Buffering: The Strange Loops of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Of rabbit holes, algorithms, and symbols. Our guest writer Kelly Leow delves into a formal exploration of how Jane Schoenbrun portrays the darkness of the internet with surprising tenderness. 

Warning: Brief spoilers Ahead! Best read after watching.

*This article was originally published in our 2021 Programme Booklet. It has been adapted and reformatted for the web.

No symbol feels more neatly representative of Jane Schoenbrun’s debut narrative feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, than the buffering icon that appears intermittently throughout the film, flickering on the screens of the film’s characters as they wait for videos to load. The particular icon used by Schoenbrun is a pair of arrows that spin round and round, chasing each other, going nowhere. This ouroboros—this strange loop, as the characters might say—both dictates the film’s unusual structure and serves as an encapsulation of its liminal themes, which circle around the idea of agency and connection.

World’s Fair follows Casey, a lonely suburban girl of indeterminate age (13? 18? Actor Anna Cobb manages to convey both), as she embarks on the “World’s Fair challenge”—a collaborative horror-fantasy game with a sprawling mythology that is expanded and enacted via videos made by “players” around the world. Actually, it’s not just Casey’s age that’s indeterminate. Everything from where she lives to her family and school situation, and even her real identity, remains obscure save for the odd glimpse: a father who yells at her through the walls and keeps a gun in the shed; a beloved lemur soft toy. Casey posts a few videos of herself documenting changes that the game supposedly triggers in her. These are mainly psychological, though she longs for the more grotesque physical changes enjoyed by other players, who “transform” into scary clowns and vampires and Barbie girls and so on.

We watch Casey watching these videos in the kind of stupor we have surely all been guilty of—lying down on her side, eyes glazed over, letting waves of picture and sound wash over her. As her playlist progresses, her computer’s screen gets bigger and bigger in the frame, until it becomes all we can see too. In fact, a significant portion of World’s Fair unfolds this way: sequences of loosely connected videos that follow one after the other, seemingly outside of the main narrative, punctuated by that omnipresent buffering icon. It’s an enticing and unconventional formal approach to employ in a narrative film, inspired by “the scroll of a newsfeed”, as Schoenbrun notes in their director’s statement.

“Most insidiously, groomers make their victims feel complicit in their own exploitation. Where do their desires end, and where do the groomer’s begin? (How many of Casey’s creative choices are her own, and how many are planted by JLB?) In this existential disorientation lies another strange loop.”

These questions, centred again on agency and power, are at the heart of grooming, the process by which online predators manipulate and exploit young people. The key characteristic of grooming—its subtlety—makes it hard to parse as an act of sexual violence. It also makes it hard to prosecute and recover from. Grooming isn’t a blatant overriding of consent but a gradual one, operating in erosion and inducement and dependence. Before you know it, you are bound to someone, and hard-pressed to explain why or how. Most insidiously, groomers make their victims feel complicit in their own exploitation. Where do their desires end, and where do the groomer’s begin? (How many of Casey’s creative choices are her own, and how many are planted by JLB?) In this existential disorientation lies another strange loop.

Ultimately, though, World’s Fair is a lot lighter and more playful than the above suggests. The film is less interested in grappling with grooming—or, say, the tendency of YouTube algorithms to lead us down rabbit holes of disinformation—than winking at their potential horrors on the way to something more redemptive. (Without spoiling too much, I’ll say it puts a far more compassionate spin on the JLB-Casey relationship than you might expect to bear out.) Schoenbrun, a non-binary filmmaker, has talked about how their experiences with gender dysphoria informed this film; indeed, a trans reading comes readily to mind, not least in the ways that the World’s Fair Challenge serves as a Matrix-esque conduit into another realm.

For all the darkness at its margins, there is also something tender about Casey’s journey into The World’s Fair: the oceanic feeling of affinity, of transcendence, that an online community can provide—particularly one based (like World’s Fair and its real-life analogue, Creepypasta) on creative collaboration. It’s as comforting as it is unsettling, like the ASMR video by real-life YouTube creator Slight Sounds that Casey watches early in the film. In it a young woman whispers soothingly into the camera while stroking her fingers at the lens as if it were a person (a move that will never not feel exquisitely creepy). “You’re fine now. It’s OK,” she croons. “I know it takes a while to come out of the nightmare. Sometimes it still feels real even when you’re awake.”

Casey lays on her side, spellbound, throughout those eerie three minutes. Then the video ends, and the buffering icon appears, heralding the next.

About the Guest Author

Kelly Leow is AWARE’s Communications Manager. She co-wrote and co-produced the limited-series podcast Saga (2020-2021), about the landmark 2009 event known as the AWARE Saga. Kelly was previously deputy editor at MovieMaker Magazine, an independent film magazine based in Los Angeles.