As her second film, right before she heads back to Montreal for good (au revoir!) Dominique chose to screen Eighth Grade, the 2018 directorial debut from comedian Bo Burnham. Far from being a comedy – certainly it has its comedic elements – the film rather deals with anxiety and awkwardness from the point of view of our protagonist Kayla Day, in the week leading up to her eighth grade graduation.
And the world is drawn into your hands/And the world is etched upon your heart
Kayla is a member of the iGeneration, those young whippersnappers of today who have grown up with a computer on their lap and a cellphone in their hand from before the time they could even effectively use them. She’s a kid growing up with a single dad (it’s implied, but I don’t think explicitly clear that mom is dead), and she partakes heavily in social media and spends time vlogging, giving self-help/self-esteem tips to other kids despite really having really only the faintest grasp of how to deal with her own life. Gucci!
As her final week of eighth grade comes upon her, she is voted “Most Quiet” (seriously, schools now vote to ridicule their classmates?) at her school – but her chagrin is ameliorated a bit by the fact that, as a winner, she gets to spend a good portion of a school day in the company of her fellow electees, including her crush, “Best Eyes” Aiden, whose first on-screen appearance (and I believe some subsequent ones as well) is accompanied by a seriously loud score hit. Not to harp on it, but whoever did the sound mixing on this film really overdid some of the music levels.
I like the Wizard of Oz. I like the tin man.
From this launch, the film breaks into a series of mostly plot-free episodes exploring Kayla and the struggles of just being a teenager. She is first invited to a birthday pool party by one of the “cool kids” at school – reluctantly, and only because the girl’s mother insisted on the invite. Kayla intends to decline, but when she sees on the Evite that Aiden will be there, she screws up her courage to go. She starts off with a panic attack but finally gets into the pool, where she meets the even-more-socially-awkward Gabe. Her gift of a card game is poorly received and she retreats to a deserted room hoping to have her dad come pick her up, but while there Aiden comes in to retrieve a phone he is charging and admonishes her to rejoin the party. She does, and even jumps into the midst of the other kids to sing karaoke, despite not at all wanting to do it. A small victory clutched from the jaws of defeat for the day!
Maria Sharapova is not impressed
This done, the next day she has the courage to crawl over to Aiden’s desk during an active shooter drill (shoot, we only had earthquake drills!) and having heard he broke up with his most recent girlfriend because she wouldn’t send him nude pics from her phone, Kayla just out of the blue tries to imply that she might, perhaps, be the kind of girl who might take pictures of herself when she’s not wearing any clothes. It’s awkward as all hell, but Aiden isn’t one to miss the drift and he immediately asks her if she gives a good BJ. She falsely assures him that she can and then goes home to find YouTube lessons on the subject, going so far as to try practicing on a banana when her dad walks into the kitchen. He finds this bizarre, as she doesn’t like bananas, but despite her overreaction to getting caught, he seems to not be at all sure what he’s caught her doing. (If only parents knew…but since they don’t, it’s a good thing that kids similarly don’t know what they can get away with – I mean, my buddy and I got away with a ten-foot fireball in his living room and I’m pretty sure nobody ever figured that one out…)
If only Kayla had waited for Hot Dog On A Stick
The next day, the eighth graders are all shipped off to the local high school and given into the charge of an older to student to shadow them for the day and see what they can expect from the next level. Kayla is very nervous about meeting her host Olivia, but Olivia turns out to be super cool and helpful and tells her to call her anytime. That night, a trembling Kayla deliberates whether to call Olivia just to thank her for her hospitality – she finally does and Olivia is still cool about it, and even invites Kayla out to the mall to hang out for the evening, which Kayla accepts, though she does, to her endless embarrassment, discover her dad creeping around the food court trying to keep an eye on her. She moodily tells him off, though it turns out his spidey sense wasn’t 100% off, considering that one of the boys offers to drive Kayla home but then kinda tries to see if he can take advantage of her in the backseat. It’s a bit tense for all of us, but Kayla finds her way out of it – though the whole incident pretty clearly leaves a psychological bruise.
Some teens just want to watch the world burn
She comes home and goes through a time-capsule shoebox her middle school had her put together when she started sixth grade and which was returned to her earlier in the week, which she has addressed to “The Coolest Girl In The World”. Disgusted perhaps some by the events of the past week and some by the video message she left herself on a Spongebob Squarepants thumb drive, she decides to burn the entire contents of the shoebox, for which she asks her dad’s help. (I’m pretty sure if we had asked any parents for help on the living room fireball, we’d have been pretty heavily rebuffed, so good for Kayla’s dad!) What follows is a treacly scene where Kayla and her dad finally connect for the first time in the film, she worried that her adolescent awkwardness and shyness makes him sad while he, as best he can, convinces her that she’s the best thing that has ever happened to him. It is the ultimate distillation of mushy father-daughter stuff – not to say it doesn’t work in the film, just that it’s pretty concentrated.
It seems to be a step in the right direction, and as the week ends, we see Kayla making a new shoebox time capsule to be opened when she graduates high school, and going on an awkward but seemingly OK date-type-thing with Gabe. Yeah, the nerdy snorkel kid from the swimming pool. Hey, gotta start somewhere! The End.
It’s a well-made film (the soundtrack issues aside) and for a young actress who has to shoulder the entire film – I mean the whole damn thing – Elsie Fisher does a more than admirable job. There’s not a lot of narrative to be had, though – in a lot of ways Eighth Grade is the all-too-innocent prequel to Dazed and Confused, but it does give you chance to reflect on the troubles that teens have.
Teenagers, we must believe, have had existential crises since society was advanced enough that they weren’t living meal-to-meal and instead had time to brood on their own thoughts. This generation, however, is the first to hold the world in its hands. At the tap of a screen there are a million forms of entertainment, a million things to learn, a million kindred spirits on social media, in chat rooms, leaving comments and likes and splashing emojis through one’s feed. In contrast, I had at best 10 channels of television, a few dozen books I had already read and an encyclopedia that got cracked open to a random page on a daily basis, a baseball glove and a soccer ball, and if we were lucky somebody managed to steal a roll of happy-face stickers out of the teacher’s desk that we could plaster up and down the schoolyard. Yet for all the modern amenities, there’s no real evidence that teen angst is going anywhere or getting any better – it seems that these days one can chat with ten people from around the world and feel just as isolated, if not more, than a kid a few generations ago standing around in the side yard seeing how far he could hit rocks with a dried-up yucca stick. Odd, that. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 