The modern internet is a sterile, corporate shopping mall. But those of us who grew up with dial-up remember it as a lawless, haunted landscape—a place where you could vanish entirely. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Jane Schoenbrun captures this ephemeral terror not to frighten us, but to map the internal architecture of gender dysphoria.

Anatomy of the Craft: A Digital Haunting

Bref, Schoenbrun ignores the hyper-polished aesthetics of the contemporary internet. Instead, they root the visual language of the film in 2012-era amateur creepypasta YouTube videos and desolate message boards.

Schoenbrun uses the specific ephemerality of this digital space—the way users delete their histories, abandon their avatars, and vanish without a trace—as a direct, agonizing metaphor for the loneliness of early trans transition. The screenlife mechanics are not a gimmick; they are the only way to articulate the alienation of feeling disconnected from one’s own physical body.

The 70/30 Principle

C’est le risque du métier. A traditional director forces their cast to conform to a rigid script. Schoenbrun understood that parasocial online authenticity cannot be faked. They wrote the protagonist, Casey, only 70 percent of the way, deliberately leaving the remaining 30 percent blank. They then cast Anna Cobb, an actor with a chaotic, palpable online presence, and allowed her to bleed into the empty spaces of the character.

The film is inextricably tied to Schoenbrun’s own gender transition. They began writing the film before they even had the vocabulary to name their own dysphoria—their “egg hadn’t cracked yet”—and used the cinematic language of internet folklore to articulate the truth they were too terrified to face in the physical world.

Insights regarding Jane Schoenbrun’s use of 2012-era creepypasta aesthetics, the 70/30 character development split with actor Anna Cobb, and the utilization of the internet’s ephemerality as a direct metaphor for pre-transition gender dysphoria were drawn from an interview with the director published by Little White Lies.