By Lindsay Lerman.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, 2021
A girl, alone in her bedroom, looks into a screen. What I see in her face is something like resignation — much more than dread or fear or sadness. Again and again, she looks into the screen. Our camera and her camera are almost one, but not quite. We see her almost as the viewers on her YouTube channel will see her, but her eyes are not quite looking into ours — they are looking into her laptop.
She’s not concerned with how she looks. This is no cautionary tale about vanity or performative femininity. Something else is happening here. Our girl is not looking to be told she’s cute. And whatever she’s looking for, I sense, she’s not so sure she wants to find it. Her eyes are searching, pleading, unguardedly expressive — in other words, they are heartbreaking.
There’s loneliness in the air. She is breathing lonely air. We don’t know what her eyes can see — we don’t see what she sees. She repeats a phrase, speaking directly into her laptop: “I want to go to the world’s fair.” She says it over and over, with increasing conviction, and then she pricks her finger to produce blood, and she appears to press the tip of her bloody finger into her laptop’s screen.
Nine minutes gets us right up to the credit sequence. It’s a perfect opening — an entire first act, if you’ll let the boundaries of filmic storytelling slide a little. Already in place is the fundamental question — the question that any smart viewer might not want answered, just as the girl is not sure she wants her own curiosities satisfied: what will become of her?
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
3. Grant Maierhofer
4. Emma Jones
5. Des Barry
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lindsay Lerman is a writer and translator. Her first book, I’m From Nowhere, was published in 2019. Her second book, What Are You, was published in 2022. Her first translation will be published in March 2023. Her essays, poems, short stories, and interviews have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Tyrant, The Creative Independent, Entropy, and elsewhere. She has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She is currently working on her next novel and a screenplay.
