A few weeks ago, I checked out a movie from the local library called Eighth Grade, a film directed by the American comedian and actor Bo Burnham. I love coming-of-age movies, and this film is a coming-of-age movie. I also love movies distributed by this film distribution company called A24. The movie is about this young girl named Kayla (Elsie Fisher) who is an introvert and unpopular at school. She posts videos on her vlog on YouTube but doesn’t get many followers or likes. And the principal announces at their assembly that Kayla was voted “Most Quiet.” Not “Best Class Clown” or “Most Popular.” “Most Quiet.” Of course, because Kayla is at an age where everyone is so concerned about fitting in and being cool, she dreads this announcement and sinks into her chair at the assembly. She spends a lot of time on her smartphone, which interrupts her sleep, and because she is on her phone a lot, her dad is concerned about her. Kayla develops a crush on this boy in her grade named Aiden, but Aiden doesn’t notice her and the only time that he pays attention to her is when she lies about being good at blowjobs. The class is doing an active-shooter drill (which is a commentary in and of itself about the issue of mass shootings in American schools) and all the students are hiding under their desk and scrolling on their smartphones. Kayla is trying to be more sociable and confident, so she goes over to Aiden, who is under his desk scrolling on his phone, and tries to engage him in conversation, but he doesn’t pay attention to her and only gives her one syllable responses while continuing to scroll on his phone. It’s not until she makes up a lie about herself that he actually pays attention to her. She lies that she knows how to give blowjobs and he finally looks up from his smartphone at her and asks her about how experienced she is with blowjobs. Kayla goes home and starts looking on YouTube for videos about how to give blowjobs and is about to practice on a banana, but her dad thankfully comes into the kitchen and thinks she is eating the banana and asks, “What are you doing? I thought you hated bananas.” Kayla’s plan to impress Aiden with her blow-job expertise is foiled, and so is her plan to get Aiden to ask her out and pay attention to her. I’m really glad that she and Aiden didn’t go out, though, because he only cared about himself and treated Kayla like a nobody during the entire movie.
To be honest, I didn’t get my first smartphone until I was in my last year of college, so I don’t know what it’s like for Generation Z because a lot of them grew up with smartphones at such a young age. Of course, I saw people using smartphones in high school, so it wasn’t like they didn’t exist for Millennials, but at the time I was still using a basic flip phone, and I was perfectly okay with that. I only got my smartphone because I was traveling out of the country for a college program and needed to have a way to reach my parents, but I didn’t even get to use it during my time abroad because the internet service wasn’t great and we were in a rural part of the country we were visiting. That was fine for me, though, because I got to talk with people and hang out with people, and I don’t know if I would have been as engaged in these conversations if I was on my smartphone all of the time. The use of social media and smartphones and their impacts on the developing brain is a huge theme in Eighth Grade because just about every scene features someone in the eighth grade using their smartphones. When Kayla tries to go up and talk to these two popular girls, they are so focused on their smartphones that they don’t pay attention to her. It took a lot of effort for Kayla to go up and even say “Hi” to these girls, especially because she is an introvert, but they ignore her. This leads Kayla to go back into her shell and retreat into her phone and social media. There is a memorable scene where Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” is playing, and Kayla is in her bedroom scrolling through post after post on Instagram instead of going to sleep. Just seeing the plethora of posts that Kayla was scrolling through was enough to give me anxiety, and it’s probably why I don’t use Instagram that much anymore. I got Instagram briefly a few years ago, but I found it wasn’t the best form of communication for me, so I deleted it. Even when I got an account again, I would get on it to check stuff and then would log out after one second because I realized that I was going to be spending hours on this platform just consuming videos, and I already have a really bad YouTube addiction from middle school, so I realized that I could not get on any more social media platforms. When Kayla goes on Instagram, she starts comparing herself to her peers, who take all these selfies and act like they are so cool, and she starts to feel really bad about herself. When her dad comes into her room to wish her goodnight, she freaks out and throws her phone across the room so that he doesn’t see what she is doing, and even after she finds out that her phone screen got cracked from the impact of throwing it, she still spends her bedtime scrolling through Instagram even though the screen is cracked. I remember when I was going down the stairs and I was texting on my smartphone to let my parents know I was heading to the airport, and because I was not paying attention, I tripped and fell, and not only did I fall on my bum and hurt my leg (cue the “My Leg!” sound effect from SpongeBob SquarePants) but my phone broke. I’m not even talking about just the screen cracking. Like, the screen went black and it died from the impact of the fall. If I had another way to contact my parents, or at that moment had the common sense to just ask if I could use someone’s phone to call my parents, I would have been fine, but dropping my phone at that moment triggered a huge panic attack in me and I remember crying like a baby on the airplane. All of my photos from senior year. My contacts. The YouTube app that I spent senior year watching videos on while taking a dump in the college dorm bathroom. All. Gone. I remember the flight attendant was so sweet, though. He gave me a whole bunch of tissues when he saw me crying on the plane.
I really love how Kayla transforms to become someone who likes herself just as she is. When she is posting videos on her YouTube channel, she posts a video about how to put yourself out there, and we see her going to the party of a classmate named Kennedy. Kennedy is a popular girl who barely notices Kayla, but Kennedy’s mom insists that Kayla comes to Kennedy’s pool party. When Kayla goes to the party, she nearly has a panic attack in the restroom because she doesn’t know anyone and doesn’t have any friends in her class. The entire scene where they show the kids at the pool party brought me right back to sixth grade, when I was a shy bookish kid who didn’t know how to navigate the social landscape of middle school. I also experienced this kind of stressful experience way before that, in elementary school, which is why I had to close my eyes when that kid in the pool party scene of the movie flips his eyelids. As a kid, I really hated it when the boys would flip their eyelids (of course, it wasn’t just boys who did it. Some girls did it, too, but for the most part it was boys when I was in school) and they knew that I would freak out and cry while they did it, so they always would do it. It just looked so gross when they did it, and I know it’s like we all had our own gross little stuff that we did as kids (mine was picking my nose in class, much to the disgust of the other girls and the amusement of the boys, who would ask, “Hey, Gabriella, are you digging for gold?” when I would pick my nose) but I hated it when boys would flip their eyelids. That and the kids shoving the Goosebumps series in my face and yelling in my face, “See! There’s no pictures! Relax, it’s a stupid book!”
While watching the movie, I thought about this documentary I saw a while ago called The Social Dilemma, which is about the addictive nature of social media and smartphones and how they have impacted teens’ mental health. There is a scene where a young man in the movie (he is a fictional character named Ben) gets a notification that his girlfriend broke up with him, and the next scene shows him lying in bed, feeling depressed, scrolling on his phone through his social media feed. His family tried to curb his smartphone use by locking up the phone in a safe so that he could not access it, but after not being on the phone for a few days, he gets that urge to check it, and he is back to square one. In middle school, the only social media that I used was YouTube. I remember being pretty addicted to it, and to my laptop computer in general. Before getting a laptop computer, I read a lot of books. But then after I started spending my free time after school on YouTube, I read less books and my mental health got pretty bad. I already struggled with low self-esteem and making friends, and being on the Internet became a form of escapism. I am pretty sure it had a negative impact on my sleep, too.
Kayla’s struggle in Eighth Grade reminded me of this podcast episode I listened to. The New York Times interviewed a young woman from New York City who started a club where kids didn’t use their smartphones. She herself talks about how she was on Instagram and social media all of the time, and she would compare how many likes and followers she had to her peers and would feel bad about not having enough engagement on her posts. Finally, she got to a point where it was affecting her sleep and her mental well-being, and she decided that she was better off replacing her smartphone with a flip phone. She said that once she gave up her smartphone, her sleep improved and she found new hobbies. Not only that, but she realized that the kids at school who liked her only for her social media persona were not true friends and that she didn’t need their validation. I think that’s why, by the end of the movie, I was very happy for Kayla when she finally had the courage to tell Kennedy, right before they were going to walk the stage for graduation, her honest feelings about how Kennedy didn’t treat her with the respect she deserved and never thanked Kayla for the card game that she gave Kennedy at her pool party. Before this, Kayla would just let Kennedy ignore her and act like she didn’t exist, and she would go on Kennedy’s Instagram page and think, This girl is much cooler than me. I don’t have the courage to talk to her because she will just ignore me. But Kayla realized by the end of the film that she didn’t need Kennedy’s validation or approval to feel good about herself, and that even though she was nervous to talk to Kennedy, doing so took a lot of courage and it was something that she, Kayla, could be proud of. She also realizes that Aiden, the boy she had a crush on who only liked her when she lied about doing blowjobs, wasn’t that great. Even though he was cute, he still treated Kayla like she was invisible. Gabe, however, who is Kennedy’s cousin, liked Kayla for who she was as a person and he, too, was socially awkward. At Kennedy’s pool party, he goes up and introduces himself to her and does a handstand in the water. He reminded me of this character in the movie The Edge of Seventeen, another coming of age film. The movie is about this 17-year-old girl named Nadine who has depression and is grieving the death of her father and also doesn’t have any friends (her best friend also falls in love with and sleeps with Nadine’s older brother, who doesn’t like Nadine and acts perfect.) Nadine often opens up about her mental health to her history teacher, who is very real with Nadine but also gives her the space to just talk because she has no one else who will understand what she is going through. Nadine likes this older boy named Nick, who works at a pet store, but he barely notices her. However, there is a guy in Nadine’s class, Erwin, who has a crush on Nadine. Even though he likes her romantically, she is so focused on getting Nick’s attention that she isn’t interested in getting in a relationship with Erwin. However, Erwin continues to show up for her as a friend and, unlike Nick, makes a genuine effort to get to know Nadine as a person. In one scene, Nadine sends off an explicit text message to Nick about how she wants to have sex with him, and Nick takes it literally. When they meet up, Nick attempts to have sex with Nadine, but she quickly realizes that she doesn’t want to have sex with him. She wants the time to get to know him as a person, but Nick tells her that he doesn’t want to get to know her as a person. All he wanted was sex. This leaves Nadine feeling badly about herself, but thankfully she has the support of her history teacher, who lets her stay with him and his wife until Nadine’s brother picks her up and takes her home.
This scene in The Edge of Seventeen reminded me of a scene in Eighth Grade when Kayla is meeting with high school seniors, and she meets this really nice girl named Olivia who invites her to hang out with her friends, who are all older than Kayla. One evening, Kayla is hanging out with Olivia and her friends, and Olivia suggests that they take Kayla home first, but Riley, Olivia’s friend, insists on giving Kayla a ride home. Olivia is a little worried about leaving Kayla alone in the car with Riley, but Kayla insists that she is fine, not knowing that Riley is, at the end of the day, an immature teenage boy who wants to take advantage of her. Riley stops the car, gets in the backseat and plays a game of truth or dare where he encourages Kayla to take her shirt off and makes sexual advances towards her. Kayla tells him she is uncomfortable, and he guilts her into having sex with him, but after she says “no” he drops it and drives her home, berating her on the way home about how boys won’t want to be with her because she lacks sexual experience. Kayla comes home crying and when her dad tries to comfort her, she pushes him away, but he continues to just sit with her and let her feel what she is feeling instead of trying to fix her emotional pain. Unlike Riley, Gabe makes Kayla feel seen and like she can be her true self without pretending to be someone else. Gabe, like Erwin in The Edge of Seventeen, was comfortable in his own skin so he didn’t feel like he had to prove himself to be with this girl. Erwin, like Gabe, also had his own nerdy interests. Erwin is an aspiring filmmaker, and he makes a movie for the high school film festival. Gabe is also a huge nerd and goes to archery camp every summer. He makes Kayla her favorite food chicken nuggets, and they make jokes from a show called Rick and Morty, which they both love. Gabe also genuinely likes Kayla’s videos, and when she tries to make it seem like her videos aren’t that great, he tells her, “No, seriously, I actually like your videos.” Even though Kayla wasn’t interested in becoming friends with Gabe at first, she realizes that Gabe actually likes her for who she is. I would be interested to know about Kennedy and Gabe’s relationship as cousins, because while Kennedy is popular and indifferent to Kayla’s efforts to make friends with her, Gabe is awkward and actually wants to be friends with Kayla but like Kayla, he worries about coming off as weird or too shy. Honestly this scene with Gabe and Kayla bonding over chicken nuggets and Rick and Morty was adorable and so sweet and delightful that I had to watch it again while writing this post (thank goodness for movie clips on YouTube.)
I have only seen Bo Burnham in a few roles, but I am so impressed by his directing skills. In college I saw a sketch he did on the show Key & Peele, and Bo played one of the members of a white male college acapella group. At first, Jordan Peele is the only acapella member in the group who is Black, but then another Black acapella member, played by Keegan-Michael Key, joins the group and the whole sketch is these two Black acapella singers competing over who should be the token Black guy in the white acapella group. Bo was also in a couple of movies I really liked; one is called The Big Sick and the other movie is called Promising Young Woman. The Big Sick is based on a true story about the beginning of comedian Kumail Nanjani’s relationship with his wife, Emily Gordon, who is a writer. Kumail meets Emily while he is doing stand-up in Chicago and she jokingly heckles him during his set. They hook up and fall in love, but then Emily finds out that Kumail’s parents want him to have an arranged marriage and have been sending him prospects of Pakistani women who they think would be a good match for him. Emily breaks up with him and then Kumail finds out that she is in the hospital and went into a coma. The movie is about how Kumail navigates his parents’ disapproval of him having a relationship with a white American woman and also the stress of having a career in comedy. Bo Burnham plays one of Kumail’s friends in the movie, and him and Mary (played by SNL’s Aidy Bryant) encourage Kumail to move from Chicago to New York City with them so that he can focus on his career as a comedian. The movie is very sweet and even though I have seen it, I wouldn’t mind seeing it again because it is such a heartfelt film. Another movie that Bo Burnham is in is called Promising Young Woman, a film directed by Emerald Fennell. In the movie, Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, a young woman who dropped out of medical school after experiencing a traumatic and harrowing event: the brutal rape of her best friend, Nina Fisher, who committed suicide after charges were dropped against her rapist and classmate, Al Monroe. Cassie lives with her parents and works at a coffee shop during the day, while at night she goes into bars and tricks men into taking her home and then confronting them about their abuse of women. She plans to get revenge on Al Monroe and the people who never took Nina’s rape case seriously and let Al Monroe get away with it. Bo Burnham plays Ryan, a guy from medical school who Cassie re-connects with, and even though she is still dealing with the trauma of Nina’s assault and focused on her plan to get revenge on Nina’s rapist, she decides to go out with Ryan and they dance around in the aisles of a pharmacy while “Stars are Blind” by Paris Hilton is playing in the background. However, Cassie later finds a video of Nina’s assault and sees that Ryan was an onlooker at the party and did nothing to stop Al from raping Nina, leading Cassie to break up with Ryan and blackmail him into telling her about Al’s whereabouts so she can carry out her revenge on him. Honestly, I love black humor, but even after Promising Young Woman I left with a heavy feeling in my stomach and quite depressed. As I rightfully should be, because campus rape is no laughing matter. When I first saw Amy Schumer’s sketch “Football Town Nights”, which is a parody of the show Friday Night Lights, I wasn’t sure how to react at first since I didn’t know much about rape culture. And as someone who is not a survivor of rape and who in the past has said ignorant things about rape and consent, I wasn’t sure if I should laugh at the sketch or not. But Schumer was skewering rape culture by showing how oblivious the young male football players in the sketch were about consent. The coach, played by actor Josh Charles, has the high school football players follow a code of conduct where they cannot rape young women. The football players at first don’t get it and so they keep asking the coach if they can get away with rape in certain situations, and they get exasperated when the coach’s answer to all of these questions is a simple, “No.” Amy Schumer plays the coach’s wife who witnesses all of this, and as the sketch continues her wine glass keeps getting bigger and bigger, showing how stressed she is that the boys just can’t wrap their heads around the word “no” when it comes to sexual assault. I watched that sketch several times and each time it never fails to impress me with its cleverness and also timeliness, considering the MeToo movement. Promising Young Woman deserved all of its nominations because it addressed an issue that is still incredibly important and took courage for a lot of survivors of sexual assault to speak out on. Even though Ryan Cooper was supposed to be an unlikable character, Bo Burham played him so scarily well. Which is a total contrast to the kind and gentle energy that he brought as a director for the movie Eighth Grade, which is based on his own struggles with panic attacks and anxiety. Even though Bo is from a different generation than Gen Z, he seeks to understand and empathize with Kayla and other youth of Generation Z. They are dealing with the same issues of insecurities, body image, fitting in, and yet the smartphone has also changed how teens interact nowadays because it is easier to text someone a mean comment than it is to say it to their face, and it is easier for kids to compare themselves to each other because we have these social media platforms whose algorithms are skewed towards certain posts, making kids feel like they have to measure up to and perform these impossible standards of perfection online just to get the validation of their peers. Although, with Australia’s new ban on social media for kids under 16 years of age, as well as the implementation of cell phone bans in K-12 schools in the U.S., that might be changing, too.
Eighth Grade. 2018. Directed by Bo Burnham. Rated R for language and some sexual material.
The Arts Are Life 