Bo Burnham's 'Eighth Grade' is the Worst and Best of Middle School Wrapped into a Glorious Debut
A thirteen-year-old girl in a one-piece bathing suit stands timidly behind a sliding glass door, peering down at a cohort of unspeakably ‘normal’ eighth-graders. The girls wear bikinis, the boys do backflips. They all bicker, they all gossip, they all scream and splash, except one. She waits for some inkling of courage that may very well never show. With no context at all, we know how she feels. Who knew there was an archetype for a middle school pool party? Bo Burnham, the writer and director of Eighth Grade has his thumb on what makes young people tick. He seems wholly aware of how friendships develop in the modern age, the influence of the internet on just about everything and the paranoia, insecurity, and superficiality attached to it. Eighth Grade, Burnham’s inaugural film, is his first opportunity to explore these issues on screen.
Bo Burnham started his career as a comedian on YouTube. A musical sensation, his first viral release was the song “I’m Bo Yo” (2008), in which Burnham showed his chops as a pianist, rapper and satirist. By age 25, he had three specials under his belt and was striking a deal with Netflix for his fourth. However, after the release of Make Happy (2016), Burnham’s performative comedy days appear to be over. Though a generally reclusive star, he has spoken in the past about feeling disingenuous as an artist while doing comedy in a theatrical setting. A target demographic for much of his past work, whether he intended or not, is an adolescent age group. Much of his work plays into the post-postmodern sentiment that teenagers all around the country have adopted. There is always a sense of irony, self-deprecation, and emotional distancing that is irresistibly resonant with young people. Though Bo has intentionally shifted the spotlight away from himself, many of these elements carry over into his big-screen debut.
Eighth Grade follows Kayla, a perfectly lovely, smart and witty eighth-grader who is imminently doomed to covet and crave a social life considered sacred in middle school. The popular girlfriends, the hottest boyfriend, the works. She films her own self-help videos in her bedroom at home, classically ignores her father, and longs for the dreamy boy granted the “Prettiest Eyes” award at the end of the school year. From the sounds of it, the film could be difficult to discern from Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010) and flops like it. However, what we see of Kayla’s life does not stop there. These middle school generalities have profound effects on us at an early age, and the film does not shy away from these impacts. Kayla struggles to reckon with her lack of social significance in school and hardly seems able to shake the illusion that this hierarchy is the very thing that is keeping her from thriving as an individual. Eighth Grade is every bit as heartbreaking, hopeful, tumultuous and infuriatingly confusing as that phase of life is for just about everybody. As the director puts it, “The story of being young is being inarticulate.”
Kayla is played by Elsie Fisher, who, it cannot be stressed enough, was born to play this part. Though she was eleven years old at the time of the film’s conception, Burnham has said he feels that the role was written for her. She possesses a wealth of emotional depth and complexity, conjured with humility and vulnerability without fail. The dialogue itself, which both Fisher and Burnham report was written almost exactly as we see it in the film, is so effortlessly spot on, it seems near impossible that the film isn’t a real-time documentary of Fisher’s own early education. Credit here goes to both Burnham, for absolutely nailing the cadence of Generation Z, and to Fisher, for weaving in every ‘like’ and ‘um’ with seamless ease. It is an arguably easier task portraying nervous confidence, but the fact that the film sticks the landing when genuine self-contemplation and depression take the focus is doubly impressive and reflective on an excellent pairing of script and performance. Fisher is so good, in fact, that Burnham said throughout the filming process, all spontaneous creative choices he deferred to her, trusting her instincts completely. Her breakout performance is truly the highlight of the film.
The director knows what it looks like to be making a film about a young girl as a white man in the industry today, and addressed this concern early on in his presentation at IFFBoston following an advanced screening. He said many years ago he knew he wanted to make a film about the internet and its influence on young experiences. To start this, he looked at a lot of the content these adolescents were producing on blogs, YouTube and social media. As he put it, “The boys tended to talk about Minecraft, and the girls tended to talk about their souls. So I went with girls.” As astute an observation as this is, it presented two foreseeable roadblocks for writing the script. The first, he says, is that he has never been a thirteen-year-old girl. The second is that he has never been a thirteen year old now. The film had to be uniquely present, and with that goal in mind, Burnham had all the more reason to find an actress he could trust completely. Elsie Fisher and Burnham have made something universal and original in Eighth Grade. For all the familiar laughs and unexpected insights it finds along the way, the film is sure to help some young men and women find their way past their own sliding glass doors.
