I felt about my own life was replaced by the intense wants, fears, grief of someone else. The emotional connections that my depression had severed became usurped by the relationships my character had with other characters. It was all text on a screen, but it was a life when I didn’t feel like living my own. In high school, I was a ghost. But when I wrote as my character, suddenly there was something solid to me. At the very least , I was solid enough to make contact with keys on a keyboard.

Erick was one of my writing partners. He wrote my character’s best and oldest friend, something I, in my real life, had lost not too long prior (Sometimes people grow apart. Sometimes you love people more than they love you). We would talk “out of character”, mostly about plot stuff, but with sprinkles of real life. Hey, what’s up? How was your day? This person whose face I only ever saw in a selfie he posted became someone I spoke to daily. Then, one day, he didn’t respond. A couple days of silence, then he wrote that he’d been in a car accident, but he was recovering and doing okay. We went back to frequent communications, just not as frequent as before. And then a little while later, he was gone. I like to think that he’s fine, just got bored of the game we were playing or stopped caring about the character he wrote. Maybe something bad happened during his recovery. Maybe there was never a car accident at all. Who knows? Not me, that’s for sure. And while I still think about him every so often, he's not really on my mind much.

Then today, I watched We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Written, directed, and edited by Jane Schoenbrun, the movie follows young person, Casey, as she takes part in this online game called the World’s Fair Challenge. It’s a roleplay viral challenge where people film themselves saying “I want to go to the world’s fair” three times, draw their own blood, smear it on their computer screen, and watch a strobe light video. After that, people would film their "progression" of going, essentially, crazy. After initiating the "ritual", Casey seems to disassociate from her body, losing control of herself and her actions. But it’s a roleplay game. A horror one, but it isn’t real. None of it is real. Until it is. Or is it? On the other side of Casey’s screen, there’s a man in his 40s who just goes by JLB. He watches and responds to her videos, though Casey never sees his face. It’s part of the game, too. But that line between reality and fantasy begins to blur and at the end, he’s scared that it’s no longer a game for her. Via Skype, he asks to speak out of character, asking if she’s okay, if she’s really going to kill her father or herself. At first, she seems confused. This was a game? But then there’s a switch, and of course she knows it’s a game. None of it is real. Why is he getting scared? She ends the call and tells him to never call her again. Calls him a pedophile. We fast forward and he's making a video about how he saw Casey a year after that Skype call. That she was doing a theater program in Manhattan now. That she apologized for how she left things and after that night a year ago she'd gone to an inpatient care center for a couple months. According to him, at the end of the night they hugged and parted ways. But we don't see it, we only see JLB on his end of the screen, speaking to no one.

In the end, we’re left with uncertainty and no clear answers. We don’t even really know who the two characters are. Is Casey her real name? Were any of her moments of disassociation real? Did any of the events JLB described really happen? Was the man a pedophile, or just lonely? Does it even matter when the dynamic was inherently predatory? I’ve seen critiques of the film that point to the lack of answers, the ambiguity. But ambiguity is the only thing that's certain online. We don’t know who is on the other side of our screens. And sometimes, we don’t really know our own selves in front of it.

Right before the film’s climax, there’s a line Casey says in the midst of what seems to be a breaking point. “I swear, someday soon, I am just gonna disappear and you won't have any idea what happened to me.” Yes, I thought of Erick and how one day he was there and the next he was gone. I thought about how I’ll never have any idea what happened to him, or if anything he shared with me was real. I thought of the fleetingness of that connection, and so many more that I made over the years behind that screen. I thought of all the lies I was probably told without any way of knowing they were lies. But I also thought about myself. My own phantom of self. I often cite roleplaying on tumblr as something that saved my life, and a part of me still thinks it did. I was self harming, suicidal, isolating myself from everyone in my life. Roleplaying was my life jacket. But when I finished watching We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the only "review" I could put into words was that when you’re drowning within yourself, sometimes your life jacket only offers the illusion of safety. Did becoming so disconnected from who I was save me, or did it just enable my deep desire to disappear? It’s been a decade now and I still haven’t fully found that kid I used to be. When I think of my life as a series of portraits, I am translucent for so many of them. Or I am painted in the style of people who never existed.

Or did they?

Maybe we'll never know.

#Horror #Mental_Health #Depression #Queerness #film