“It’s like I’m waiting in line for like a rollercoaster,” says 14-year-old Kayla to the very small, potentially even non-existent audience of her vlog. “And that stupid, like, butterfly feeling in your stomach, I get that all the time. And then I never get the feeling after you ride the roller coaster.” Kayla is talking about anxiety, and this summary comes towards the end of comedian Bo Burnham’s first film Eighth Grade (2018), an extremely successful attempt to examine the agony and the boredom of early puberty. We follow Kayla (Elsie Fisher), a middle school student, as she stumbles through the last few weeks of the eighth grade, and anxiously looks forward to joining high school at the end of the summer. This rollercoaster analogy is one of very few moments where Kayla tries to put her experiences into words. She moves through a world in which teenagers constantly have to negotiate online interactions as well as real-world ones. Elsie is perhaps more noticeably poleaxed by this experience than some people her age, but she isn’t presented as an unusual case. The film’s background cast of teenagers are glued to their phones too: on the bus, at a party, even during a school shooting drill. The new social landscape is an anxious one for teenagers in general – recent studies have, of course, shown a strong correlation between social media use and anxiety and depression. I watched Eighth Grade for the first time on my own, but suspected that it might impact a viewer who is currently a teenager differently. So I asked my little sister if she would watch the film with me and tell me what she thought afterwards (or, as it happened, in a live commentary throughout).
My sister is almost ten years younger than me, and was in the UK equivalent of the eighth grade (Year 9) at the time that the film was being made. Her at 14 is an age I remember particularly well. I remembered being that age myself, of course, but I relived it more vividly because of her. Now, just like then, she sends me messages about the small mortifications that make up life in your early teens: hanging out with classmates you don’t really like, having to make small talk with the hairdresser, stilted conversations with your parents’ friends, awkward incidents at parties. These everyday horrors are the focus of Eighth Grade. In so many of the films that deal with adolescence, teenagers who initially seem ordinary are revealed to be special in some secret way. Kayla is not special. Elsie Fisher’s Kayla is utterly normal and her life is normal too. When she talks, it’s with the familiar cadences and vocal fry that we associate with young people: “like”, “um”, and “whatever”. She wears slightly too much eyeliner, has braces, acne, and isn’t very skinny. She lives with her dad in an unremarkable suburban house in an unremarkable suburban neighborhood. She’s not particularly funny, interested in anything, unusual or charismatic. But this is what most 14 year olds are like. Things happen near Kayla, not to her. A classmate masturbates at his desk, and she notices but isn’t the one to point it out to the rest of the class. Some popular kids have a pool party, showing off on the deck and chasing each other. Kayla, in a painfully ill-fitting swimming costume, is just there.
Kayla shares some features with my sister: they both have long blonde hair, had braces and are taller than most girls their age. When my sister googles the film poster this doesn’t escape her notice. “I’m scared,” she says, and as we start watching, I can see why. It’s a detailed study of awkwardness. Within twenty minutes my sister says that she wants to cry because it is so agonisingly real. Every fresh detail elicits a groan. The bully’s lip-gloss, Kayla’s extensive use of social media, and her painful conversations with her father, in which he tries to bolster her confidence and she is embarrassed by his sincerity. “I have had this exact conversation with Dad,” my sister says. So have I.
Eighth Grade is deeply relatable, even if you are not a teenage girl. But the film is so in tune with the current teenage experience that, in my mid-twenties, I had to have a number of references explained to me. After a background character shouts “LeBron James” for the second time my sister explains it to me: “It’s from a vine of a kid saying it in a funny way, and now people just say it like yeet or esketit,” she tells me. “If you know what those are.” I don’t. And the film pokes fun at older people, like me, for thinking they get this stuff. In a sex ed video they watch in class, the voiceover assures the kids that “it’s gonna be lit”. Elsewhere, one of the teachers gives his class a knowing but just slightly too self-conscious dab. When a classmate’s mum asks her daughter to send Kayla a Facebook message about a party she receives an eye-roll: “No one uses Facebook, mom.” The characters in the film are aware of and talk about this distance. In a scene in a shopping mall, Kayla sits with some students in their final year of high school. One boy insists that Kayla, some four years younger than them, has had a completely different experience of growing up from them because she got Snapchat at a younger age. He isn’t wrong. The hyper exposure of being 14 now is something to which being 14 in the noughties can’t really be compared. This difference has been pointed out many times before, but it’s worth reiterating. Watching Eighth Grade, I was reminded that while I had MSN messenger and pay-as-you-go texting, they didn’t follow me to the dinner table, or out to the park, or hound me with notifications at all hours of the day. Because of this, my sister and I are from different generations. And although films have been made about girls this age before, they haven’t been made about girls this age right now. The fact that Bo Burnham, a man in his late twenties, is behind this film is nothing short of miraculous given its accuracy.
But, importantly, Eighth Grade makes neither a straightforward villain of social media, nor a laughing stock. Here, as in Ingrid Goes West (2017), social media is seen as an inescapable presence in the lives of young people. It both preys on existing insecurities and introduces new ones, but these days it’s such an ingrained part of normal life that opting out simply isn’t possible. Eighth Grade doesn’t hold up Kayla’s engagement with Instagram as something to ridicule her for. Instagram makes her feel worse, and yet Kayla can’t look away because it makes her feel superficially more connected to her peers. It’s an accurate reflection of how teenagers really feel about the painful push and pull of social media. I asked my sister what she and her friends think about it. Sure, it’s fun to take the photos and see what people are doing, but “you’re constantly reminded that you’re not socialising, when you go on social media at home”. And you have to cultivate “two personalities”, one for online and one for offline. Oh wait, make that three, because she also has a private Instagram account. “It’s a blessing and a curse”. This cultivation of personas is a huge part of Eighth Grade. Kayla makes motivational videos for others, but really for herself, and posts them on YouTube. She looks into her mirror, surrounded with Post-it notes of advice, and prepares herself for the day ahead – something which involves following a make up tutorial for an “everyday” look, and posting a filtered picture of herself on Instagram, building a personality one excruciating piece at a time. For Kayla, being online offers an easy but also unsatisfying way to engage socially from the safety of her bedroom, and we watch her as she lies in bed, watching videos and reading Buzzfeed, acne illuminated by the screen. Like any addiction, it presents itself as the solution to the very problems it causes. When Kennedy’s party becomes too much, we find Kayla scrolling her feed in the dark of the family’s dining room, away from the rest of the guests. It’s significant that when Kayla does finally feel able to communicate her thoughts about anxiety through the rollercoaster metaphor, it’s only to the invisible audience of her vlog.
The experience of watching Eighth Grade is, as I suspected it might be, a different one if you are still a teenager. For an older viewer, the primary feelings are of sympathy with Kayla, recognition mixed with relief that these years are behind you. My sister didn’t have this response. Towards the end of the film, she seemed sad and I asked her why. “I’m gonna look back on how I am now and feel embarrassed” Words rose in my throat. “Why would you be embarrassed? You’re so great!” And so on. But these are Kayla’s dad’s words, too, and miss the point. I didn’t say them. Part of the thrust of Eighth Grade is that the assessments a teenager makes about their own life, however misguided they might seem to a listener, deserve to be heard and respected. Instead I observed that being 14 is uncomfortable like no other stage in your adolescence. It feels like the first year in which you are not a child, and yet you might still feel like one. You have a new, pubescent body, and at the same time must be loyal to some idea of your essential and unchanging character. When Kayla makes her motivational YouTube videos she runs into this paradox: we can see the slightly lost look in her eyes even as she affirms the necessity of being who you are. Being “true to yourself” is a meaningless exhortation if you’ve got no idea who this new, bigger, spottier, hairier self is yet. “Yeah,” my sister responded. “Bleurgh.”
Imogen West-Knights is a writer based in London.
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