Hi! You’re reading an entry in the Jscars 2022, a series on my favorite movies of the year 2022. Read the previous entries here:
All Quiet on the Western Front
“I swear, someday soon, I am just gonna disappear, and you won’t have any idea what happened to me.”
If there’s one thing Generation X loves to talk about, it’s how everyone forgets about them. If there’s two things Generation X loves to talk about, it’s how everyone forgets them and the fact that many of them grew up as “latchkey kids.” Spending their days as children with little to no adult supervision, simply leaving home at the start of the day and exploring the world with other kids just like them until it was time to come home for dinner. I’ve heard an awful lot about how much more freedom kids had back then. That might have more to do with how my dad is in specific rather than the whole generation, but it still does seem like a fairly common talking point. And while it’s true that not many people currently my age had that experience growing up, we had another one. Unsupervised internet access. Did I spend most of my time roaming the streets with a gang of friends? Not quite. But I did watch a LiveLeak video of a man committing suicide by burning down his apartment with him in it when I was about 13. The times change.
When teenager Casey discovers the “World’s Fair Challenge” online, she decides to throw herself fully into the strange digital phenomenon. After smearing some of her blood on her computer screen and watching a short video of strobe lights, she decides to document any “changes” she undergoes in the coming weeks. What follows is a series of strange moments, starting simply with just some sleep walking and intensifying until it seems based on her videos that Casey’s mental health has deteriorated significantly. But how much of this is real? Throughout the entire experience I was wondering whether this challenge was actually having a supernatural effect or if something else entirely is going on, and at times it seems Casey doesn’t know the answer either. She does have one figure, an older man going only by “JLB” to help guide her through it all, but that relationship itself raises questions. Why exactly is this man in his 30s at the youngest spending all this time communicating with a teenage girl? I thought about my own experiences here, such as when in middle school I found myself talking often with a group of people who were mostly college age through video games. I tried talking to them about feeling depressed a few times. It made me reflect on what I was getting out of that relationship, as well as what they were getting out of it.
Despite Casey mentioning her parents and family a few times in her videos, they’re not seen at all throughout the whole movie. The closest thing is one offscreen line of dialogue from her father. There are also very few specifics given about her life outside of the World’s Fair videos she’s making and her talks with JLB. It raises the issue of regardless of how much I can relate to Casey, whether or not I truly know who she is. Friendships made online are certainly just as real as any friendships made in person, but when there’s so much distance between you or the friendship hinges primarily on one specific interest or topic, it can be tough to feel like you have the whole picture of the person you’re talking to through a screen. Questions linger unanswered, likely to always stay that way. Whatever happened to my Steam friends who told me they’d play some more games tomorrow and haven’t been online since 2015? What’s going on in their lives now? Like I said at the beginning, I come from the generation of digital latchkey kids. And whether or not all of the situations I found myself in at a young age thanks to that fact were healthy for me or not, it points back to one of the central topics the movie explores, especially in its ending.
How much do any of us really know each other?