"I'm going inside the video, through the computer, into the screen"
Jane Schoenbrun and a new grammar of trans cinema
The following is an edited excerpt from Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema by Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay, available now from Repeater Books: https://tinyurl.com/46jxp3vz
The increasing visibility of transness from the 2000s onward is undoubtedly tied to the rise of the internet. The creation of online forms like Susan’s Place and TGForum gave rise to greater interconnectedness; these were places to discreetly share thoughts, opinions, photos, and information with like-minded individuals, with a common grasp of slang, niche acronyms, and pseudonyms. At the same time, video-sharing websites like YouTube also offered new avenues for trans film images.
The most common of these were the vlog diaries of trans people coming out and speaking transparently about struggles related to dysphoria, transphobia, rejection, exclusion, and medical transition, and particularly how they progressed on hormones. YouTube didn’t just democratize filmmaking, it also made available information on matters of trans health and procedures that was previously not widely shared. As Morgan M. Page and Chase Joynt noted, this “first-wave” of YouTubers
“were untrained and unmonetized, relying primarily on iMovie, early smartphones, and grainy webcams to produce DIY content for each other. Though their work is largely forgotten, these YouTubers constructed the now-ubiquitous trans vlog format.”1
In doing so, as Laura Horak notes, these users created their own series of cliches and tropes of the transition timeline within the vlog space.2 In many ways, as Horak framed it, “instating transition as a norm” arguably helped accelerate the ways in which trans audiences were able to articulate their dissatisfaction and fatigue with the fictionalized transition narratives appearing in mainstream culture. Most trans people had already encountered many of these stories before on their own computer through authentic real-life images and experiences.
YouTube was also used as an archive through which to connect with trans elders’ testimonials. One such popular case was the Trans Oral History Project, whose subjects included Stonewall veteran Miss Major and trans elder Ben Power, and which featured testimonies about spaces like the Stroll in New York, which became synonymous with trans women and sex work. However, while opening a democratized space of connection and self-documentation, YouTube has also created additional vulnerabilities as a forum for personal disclosure. On the one hand, people who need and want to see certain images can do so, but on the other, everybody can see them and pass judgment, expressing ignorance or hate, or worse, repurposing images to engage in targeted doxxing and violence. YouTube was never going to be a digital utopia or have the safeguards and discretion of older groups and communities, but trans visibility through YouTube offers something perhaps not unlike what talk shows provided in terms of trans imagery for the prior generation. The possibilities of discovery for the unsuspecting viewer that came with flicking through TV channels re-emerged in the form of internet rabbit holes that helped to inform the self-actualization of their gender identity.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair: Dysphoria as a Living Ghost Story
The internet was initially conceived of on film in conceptual terms. Numerous films used computer video games as a basis for images, like Johnny Mnemonic (1995) or David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999). The other approach was to conceive of online spaces as distant, surreal places, which introduced alternative realities, like Pulse (2001),t through the lens of horror, or The Matrix (1999) in science fiction. While initial depictions of the internet on film took a cautious, concerned approach to the growing technology, there is little to no resistance in the way Millennial and Gen-Z filmmakers conceive of the internet as a natural extension of everyday life. This has interacted with transness in the form of a vast flood of visibility via social media channels. In earlier decades, it was more difficult for a trans person to organically find their community or relatable images, but now they only need to go online.
In Jane Schoenbrun’s feature debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), the internet is intimate, personalized, and evolving for people who call it their home. Schoenbrun is strongly influenced by the work of David Cronenberg, particularly in the way his filmmaking takes the human body and collapses it inside new realities and possibilities for definition through surreal uses of technology. With eXistenZ, Cronenberg tried to understand how things like video games and the internet were beginning to become like prostheses for the human body. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair builds on this idea with greater specificity, as the internet acts as a type of virus that is induced by shared loneliness and a longing for community.
In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, this is foregrounded through a blood oath. To participate in the “World’s Fair Challenge,” a user must cut themselves and wipe the blood on their screen. After enacting this blood oath, transformations are supposed to occur, and the participant is required to document their experience of those changes, echoing the popularity of YouTube transition-timeline videos that date back to the 2000s. Teenager Casey (Anna Cobb) becomes obsessed with these transformations and eagerly joins this online community, spending her evenings on YouTube listening to others chart their symptoms. The transformations unfurl in the realm of the uncanny. Casey watches a video of a young woman’s skin becoming like plastic, or that of a boy whose arms are being overtaken with a fungus. The language of the “World’s Fair” is built upon the backbone of body horror, analogous to dysphoric transness. In Schoenbrun’s director’s notes, released alongside the film at Sundance, they state that World’s Fair is an attempt to “use the language of cinema to articulate the hard-to-describe feeling of dysphoria.”3 Schoenbrun elaborates further that their adolescence involved a “constant feeling of unreality, one cut with an ambient sense of shame, self-loathing and anger.”4
World’s Fair is staggeringly unique in construction and exciting for the possibilities it offers for telling stories of coded transness free of the burden of medical queries dominating narrative and representative images. Casey’s experience with the “World’s Fair” and the way the film utilizes dysphoria is like a secret handshake of transness that is deliberately for trans people, and there are none of the broad depictions of anguish present in more traditional transition narratives, but rather a quiet unease and the dispossession of Casey’s subjective experience of herself.
Casey’s internet seems to exist under the shield of a perceived anonymity. It feels haunted in the style of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but unlike the characters in Kurosawa’s films, Casey is completely at ease in giving herself and her body to the internet. Schoenbrun treats algorithmic loading screens like séances, and lingers on them for long periods of time before someone or something is summoned for Casey during her lonely nights. Sometimes she is accompanied by a positive force — like an ASMR video telling her that nightmares are not real as it rocks her gently to sleep — but in one instance, she comes across a video that acts as a direct warning that she is in trouble for reckoning with the horror of the “World’s Fair.” Is any of this real? Or is it a type of viral chain-letter of the body? It hardly matters for Casey, whose isolation and discomfort with her own existence have made her look for kinship in the waiting arms of the internet and this community of people who may or may not be charlatans, whose body morphing videos may or may not be fake.
When Casey does begin to experience symptoms — such as feeling outside of her own body, a kind of disassociation — an older man who goes by JLB (Michael J. Rogers) introduces himself. He speaks to her through an internet avatar, revealing that he made the warning video. The movie’s horror elements are most present in the potential danger of this relationship, and Casey’s videos take a darker turn, finding her destroying a childhood teddy bear and wearing homemade corpse paint when online.
World’s Fair is not a tragic story, or even one that comes from a moral place, positioning the internet as an inherently negative experience. It is far more nuanced. For younger Millennials and Gen-Z, the internet is not a bogeyman; it is as natural as the air they breathe. Schoenbrun’s film has sympathy for people who seek these online connections, and Casey’s story introduces a type of dissonant, trans-adjacent narrative through which viewers can see and feel the desperation of wanting to transform and find others like yourself. It is a cinema influenced by how people live with the internet, which is also undeniably and textually informed through the lived experience of transness.
Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema is available now from Repeater Books: https://tinyurl.com/46jxp3vz
Joynt and Page, Boys Don’t Cry, p. 1.
Horak, Laura. “Trans on YouTube: Intimacy, Visibility.” , vol. 1, no. 4, Fall 2014, pp. 573–574.
Horak, Laura. “Trans on YouTube: Intimacy, Visibility.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 4, Fall 2014, pp. 573–574: <https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2815255>.
“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” Director’s Statement. Lightbulb Film Distribution (UK). 2021.
Ibid.
Rosskam, Jules, editor. “Making Trans Cinema: A Roundtable Discussion with Felix Endara, Reina Gossett, Chase Joynt, Jess Mac and Madsen Minax.” , vol. 8, no. 1, 2018, p. 17.