The New Yorker Radio Hour - “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and a Short History of Movies about the Internet

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

The Internet can be a scary place in real life, and far more so in Jane Schoenbrun’s film “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” which premièred at the Sundance Film Festival last year and is being released in theatres and streaming. It’s a horror movie centered on a lonely and bored teen-age girl named Casey, who spends most of her time being online and trying to figure out who she is. She undertakes a ritual that she’s read about—the so-called World’s Fair Challenge—which is said to cause unknown and possibly dire changes. “Everyone wants to know, ‘Do you think the Internet is good or the Internet is bad?’ ” Schoenbrun told the Radio Hour’s Alex Barron. “That’s like asking, ‘Do you think that people are good or bad?’ There’s not a simple answer.” They spoke about the forty-year history of movies depicting the online world. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Hey, guys, Casey here. Welcome to my channel. Today I'm going to be taking the world's fair challenge. Casey is a girl in her teens. She's sitting in her bedroom, in the dark. Her face is lit by the glow of her laptop, and she looks into the webcam directly at us, watching this scene

and she says I want to go to the world's fair I want to go to the world's fair I want to go to the world's fair this is a ritual she's read about on the internet repeat those words smear blood on your screen watch a strange video

and something is supposed to happen okay that was the world's fair challenge thanks for watching and I'll make sure to update if I start to notice any change any changes. The nature of those changes is the subject of a new film called We're All Going to the World's Fair. It's a horror film, but one that starts with a very real and eerie premise. A lonely and bored kid spending most of her life online is trying to figure out just who she is. World's Fair was written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, and our producer Alex Barron talked with

Schoenbrun about the long line of movies about the internet, horror and otherwise. Here's Alex. So movies about the internet, whether they're from last year or from decades ago, tend to be grappling with this question, with this really big question, which is, we made the internet, and it got huge and unfathomable and uncontrollable. And so how are we supposed to live alongside it? and over the years, lots of different movies have come at that question from a lot of different angles. So you could think of something like the sort of scary, oppressive cyberspace of a movie like Tron. Your user can't help you now, my little program. Or the shiny, happy social internet of You've Got Mail.

Do you think we should meet? or a quiet, kind of creepy movie about a kid who's trying to use this scary online game to figure something out about herself. And that's what's going on in this new movie. We are all going to the world's fair. And I think that perspective is one of the things that's made me, and also a lot of other people, really excited about that movie. So, you want to join the internet's scariest online horror?

Gabe. We can't be held responsible from what you become. All you have to do to get started is one of the main goals I set for myself with World's Fair was trying to see how I could evolve the language of how film has talked about the internet to something that felt more true to my version of the internet. That's Jane Schoenbrun, the director of We're all going to the World's Fair. Jane has been making video art and documentaries often about the internet for a lot of years, but this is their first feature. I grew up on the internet. I remember the first computer in the household in the basement.

I think it was a Windows 95, and the internet was sort of first there for me as a way to experience culture that I wasn't getting access to as like a 13-year-old kid in middle school in suburbia. and the internet sort of became like a place where I could differentiate myself from my surroundings by, you know, downloading on 56K modem on Napster or whatever, like Neutral Milk Hotel albums and just sort of have access to. I don't think it was community yet. It was more like an outlet towards art that I just wasn't going to find in any other way. Yeah, it's funny to remember like how hopeful the internet felt when we were younger. Like I had a similar experience than when you did. Like I grew up in the middle of nowhere and the internet felt like the first access that I had to like a big interesting world. I feel like for a lot of people of, I think we're of a similar age. Like for a lot of people of our generation, the internet started off from that idyllic place in our lives. I think it's something that like we don't think about so much because of how dark a place the internet can be in 2022 is that it was sort of just all about desire at first.

right? And that was the only reason you were going to be on it, whether you were in an AOL chat room or like an X-Files message board was, I want to learn about this nerd. And there's nobody around who will talk to me about this nerd. I have to go on the internet to find it. And for me also, like, I'm embarrassed of the corners I was popping into on the internet because I think that they were not traditionally associated with the image that the people in my life wanted to have of me, which was. was like a 13-year-old boy about to go through puberty, which, of course, I wasn't. And so in my film, we have access to our main character, a young girl named Casey. She's claiming to be going through the changes that are wrought after you watch this video and complete this challenge. And for me, the fascinating question of the film is how the supposedly horrific changes that

she claims to be going through can actually be also viewed as a film. form of identity play or at the very least an outlet for her to express a sort of feeling of unreality or as I would call it dysphoria. It's funny, I'd be dreamed. I know I'd be dreaming when it used to happen. But it was like I was also awake at the same time. It was like watching myself on a TV all the way across the room. And I was aware of my actions.

Yes, granted, I was aware, but I couldn't control myself. I've been kind of feeling that way recently ever since I watched that video that feeling's kind of creeping up on me a little bit I'm not really sure what to do about it So in the movie, Casey, the central character, is not explicitly identified as trans but the way she's using the internet

to try to carve out some identity for herself definitely feels informed by Jane's experience as a trans person online. And you can also really tell that when they were making the movie, Jane was really thinking about some of these older movies about the internet. And in fact, to coincide with the release of the movie, Jane has programmed a series of screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

of some of those older films that inspired their film. I would say that they are all movies that can be in conversation with my film in various ways, some aesthetically, some thematically. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore... It's a pretty wild selection of movies on Jane's list. The oldest one is David Cronenberg's 1983 movie Videodrome.

Your reality is already half video hallucination. If you're not careful, it will become total hallucination. Videodrome's not actually about the internet. It's, for those who haven't seen it, it's about a TV executive who discovers a pirate TV signal that causes these like horrifying, violent hallucinations in anybody who watches them. So tell me a little bit about how this sort of pre-internet movie ended up in your internet festival. I think no movie more than Videodrome is about the flicker of the screen and the sort of desire to be lost in it and to, to have your world changed by it. And well, and I think for Kronenberg, it's almost an inevitability.

Our relationship with technologies is inherently somewhat symbiotic, or at the very least, that technology is an extension of ourselves, right? Like, we built it for a reason we built it because we desire something. And then in turn, it's changing us. I feel like the thing that you say about Videodrome resonates with a couple other movies in the 80s, including like Cronenberg's movie The Fly or Robocop. These are all sort of movies about how technology could warp your physical body. I would throw out the Donna Harroway essay, The Cyborg Manifesto, which was published in 1985.

and is sort of positing exactly this idea, but from an explicitly queer and trans lens, that our bodies can change with technology, and this is going to open up a transhumanist future in which ideas of identity and physical form are going to change radically. This would also be around the time when cyberpunk is sort of taking office as genre, you know, a lot of the 90s internet stuff that I suspect we'll talk about

is sort of born from that movement. There's a new virus in the database. What's happening? It's replicating, eating up memory. What do I do? Type cookie, you idiot. I'll head him off at the past. Yes, so by the time we get to the 90s,

we are definitely firmly in the cyberpunk world of movies like hackers and Johnny mnemonic and of course the Matrix. So how is the idea of the internet in those 90s movies different from what we saw in the 80s? Well, it almost feels like the sort of like dream of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and early Silicon Valley. This was sort of the early dream of the internet, right? That this was a space that by its very nature was going to democratize all communication and sort of like radically change the world into a space without hierarchy, which was obviously, I think time has proven that

to be a very adolescent and naive fantasy. But you sort of feel maybe in a lot of those 90s movies, yeah, like hackers, I think especially, or The Matrix, this idea that the evil corporations are trying to take control of this space and the true heroes of the internet are the outlaws, right? the people who believe in that mission of equality and democratized information,

they sort of become our heroes. The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room, you can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church,

when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. What truth? I think that what, at its heart, my film, we're all going to the World's Fair, shares in common with The Matrix, is this sort of desire to find a space that feels more real than reality. Because reality to you feels wrong in this very essential way that perhaps if it's 1998, you can't quite put your finger on. It's a film about sort of casting away the shackles of the fake that the corporations have built for us to find our true selves. But it's having that conversation within the context of someone who feels that his life has always felt a little bit like a dream and like his real life isn't his own. And I think that is an essentially trans feeling.

I want to jump forward to a movie that's on your list from 2001. a Japanese film called Pulse. Pulse is kind of the classical, there is a ghost in the internet movie. It is about a figure-haunting computers and kind of traveling between computers, but so much of the horror in this movie is about entering spaces that maybe feel like real life

with something a little bit off. and sort of being filled with the dread of realizing that there's something bled of reality in those spaces. And this is like really the beginning of a healthy seam of movies about ghosts on the internet that came out during the 2000s. But I think one of the things I love about Pulse is that it draws like a thick line between the idea of being lonely and the idea of being on the internet. The spirits we come to find out are sort of driven by loneliness. they're seeking out people who are lonely. We get to a real kind of emotional place with that movie, which is kind of stunning for a movie that came out about the internet 20 years ago.

It feels very similar to me to what I'm trying to conjure through the World's Fair in my film. It feels very similar to what you're talking about in Pulse. And I think for people who are drawn to the internet, who are actually invested emotionally in that as a space, this is maybe at the center of it. and these are films that are actually interrogating the sort of emotional center

of why that space exists and what we use it for. So over the next couple of decades, obviously, the internet kind of works its way into every element of our lives. So it also works its way into every element of the movies. And now I feel like

we've gotten to this place where we're like fixated on the question of where the line should be between the like quote unquote real world and the online world. I'm thinking about movies like Ready Player One or Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle or Free Guy, these movies that seem to suggest that it might actually be good if there was no line for a person to get to be a character in a video game or for a character in a video game to get to be a person.

Or for a boy to get to be a person. a boy to get to be a girl. This is sort of the intention of my movie is to not draw like a binary answer, right? Everyone wants to know, do you think the internet is good or the internet is bad? And that's like asking, do you think that people are good or bad?

There's not a simple answer to that question. There's a lot of purposeful ambiguity in my film about whether what this person is going through is some form of trying to discover herself through the medium of the internet in a way that's going to have ultimately a positive impact on her real life, even if the expression itself is really dark

or if what we're watching is some kind of more nefarious manipulation or ghost in the machine kind of thing. Well, it's been really nice to talk to you through this computer screen. Yeah, this is where I do all of my talking, like Brian Oblivion. I don't actually exist.

Spoilers for VideoDrome. Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun spoke with our producer Alex Barron. We're all going to the world's fair. He's coming out in theaters and on HBO Max on Friday. I'm David Remnick. That's the show for today. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts,

with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Berrador, Aaron, Ave Carrillo, Brita Green, Callaliyah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Puttubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Alison McAdam, Harrison Keithline, and Mengfei Chen, and guidance from Emily Boutin. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.