Eighth Grade

I was deeply affected by Eighth Grade when I first saw it. That and Lady Bird were among the very few coming-of-age stories in the movies that fully spoke to me and the issues I was having at that age. I was in the same place as Kayla in middle school, a secretive, introverted kid who had trouble making friends. Never did I think a teen dramedy could be made about that kind of character, but it happened. We finally have a teen comedy that de-romanticizes and subverts the teen movie tropes to not show what grown-up filmmakers think teens should be like, but what they are actually like and what goes on in their reality. We have a teen movie were the main character stammers and says "like" a lot, constantly uses social media, but never mocked or exploited for that for comedy. That was one of the best things I watched during lockdown (in fact, I saw it the same day as Sorry to Bother You and Moonlight, one hell of a triple feature; the only thing I'm grateful for about the pandemic) making the experience hit even harder when I was having similar mental health issues to Kayla. Seeing it now that I'm past middle and high school, Eighth Grade hits even harder, in a way my older review couldn't do justice to. This has to be one of the more realistic films to focus on Gen Z specifically, and their experiences with a social media-dominated climate, but not for condescension or mockery of our generation.(cough… Bodies Bodies Bodies). The closeups of the kids sniffing markers, picking their braces and masturbating in class are surefire signs that this isn’t gonna be the average coming-of-age movie. This isn’t afraid to show the more awkward and uncomfortable side of school life; and to make things more awkward, this is middle school. They are desensitized to real-world issues due to the prevalence of the internet, so they have a much heavier burden to carry than the average teen movie characters. We may not want to see them having to deal with creepy boys picking girls up and telling them to take off their shirts in a movie (only to get victim-blamed for it: seriously, fuck Aiden), but we see it, it's extremely uncomfortable, and it happens to middle schoolers. For god's sake, these kids have to go through school shooting drills (something Aiden even jokes about: again, fuck that creep), which is pretty sad to even exist. We’re also allowed to empathize with Kayla, a main character so indifferent towards her family and home life that she’d rather be plugged in and on Instagram than eating dinner with her dad. I guess it’s me being a young person watching it, but I inherently feel what she feels, even if she’s being rude to her dad. Like it or not, preteens and teens are like that. They don’t have to be “likable” to be fascinating characters. Kayla just feels like a real, nuanced, flawed human being rather than the teen movie archetype. When she stammers and stares blankly and doomscrolls, she's not portrayed as a clueless ungrateful brat, but someone struggling with issues she can't quite put her finger on. She can't fit into the stereotypical teen movie "jocks, nerds, and popular girls" cliques, a much more memorable and fascinating character for it. Putting herself out there seems easy, since Kayla has a YouTube channel where she gives life advice, but we see her struggle even in her vlog videos, starting to question whether she's the right one to give this advice to a public audience. Not to mention that she needs validation from her classmates and her similarly-awkward-but-supportive father, since deep down she lacks the self-esteem to think she is a fully-conformed teen in a world of conformity. Any other movie would just tell us Kayla is getting anxious when she sees everybody else at the pool party, but here we see her staring at the other kids having a better time than her, in a massive crowd; it’s horror-movie tense. The character of Kayla is helped so much by Elsie Fisher's incredible performance. Right from that opening long take, as we see Kayla’s first vlog, she is an absolute natural. I don’t get the impression that she’s playing a Hollywood version of a middle schooler at all, since she acts exactly as awkward middle schoolers like me did. Bo Burnham himself said that Elsie Fisher stuck out because she seemed like a shy middle schooler trying to be confident, unlike other auditioning actors who simply acted like they were shy while being confident, which rings true in her performance. I can't imagine someone else playing Kayla, cementing this as one of the best child performances I've seen. It's too bad she was shut out of the 2018 Oscars race (the same year that Toni Collette got snubbed for Hereditary...) since she is brilliant here. When we see Kayla admit to her father that she feels like giving up, to the point of burning her time capsule, it is as powerful as it should be, and I couldn't help but tear up a little at it; such a beautiful, sincere moment that recalls the best John Hughes moments. Kayla is a character that I would really like to see Bo Burnham and Elsie Fisher revive for multiple other films, just like Truffaut did for Antoine Doinel from The 400 Blows, perhaps the all-time greatest coming-of-age movie. Bo Burnham makes his first and only narrative feature with Eighth Grade, knocking it out of the park. The visuals are bold and colorful (mixing the candy-colored social media aesthetic with a colorful classroom bulletin board), but with a tinge of gritty, documentary-like naturalism; a powerful aesthetic shared with Gerwig's Lady Bird. Handheld is often utilized, but never distractingly, and to put us in Kayla's anxious, near-panicked headspace. He is also willing to hold on a conversation for a while without cutting, letting each performance shine. Bo Burnham has not made a narrative feature since (unless you count Inside, although I have no idea how one would categorize it), but needs to make another ASAP. He has such a metamodern (thanks, Thomas Flight!) understanding of teen life, willing to subvert teen movie tropes, but maintain a touching emotional sincerity while thoughtfully examining multimedia. A feature that stuck out more on this watch was Anna Meredith's instantly memorable synth-heavy score. The synth sounds are colorful and bouncy but with a veneer of coldness that perfectly encapsulates the coldness inherent in social media; something that Reznor and Ross' ingenious Social Network soundtrack achieved just as well. Something that has always frustrated me, which is not related to the movie itself but the release of it, is the MPAA's decision to give Eighth Grade an R rating, just for a few F-bombs and "inappropriate" scenes. This is a great film for younger people to see, so to rate it an R cut that younger audiences out. Thankfully, Bo Burnham helped counter this by allowing younger audiences into some screenings; but this rating choice goes to show how arbitrary and fatally-flawed the MPAA rating system is, and has been for several decades. In fact, eighth graders should see this film because that is the audience the film will speak the most to. And if those more uncomfortable, hard-PG-13/borderline R-rated moments weren't there, the movie would not be nearly as impactful or relatable. I could go on for hours about Eighth Grade, one of the best coming-of-age stories of the century, perhaps of all time. It's a shame that only recently a mainstream American-made coming-of-age story could capture the middle and high-school experience in this realistic of a manner. But thanks to A24 trusting up-and-coming filmmakers with full creative control, this relatable realism is becoming much more common in the genre and entering the mainstream, and cinema is all the better for it.