Since their debut with 2021’s We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, Jane Schoenbrun has explored ideas of gender identity, dysmorphia, belonging, and pleasure within the bounds of a screen, where one can connect with a community or see themselves reflected. Through the internet culture, TV shows, and movies that mean the world to Schoenbrun’s characters, they are liberated to find themselves, often through a messy—sometimes dangerous—process. These moments of self-discovery are unique to each film; with each entry in Schoenbrun’s Screen trilogy, the make-believe world changes and expands to include new styles and memories as it opens up to reveal more of the filmmaker behind these deeply personal works.
It all begins with We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, a coming-of-age story centered on a teenager who enters a horror-themed internet challenge. After a ritual performed on camera for her online viewers, Casey (Anna Cobb) embarks on the “World’s Fair Challenge,” promising to post if anything out-of-the-ordinary starts to happen. It doesn’t take long for that to be the case. Soon, videos of the teen sleeping show them getting up with an evil smile, dancing to music before stopping to scream, and losing control, destroying a beloved stuffed toy before waking up to realize what they’ve done and crying over the shredded stuffing. A stranger on the internet who goes by the screenname JLB (Michael J. Rogers) expresses concern for Casey, causing them to block the stranger and quickly retreat from a screen where, now, someone can see them.
But much of We’re All Going To The World’s Fair plays out over videos shot on phones, captured from Casey’s computer, or streaming from their screen. The audience is immersed in Casey’s infinite feed, which ranges from ASMR videos to seemingly random workout footage. Casey gravitates towards content from other World’s Fair Challenge participants, some of which look like creepypasta-influenced mini-horror movies of their own, like when one challenger picks at a multicolored scab and pulls out a string of carnival tickets from their arm. Casey finds purpose in the challenge and enthusiastically participates in it by creating videos of their own. But there’s also a question as to whether or not the videos are a real documentation of Casey’s fall into the game or merely faked videos to creep out their fellow participants. That ambiguity is left for the audience to decide.
Like the film’s main character, Schoenbrun escaped into the internet back in the early aughts, finding communities in fanfiction sites and horror movie forums that kept them up late at night. “I was interested in making something about the internet that I knew growing up and that I still know now, which can feel quite lonely, quite boring,” Schoenbrun told Variety. “A space where you spend all day staring at a box that’s reflecting you back at yourself.” Yet they also took inspiration from the internet as a nebulous space where they could discover themselves. “It was all about the safety of anonymity, and the safety of creating a self or experimenting with various versions of self detangled from physical form and from an identity that I couldn’t control,” they explained. “And it was a space of dysphoria as a trans person who didn’t have any kind of language to understand myself in that way at age 13.”
That language expanded with I Saw The TV Glow, which went back beyond internet culture to TV fandoms, exploring how we remember the media that influenced us in our younger years. Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Jack Haven) find each other through their deep affection for the series The Pink Opaque, built from Buffy-esque ’90s teen programming. Years later, after some time apart, Maddy returns to Owen with an offer to come back with them into the world of the show they grew up loving. Owen rejects the invitation, choosing a so-called “normal” life instead, and lives to regret it.
Like We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, it’s unclear if the world on the screen is just confined to the glow of a television set or if it does actually exist as a safe haven for kids who don’t seem to fit in elsewhere. Owen and Maddy’s obsession with The Pink Opaque helps them find the kind of connection they’ve missed throughout their formative years, and in Owen’s case, it directly puts them at odds with their father, who dismisses the show as something for girls. In rejecting Maddy and refusing to venture into the world of the show, Owen rejects part of themself.
The screen that unites the pair is filled with its own lore, cherrypicked from old WB and Nickelodeon shows and combined into a fever dream. Schoenbrun’s personal reflections on TV from that era are part of the film’s immersive experience, opening up nostalgic memories of the audiences’ own youthful attachment to these shows. The movie also challenges our memories of what we loved when we were young, which, upon rewatch, haven’t aged well. Whether we move past our childhood obsessions or embrace them can shape our lives as grown-ups. The power Casey feels when connected to their internet element resembles Maddy’s comfort in the world of The Pink Opaque. On the other side of the screen, Owen’s decision to not follow Maddy leads them to a boring reality devoid of passion and community. The film may be about a different era of entertainment, but still one feverishly etched into the minds of those who lived through it.
Schoenbrun’s third movie goes even further into the fantastical screen realm, exploring escapism as a way to heal past wounds and sexual trauma. In Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, budding filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) lands a project to update an old transphobic horror film (think Sleepaway Camp) for a new sequel in order to bring a franchise back to life. But first, she wants to win over the film’s original final girl, Billy (Gillian Anderson), to join her movie, and the two embark on a passionate discussion about fear, pleasure, and watching.
Here, Schoenbrun goes all-in on the aesthetic of the unreal reality, pushing their production design into new stylistic territory. The world Kris and Billy find themselves in is eye-poppingly surreal and barely meant to pass as the real world. However, it is real to them, and we accept it as real, no matter how colorful the mountains look or how strange the windows of the gas station appear. The film is rich in the lore of its horror franchise-within-the-movie, retracing its history over the film’s opening credits through headlines and movie merch. The boundaries of who is on what side of the screen is deliriously blurred as the point of view shifts from Kris to the series’ villain, Little Death (Haven).
But the fiction of the film also brings Kris and Billy together emotionally and physically, as they recognize themselves in the ways the movie affects them. For Billy, Camp Miasma meant surviving a hostile set, pushed into a sex scene she wasn’t ready for; for Kris, who had shelved her desires to get ahead in the industry, finding someone who understands her obsessions allows her to feel accepted and desired for the first time.
In our interview with Schoenbrun, they referred to their first two films as “trans coming-of-age stories” while Camp Miasma was their “trans-coming story.” Not only has the screen given them space to explore and embrace themself, it’s also where they find pleasure and community. Screens bring us together, in our passion for the media that means the world to us. It can also reveal new parts of ourselves through the media we love and identify with, or it can open up new ways of how we see ourselves and the world around us. Schoenbrun uses computers, television sets, and the silver screen to reflect on their own experiences of growing and becoming—in the process, they’ve reached moviegoers who see pieces of themselves in these screens-within-screens. Our media may be filled with hokey TV monsters, schlocky horror plot twists, and done-to-death creepypasta, but it is in these broad elements that allow people like Schoenbrun—and now, their audience—space to find themselves.
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