“I hate people like that that know everything; they just always are like: ‘Well, no, this is how it is. Who are you to tell me how it is?’”
So I guess two David Cronenberg movies came out this year.
People habitually mislead themselves with documented “acts” that insight change so that they don’t have to put in the effort to actually change, or at least change with perceptive reason. The internet manufactures so many faulty, theatrical solutions made for lazy finger-tip consumption that quickly fill undefined voids temporarily. It’s safe to say that we, more than ever before, subconsciously want the media to be in charge of controlling our body and mind. We want to give up that responsibility to excess information no matter their sources — trend-approval is sometimes helpful nonetheless. We want contortion from something that is ironically unphysical.
Most people compulsively online are living in a dream right now, where everything in you conveniently feels like it’s drastically changing, when really, nothing is until your eventual recognition of this dependency that’s, however, always just momentary till the next loop. The contemplative reality here is, as time and media populate, more and more people become okay with dreaming forever. They are looking predominantly there for a ticket to the world, when it’s just the world’s fair: new realities that we interpret as accurate projections of what’s going on or about to go on in the old.
Problem is, so many of the ones we indulge in at some point are left incomplete to our knowledge. We become lost in their systems as just another string of alphanumerics that could vanish without question or return without even seeming as if we’d left to most. There is an underlying privilege or curse to these realities that in a way, condition us to death and rebirth at a far faster rate than just real life’s. Data on us becomes more permanent the more we self-produce our image, but not often are they met with recordings of us as regular people as much as they are celebrity concepts stemmed from the imagination, or at least that’s what it seems like considering this virtual barrier is really another facade that stretches our ability to determine the individual than from face-to-face — screen-to-screen is simply an extra layer(s) away from it given that it constitutes further complexion, and, if we’re assuming, further confusion of the self, not to mention some quite literal distance. There is so much more fabricated individualism when residing online than outside, like you in a dream.
It’s funny though because even our lead character mentions how self-aware she is about these “acts”, but the fact of the matter is it’s clearly not enough to stop her from feeding it, and therefore, giving into its sovereignty over her actions. Video publication and self-contrived appearances are a one-of-a-kind convenient outlet to deal with permanent isolation, to diagnose ourselves from having to wake up from its draw. Like any new form of adapted society though, we grow to hate its mechanics in intervals, and every so often, seek to leave it but only for a little while since its hold has become much too alluring to ever leave it for good.
So kinda like a modern update of Benny’s Video (1992). There aren’t a ton of scares in this, but the few that it does feature are pretty clever. And Anna Cobb is creepy ASF.
Theo Anthony cameo was hard.
Verdict: B-
“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” is now available to stream on HBO Max.
Burning the Celluloid 
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