How ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’ Grew Out of the Internet’s Subconscious - Hollywood Reporter

Jane Schoenbrun’s debut communicative feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, is an entrancing fearfulness movie that shirks accepted three-act operation successful favour of bold, unprecedented cinematic connection and a heavy fascination with its cardinal character, Casey, who lives the bulk of her teenage beingness successful her room, posting vlogs arsenic portion of a sinister and mysterious online inclination called the “World’s Fair Challenge.” The writer-director’s curiosity astir net subcultures stems from their ain nonbinary and trans identities, increasing up and looking to the machine arsenic an outlet to explicit themselves authentically.

“People were collaborating successful this precise decentralized mode to make caller narratives that truly lone could person been created connected the internet,” explains Schoenbrun, referring to antithetic acheronian online fearfulness characters and stories shared wide online that helped animate their film. “It truly resonated and reminded maine of thing I went looking for online successful my ain youth, which was an effort to region myself from my assemblage and my individuality and beryllium successful a abstraction wherever I could explicit myself creatively, and possibly adjacent research myself personally, extracurricular of ‘the existent world.’ ”

Schoenbrun says that coming retired arsenic trans allowed them to yet archer the stories they’d had locked distant wrong their subconscious. “I don’t deliberation that I had a originative burst aft coming out,” they muse. “I deliberation that I worked up the courageousness to stock my interior satellite with the outer world, which was precise hard for maine to bash pre-transition.”

Shame, some interior and outer since childhood, worked arsenic an obstacle to creativity for Schoenbrun earlier this prolific caller signifier of their career: “I wasn’t being encouraged to explicit myself. And truthful you larn to enactment it away, and you larn to log online and constitute stories connected the internet, disconnected from your existent life, and you learn, basically, to beryllium ashamed. The process of starting to enactment connection to who I was, and to go who I needed to be, was a process of unraveling my narration to that shame and overcoming it. I deliberation that’s what allowed maine to marque a movie similar this one, marque a movie similar my adjacent one, and marque each of the things that I’m going to make. These were the stories that I ever wanted and needed to tell. And they were ever successful there. They were conscionable lodged down internalized transphobia.”

World’s Fair is the archetypal successful a planned assemblage of enactment Schoenbrun dubs “The Screen Trilogy,” to beryllium followed by their upcoming A24 thriller I Saw the TV Glow, starring an ensemble formed including Phoebe Bridgers and Danielle Deadwyler, and a tv task titled Public Access Afterworld.

“This transition from surviving my beingness arsenic a spectator of the world, successful the incorrect assemblage and identity, and dilatory becoming myself and an artist, going from idiosyncratic who, similar Casey successful World’s Fair, spends each of her clip staring astatine a screen, to idiosyncratic who is, successful immoderate ways, entering the surface — that is, to me, a truly potent metaphor for modulation and however it’s felt,” Schoenbrun explains. “Similarly, I conscionable find the glow of a surface to beryllium appealing. It’s thing that I precise people gravitate toward, successful the mode that David Cronenberg gravitates toward assemblage fearfulness oregon Christopher Nolan gravitates toward super-confusing clip [plots].”

This communicative archetypal appeared successful a December stand-alone contented of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To person the magazine, click present to subscribe.