A Hauntingly Real Depiction of the Cacophony of Youth in a Technological World.
There is little to say about Eighth Grade that is short of praise. Bo Burnham’s writing alone proves once again that the 27-year-old comedian is acutely aware of what life is like for young people currently. Elsie Fisher’s performance as Kayla Day, the film’s lead, rises far above the stunning mediocrity everyone seems to expect from child actors. Anna Meredith’s haunting synthpop provides a brilliant cover for the events of the film. The plot is simple to follow and packed with the subtle twists and turns that exist growing up and transitioning from grade school to high school.
And all the while there is something bigger at play. Coming-of-age movies have existed for ages in a myriad of forms. The Star Wars original trilogy could be considered a coming-of-age movie for Luke Skywalker, as he discovers the truth of his family and his own abilities with the Force. The Spider-Man movies have always been coming-of-age movies, whether Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, or Tom Holland in the leading role. Eighth Grade is not special because it’s a coming-of-age film; it’s special because it’s a coming-of-age film for today.
The eighth graders of today are not of my own generation. The fourteen-year-olds of today are wholly separate from the fourteen-year-old of my own life. Now, because people are obsessed with the notion of “generations,” technically I am Generation Z alongside today’s eighth graders, but culturally there’s far too large a divide. I was born in 2000; my older brother was born in 1997; we are in the same generation, alongside those born from 1995-2005. That ten-year period is a strange one. We were not born in a world drowning in tech, we were not born in a world in transition, the early or first years of our lives were post-9/11. I remember getting a Wii and being so impressed with the boxing in Wii Sports. My brother and I have played games of Madden ’17 with the same intensity we’d go outside with the neighbors and play with sticks. I remember switching back and forth between Drake and Josh and Spongebob Squarepants watching TV because the commercials always seemed to flow opposite to each other, and I wouldn’t have to sit through them. I didn’t get my first phone until eighth grade. I still play games from 2004. Some of the most popular music from the first ten years of my life was rock and pop punk.
That’s not how kids today are growing up. My younger brother was born in 2006; I was in kindergarten. He got his first phone before sixth grade. Video games have always been a method of entertainment for him. No one in my family watches much TV anymore, but when I do, I’ll watch Frasier, a show that was seven when I was born, or Parks and Recreation or The Office. My younger brother will watch YouTube videos. He hasn’t experienced commercials the way I have, most ads he can skip after five seconds. The music scene is no longer dominated by rock or punk. The outrage has petered out. Some would call that healing, but Bush was far easier to hate than Obama.
Media has changed dramatically. During the film, when Kayla is at the mall with some high schoolers, one of the young men asks her when she first got a Snapchat. Kayla responds casually, saying she first made an account in the fifth grade. Snapchat was first released in 2011; I was in the fifth grade (in a stunning incident of comedic irony). The earliest memory I have of snapchat was sometime in the middle of sixth grade. Technically, none of us should’ve been allowed to have a Snapchat as company policy (and COPPA—the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, passed in 1998) prohibit users under the age of 13. I was late to the curve; I didn’t get a Snapchat until my sophomore year of high school. My younger brother already has one, he is also not 13.
Eighth Grade is probably the only piece of art I’ve ever seen to accurately depict how people treat social media. I check all my social media (Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat) when I wake up in the morning, and before I go to bed, with glances here and there throughout the day. The apathetic scroll and double tap that Kayla navigates Instagram with is an artform most people I know have mastered. It doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s something new on my feed: I like it. Nobody cares and at the same time it’s poisoning us all. In a study done last year, Instagram was ranked the worst social media site for mental health, followed by Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.[1]
Everything that Eighth Grade does makes you feel like a ghost, floating just behind Kayla, wanting to reach out and help her. I watched Eighth Grade with a group of high school students, all in the same “pseudo-generation” as I. Throughout the film we laughed, cringed, and had mild panics over Kayla’s actions. Whenever her crush moved across the screen, we all whispered to her that “he isn’t worth it, move on! He’s built like a twig for crying out loud!” We internally screamed, mostly, when she searched for videos on how to perform fellatio on YouTube. We wanted to hug her to safety and protect her when a high schooler tried to manipulate her into sex. We cheered, although the conversation was cringeworthy, at the date she went on. Burnham strapped us into the cataclysmic rollercoaster that life often is for eighth graders and youth in general and sent us through a cacophony of emotion. I was wholly impressed with how much I responded to the movie.
Eighth Grade is not a movie about me, and that is okay. My generation occupies the weird space in between Millennials and Generation Z. The world was never “ours;” we grew up in the shadow of chaos born of our elders. Eighth Grade focuses on the youth of today, growing up in a world moving far faster than they can. While the amount of tech they were born into outpaces mine, their problems are the same:
Where do we go from here? And how?
-Gabe
[1] Royal Society for Public Health, Young Health Movement, 2017, #StatusOfMind: Social media and young people’s mental health and wellbeing, London: Royal Society for Public Health, 32, Accessed August 12, 2018, https://www.rsph.org.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/62be270a-a55f-4719-ad668c2ec7a74c2a.pdf.
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This post was submitted by Gabe from SLUH.
