In my and probably many others’ opinion, it’s the most heart-wrenching scene of the film: thirteen-year-old Kayla Day sits with her father who has helped her light the fire which will burn a memory box her sixth-grade self made. On the front is unabashedly strewn: To the coolest girl in the world! In it are once-precious relics, alongside a Spongebob USB which holds a video that Kayla made, gleefully asking if her future self had a boyfriend, friends, was she excited for high school? When her father asks her, between flickering flames, what is in the box, she replies – ‘just my hopes and dreams.’
After a couple of years in middle school of honing her online persona – an enthusiastic YouTuber who, despite getting no views, persists with positive videos that offer advice on How To Be Yourself and Growing Up – Kayla’s finally disheartened. She’s racked with the anxiety that arises from the disparity between how she truly is an how she’s perceived, we watch her try – in vain – to make friends with the popular girls, and after a promising mall-date with a new, older friend and her crowd she’s crushed and alienated. Kayla, faced with the overwhelming future of high school, is struggling to find any value in herself. She can’t even practice blowjobs on a banana (as an in with her ultimate crush Aiden) because her innocuous and well-meaning Dad grills her – I swear you got mad at me when I bought bananas because you hated them? In fact, I think I made a note on my phone to remind myself. The banana is promptly thrown at Dad, clueless.
And so we watch the small Day family as they sit, melancholy, next to the fire that burns her previously proud optimism and joy to ashes. It’s grim enough already after watching how harmless and sweet an eighth-grader Kayla is, how hard she tries to keep up with life online. But then, she stumbles through her articulation of what’s really bugging her. She asks her Dad, “Do I make you sad?” My heart broke precisely at the moment, I think, you see Josh Hamilton’s. Throughout the film, he’s constantly telling her how great and amazing and positive he thinks she is and how proud he is of her – but it’s tragically faded into the background noise beyond Kayla’s headphones. I started crying without warning as her Dad tries to explain how she fills him with pride everyday, and the day-to-day sadness she might see in him has nothing to do with her because he could never be sad about Kayla. He tells of how he’d thought he’d need to teach her kindness, empathy, sharing, how to make friends. But she did it all by herself because it was already in her, even after her mother walking out on the two of them when Kayla was still a baby. She goes over to hug him – pivotal when she’s so anti-affection and bonding – and I turned to Dan, blubbering, and said “that’s just a really good Dad!!!!!” pathetic!!!! But it really got me.
All things considered, then, especially the fact that Bo Burnham is a 29 year-old man who, when Kayla/Elsie Fisher was born had already established himself as a performer in the early days of YouTube, Eighth Grade does an exceptional job of documenting the “i-Gen” condition. Burnham has studied and listened to the teens who largely people his audience and makes a film which, whilst being an empathetic ode to them, transcends generational boundaries and appeals to the scared, anxious outsider in any of us. The script is purposefully packed with fillers, “um […] like […]”, but Fisher’s delivery is astoundingly natural – it’s part of her own diction – and the vlogs could be taken straight off a young girl’s channel. Rather than rudely parodying and alienating the habits of Gen-Zers, Burnham documents their innocent authenticity. Struggles with communication, he suggests, come from a genuine place of anxiety and self-consciousness. When everything is archived forever online, a 2019 teen lives in constant fear that the wrong word or choice will be memed or made into a 15-tweet thread and scattered across the world as a cementation of their personality – real or false – forever. Teenagers like Kayla do not lack intelligence, ‘woke-ness’, or self-awareness in the least; it could be said that teenagers are hyper-intelligent, hyper-woke and hyper-aware in the age of information. Portraying them as vapid zombies only serves to alienate them further and push them away from accessing anything meaningful, Burnham implies. The markers of adolescence that will transcend most generational differences – acne, hormones and angst – remain, of course. But it’s how they’re framed on a rosy, always-‘on’ phone screen that the director is interested in.
The ‘truth-or-dare’ scene was obviously horrendous to watch. Some piece of shit seventeen-year-old exploiting a vulnerable thirteen-year-old, desperate to appear cool and make friends, in the back of his car under the guise of kindness. After her protestations, he says something like: no, it’s fine, it’s just now your first time is going to be with some jackass that doesn’t respect you and you’ll get passed around and you’ll feel shitty afterwards. Is that what you want? What’s Kayla supposed to say? She’s hurt and confused in the back of this stranger’s car, barely able to work herself out, let alone the opposite sex. But the scene brought to mind something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently in the wake of the Me Too movement. Sex education in high school is complete bullshit. There’s nothing of the nuances of sex and sexual relationships, the vital importance of consent, queerness – I could go on. For us 12-13 year olds, ‘Sex Education’ was a hasty one-hour science lesson every lazy Friday afternoon for about three weeks. An evidently uncomfortable and frustrated teacher dragged her way through the basics of vanilla, hetero- sex. It was purely clinical and procreant: sperm, egg, foetus, embryo, baby. Missionary, man, woman. It’s clear Burnham is raising the same frustrations as myself in this scene: when the exchange of information has changed so rapidly in recent years (teens being able to see and access practically anything they want to online), why aren’t they being given the important information surrounding sex that will shape them as they mature? Kayla is clearly distressed as she struggles to know how to react to the boy. She seems to wonder, is this what I’m supposed to do? NO!!! We all scream, older and more informed. Like so many women, let alone girls, Kayla feels she has to apologise because she doesn’t know the gravity of what he’s doing to her – the inherent wrongness of it. If this information was administered in these early years, perhaps she’d feel more confident in telling the boy abusing his position of power to fuck off. And, perhaps, the boy wouldn’t be so abusive in the first place.
After the film, Dan and I reflected on our younger sisters. Dan said he was happy that his sister seemed not so obsessed with her online presence and that she had a good, solid, genuine group of friends that have stuck by her. She’s sixteen, so just three years older than my own sister who just finished ‘eighth grade’ or, year eight, in the summer. But I feel like in today’s currency the gulf in a three-year age difference is larger than before. I see pictures of girls my sister’s age – thirteen – and it’s mind boggling. They’ve watched so many beauty influencers and YouTubers that they’ve perfected their cat-eye and dress like I tried to when I was seventeen. The other week my sister bought a long satin skirt, something I’d wear. When I was her age I couldn’t imagine wearing the same thing as a 22 year-old – I lived in shapeless vest tops, zip-up hoodies and skinny jeans. I’m worried that she feels pressured, like Fisher’s Kayla, to imitate the girls who get the most likes and have the longest hair and have the most ‘beat’ makeup. She can’t really do her own makeup still; this little glimmer of innocence is something I’m grateful for. A James Charles X Morphe palette might sit on her dressing table but she’s no idea what to do other than splash some nude shades on her lids. I feel completely alien, though, from her online experience. Ten years ago Facebook was en-vogue, then Twitter. Now those my sister’s age use neither, preferring to communicate from the distinctly visual and surface mediums of Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. Is much said? Is there much depth? Can you really get to know someone’s true self online, or, like Bo Burnham portrays, are the personalities of today’s teens being lost and misunderstood behind a screenshot? If my sister would allow me as her friend on any of these apps I’d be able to give my two-cents on how she’s doing but I’m still, happily, an annoying older sister ready to rip the piss at any moment. She’s forgivably angsty and snappy at the minute but seems, otherwise, okay. School is still the worst and Dad is still sooooo embarrassing. The classics endure, which is good to see.
Eighth Grade is an incredible feat of 2019 realism. It made me truly feel something: melancholy, concern, happiness, recognition. Dan watched interviews with Elsie Fisher afterwards ‘just to see Kayla happy and doing okay’. So you could say it affected us for a while afterwards!! I’d love to see more nuanced and careful representations of the epoch we’re living in now, addressing the biggest issues and concerns that young adults face in their bourgeoning worlds. Quickly, on the cinematic side of things: the colour palette was great, immersive, the score was humorous, effective, emotive and completely perfect, and the power of a good long-shot wasn’t forgotten in this film. Bravo Bo Burnham!!!
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