“The enigma is that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensible for itself… It is a self… that is caught up in things, that has a front and a back, a past and a future…”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”
Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair opens with a teenage girl (Anna Cobb) sitting at her bedroom desk, snacking absentmindedly on a packet of string cheese. Eventually she sits up, looks straight into the camera, and says, “Hey guys, Casey here. Today I’m gonna be taking the World’s Fair Challenge.” We later hear this described as the “internet’s scariest online horror game,” but for now we realize that Casey is just rehearsing. After turning off her bedroom lights, her face now lit by her (unseen to us) laptop screen, she repeats what she said earlier, this time carrying through with the so-called “World’s Fair Challenge.” This involves pricking a finger with a button pin, smearing blood on her computer, and watching a video that flashes violently onto her face. When it is over, she says, perhaps a tad anticlimactically, “Okay, that was the World’s Fair Challenge.”
In total, this sequence lasts roughly eight minutes and unfolds without a cut. What is notable, though, is not the scene’s length or continuity, but that the shot—composed so that the movie screen effectively doubles as Casey’s webcam capture—seems to divide into two modes of perception. So often just a window for audience observation, the frame here becomes a surface where Casey can both see and be seen, where she can both act and see herself acting. The image has a “front” and a “back,” as it were, and this double-sided aspect pervades the entire film, even in scenes that depart from this initial setup. In considering this, one might think of the oft-imitated formal maneuver from Fritz Lang’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), in which a scene of a couple talking in a hotel, framed for a two-shot, pulls back to reveal that we have actually been watching a surveillance monitor all along; by showing us the “other side” of the camera’s power of looking, Lang demolishes any assumptions about its omniscience or neutrality. Arriving over a half-century later, World’s Fair inhabits a world where technology has made such revelations only too familiar, where most every image can open up a circuit between actor and audience. (Often, the question no longer seems to be “Is someone watching?” but “How many?”) And in an environment where every screen at least suggests a potential reversibility, the experience of seeing ourselves seeing is not simply ubiquitous, but commonplace.
Found-footage horror films like The Blair Witch Project (1999) possess something of this double-sidedness, pointing to both the image’s moment of capture and the “present” context in which it is being viewed; while screenlife movies such as Unfriended (2014) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018), which unfold entirely on desktop windows, have made use of similar screen-mediated possibilities. But despite their clear differences from each other, both sets of films necessitate that the frame’s double-sidedness be resolved, collapsing our attention onto either the “front” or “back” of the image: on the action unfolding before the camera or the context in which it is being viewed. World’s Fair, by contrast, keeps both possibilities afloat throughout: it preserves the frame’s two-sided nature even in footage that we don’t immediately recognize as having been shot and uploaded by Casey or any other online user. As Casey at one point remarks, “I took the World’s Fair Challenge because I love horror movies and I thought it might be cool to try actually living in one.” And as she records the (possibly supernatural) bodily changes that the challenge brings about, she becomes a spectator to scenes that she herself plays out. She becomes both an actor in a horror movie and a viewer of it, thereby oscillating between two points of view on herself. By the film’s end, though, we may feel that such perceptual movements are not so much a function of technology as a fact of vision itself.
Across its 86-minute runtime, World’s Fair does not include a single face-to-face conversation unmediated by a screen. The only sense we get of the wider World’s Fair Challenge is through videos that Casey herself watches, such as of users who are no longer able to feel their bodies, or whose skin is transformed by some strange infection. Schoenbrun deploys this footage with real intention, cutting disorientingly between online footage and Casey’s day-to-day, and gradually scrambling our sense of “virtual” and “real,” thereby activating the possibilities on either side of the frame. Like other internet-based challenges, iterations of the World’s Fair depend on individual participants’ unique tweaks on the formula—but at least as enacted by Casey, the challenge comes with no clear bounds, no clear markers as to where the “horror game” ends and where her life begins. And just as it becomes increasingly difficult to separate “horror” and “game,” it also becomes impossible to fully resolve the film’s perceptual ambiguities: We are never quite able to ignore the “other side” of the camera’s power of looking. Thus, even ostensibly banal establishing shots (Casey filmed from afar in a snowy glade, a nondescript shot of a highway) can be as unnerving as the videos Casey uploads under the moniker “CaseyWorldsFair,” an ASMR channel that she watches when unable to go to sleep, or a frightening message she gets from a user known only as JLB. In all this, Casey continually oscillates between two modes of perception, two points of view on herself; the enigma of seeing oneself seeing, rendered so banal by technology, becomes a crucial matter of identity once more. Indeed, one might even go so far as to say that her identity is this oscillation.
This aspect of World’s Fair comes to the fore when Casey chats via Skype with JLB (Michael J. Rogers), the older man who had sent her the aforementioned message. We see him take an unnerving interest in Casey, obsessively watching her videos, which feature titles like “losing control of myself,” “tour of my high school,” and “guess where i am today,” and which shift from unsettling to frightening to unbearably sad. (“I swear,” Casey says in one of them, ”someday soon, I’m just gonna disappear, and you won’t have any idea what happened to me.”) In one extended sequence late in the film, a series of Casey’s videos appear in succession, separated only by a black screen, punctuated by autoplay/loading arrows. And while it is possible to frame this by reference to JLB’s perspective, the spectral force of the sequence cannot be reduced to it. The strange pull of these sequences derives from the fact that they float free of any spatiotemporal determinants: Watching the videos, we are unable to place ourselves in a particular where or when.
This uncertainty is not something that JLB seems able to accept or even comprehend. Whether one judges his concern toward Casey as sincere or nefarious, it remains true that he can only engage with her by pinning her to one side of the image, by fixing her identity to a determinate space and time. Toward the end of the film, JLB alienates her for good, and “Casey”—she tells him that it is not her real name—recedes from view thereafter.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair includes a coda written from JLB’s perspective, though it is rather uncertain, to say the least, whether we can trust his account. In any case, what is important is that he would presume to tell her story for her. In the end, the film resonates as a kind of coming-of-age story, and like any good one, it shows us that our selfhood cannot ultimately be fixed in a here and now—for our perceptions, our images of ourselves, have a front and a back, a past and a future, and are not reducible to one or the other. (To use an adage of the painter Paul Klee: “I cannot be caught in immanence.”) True, we may not be able to imagine a concrete future for “Casey.” But perhaps no future we might imagine is, in the end, as important as the sense that she has one.