Into the Screen

This past weekend I finally watched Red Rooms (2023) and We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021), two movies about staring into the networked abyss. Spoilers to follow!

As Ice Cube's latest reveals, it's hard to make a movie about the internet. Filmed during the peak of the pandemic and released only this year after a stint in development hell, director Rich Lee's War of the Worlds achieved instant infamy for debuting at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Tracing the film's tortuous path for The Guardian, Jesse Hassenger speculates that the film had all the makings of a timely experiment in Zoom-ifying a genre that producer Tim Bekmambetov had successfully developed and deployed over the last decade.

These "screenlife" films, like 2014's Unfriended or 2018's Searching, take a found-footage approach to the digital age, dramatizing the mundane interfaces and actions of our computational lives to effectively underscore the horror or tension of their premises. DMs are pinged, Googles are searched, and logins are entered. And while, apparently for a plethora of reasons, it seems Ice Cube's shot was a misfire, it's undeniable that to film almost any kind of contemporary story—at least in this part of the world—requires at least some attention to what characters are doing digitally. Which is to say, some kind of representation of what goes into and comes out of the screen.

What goes into and comes out of the screen animates two recent films (each of which I'm admittedly late to) by director Pascal Plante and director Jane Schoenbrun: Red Rooms (or, Les chambres rouges) and We're All Going to the World's Fair, respectively. At their centers are women—young in one case, adolescent in the other—whose existences, their sensemakings and their selfhoods, end up subsumed not just by strangers on the other side of a network protocol, but by the Internet itself.

Schoenbrun's film, a stylistic and thematic precursor of sorts to their breakthrough I Saw the TV Glow (2024), begins with teenage Casey (Anna Cobb). She is sheltered in her attic bedroom from a father whose figure is never seen, but whose presence is felt firstly as his rage echoes up the stairs to chastise her for staying up past 3am and secondly as Casey later sneaks around his expansive workshop shed to inspect his poorly hidden assault rifle. In the opening scene, swiping her pin-punctured fingertip across her computer screen, Casey traces a blood sigil and repeats the magic words, "I want to go to the World's Fair," before watching a strobing video the Internet promises will bring strange and terrifying changes to her mind and body. It's a horror game, you see, only for serious players.

Documenting her "changes," which broadly resemble bouts of dissociation and dsymorphia, Casey is contacted by JLB (Michael J. Rogers), another member of the what we might call the World's Fair "community." He makes creepy videos about the creepy videos she posts and even converses with her about his theories surrounding the game. He's also like, 30 years her senior. The vibes are rotten, but we're never totally given access to Casey's interior read on the situation. Or rather, we're only given access to its mediated exploration.

Practically every scene Casey occupies is prefigured either as the final product of one of her video shoots, or otherwise as a rehearsal or setup for one. When, under the "influence" of the World's Fair, she cakes her face in fluorescent paint and tears her childhood stuffed animal apart, departing and then returning to the scene of fluffy carnage with a shriek of realization and regret, it's not obvious whether she's in on the game and acting for the views, whether she's convinced herself the World's Fair is real, whether the World's Fair actually is "real," or whether Casey's transformation a product of underlying adolescent angst.

Perhaps the most disturbing scene arrives in one of Casey's videos near the midpoint of the film. Casey's titles warn us that the World's Fair is causing her to lose control of her body as she films herself dancing and singing like any other teenage girl. Then, she suddenly breaks down screaming. And returns to dancing as if nothing happened. Which part is supposed to be the possession? The singing and dancing like a normal teenager, acting entirely unlike the Casey we've seen so far, who briefly registers these abnormal actions with horror? Or the screaming demon?

I won't give much more away other than to say that, while I'm not sure the film hangs together completely, I found it a fascinating portrait of selfhood splintered in the Internet's endless hall of mirrors.

Shimmering with a similar kind of creative confidence as World's Fair, but here sharpened to a knife's edge, Plante's Red Rooms sees successful fashion model, online poker player, and dark web junky Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) sleeping on the street to be the first person in line to enter the Montreal court where the trial of the decade unfolds. Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) sits inside a glass box inside a sterile conference-room looking courtroom, accused of abducting, assaulting, dismembering, and murdering three teenage girls, videotaping the entire process for distribution on eponymous "red room" sites accessible via anonymous networks and purchasable through cryptocurrency.

It's dark stuff. Made even darker by what is slowly revealed to be Kelly-Anne's desperate, even existential interest in the case, the families affected, the victims, the killer and, yes, the videos themselves. Gariépy magisterially portrays a woman at once displaced from and continually indulging in the most antisocial parts of herself. As Kelly-Anne methodically saves every photo from her latest shoot to her personal hard drive, we wonder, is this woman obsessed with her self-image? Yet, as she later loads one of Chevalier's snuff films onto the same screen, we realize, no—she's obsessed with image. All kinds. All extremes.

I'm even less inclined to reveal exactly what goes on in this film, given the Hitchcockian ratchet wrench Plante employs throughout.

But suffice it to say that Kelly-Anne's spiral is a reflection of an all too common pattern. Ask anyone who grew up on the Internet—really grew up on the Internet—and you're bound to hear stories like "that time I accidentally watched a beheading" or "that time I realized I'd been talking to a 45 year old man about my personal life." Kelly-Anne and Casey represent an intriguing kind of contemporary protagonist—not so different from the hardboiled detective who doesn't leave well enough alone—who can't stop poking around. They're perfect networked subjects, if not especially happy humans.

Perhaps what networked computing unlocks, in the psyches of Juliette Gariépy's Kelly-Anne and Anna Cobb's Casey, is a kind of radical capacity: an understanding that here, online, will can and does translate into power, or at least into effect. It's a radical kind of virtuality—which, etymology reminds us, emerges from Latin vir and virtus, meaning "man" and "strength," respectively, before developing into something that rather means, "power," or indeed, "effect."

Casey manages to out creep the creep, who has to step "out of the game" to ask her if the violent fantasies she describes in her videos are real. Kelly-Anne achieves a similar result by forcing the killer—and I won't say how—to finally look in her direction. When Casey muses, "I know how it's going to end now. I'm going inside the video, through the computer, into the screen," she does so already having been there. Kelly-Anne, for her part, arrives at the exact same place.

And who's there waiting for them? Is there a definitive kinship between Michael J. Rogers' JLB and Maxwell McCabe-Lokos' Ludovic Chevalier? Not exactly. But watching these movies back to back, it's hard to ignore that the role of the antagonist (such as it is) in both films is filled by a nearly bald, spindly, mild-mannered, somewhat disheveled white man, in his mid- to late-40s, with sunken eyes, and a particular (albeit not identical) interest in young girls, the Internet, and the terrible intersections thereof.

Is this part of what these films posit? That this—that he—is there on the other side? Always? If the darkness inside the screen possessed a form, would it take this one? Maybe we should be so lucky to have Kelly-Anne and Casey in there, too. Or should we hope that they can still get out?

POF