Eighth Grade (Aug 3)

There were other ways to have done this movie that weren’t as ambitious, weren’t as safe–Bo could have reached for the nostalgia of the mid-90s as in the case of Jonah Hill’s upcoming film about the mid-90s called… Mid-90s–he could done a year in the life, as with Love, Simon–she could’ve been a twenty-year old playing a seventeen year old, as in most every movie about high school–but instead in the span of three days at the end of 8th grade school year, Bo examines the lives of young people with refreshing objectivity and an unparalleled sensitivity to the memes of the present day.

The film is structured by three spaces in the life of a young teenager: birthday parties, school, and the mall. Overlapping that structure of the physical spaces of young people are the three different iterations of Kayla navigating and engaging with her sexuality: her canny lies that throw her into the spotlight of a shallow heartthrob in her year with the “Best Eyes” award, her interactions with an awkward but earnest boy crushing on her, and Truth or Dare with an Older Boy. The films protagonist is, as AE Stallings once put it in “Alice, Grown-Up, At The Cocktail Party,” “all knees and elbows in a room half hope / to shut up tidy as a telescope,” her discomfort and anxiety plastered on her face. She makes for a tremendously good audience surrogate.

One of the cleverer scenes in the film (both because of where it lands and how it makes us feel so many different things before it gets there) is Truth or Dare in the car on the way home from the mall with an older boy. As the boy pulls off to the side of the road and hops into the backseat next to Kayla, the emotional tenor of the scene splits the audience. At once, the scene turns stereoscopic: the male audience senses the implied threat from a male figure that women are always aware of, and at the same time the women in the audience maybe, possibly recognize the fantasy of desirability for a young girl just testing the waters with her sexuality.

The tension between the refrain of YouTube monologues and the action on screen makes for some interesting contrasts. Kayla’s monologues feel aspirational, her conscience disembodied. Her actions follow (karaoke, pool party) or ignore (being yourself) her Youtube’s sage wisdom and feigned worldliness. In terms of trailer fatigue, Eighth Grade does something really lovely by compressing the whole trailer into the very first ninety seconds of monologue. Everything that follows is fresh and new and unexpected. The film likes to let us marinade in the awkward, halting, likes and ums and mumbles, the verbal ticks of youth and youthful femininity especially. The language is strained and repetitious, but never tedious or unconsidered.

(Paraphrasing some notes from Wife and Friend that seem relevant here:) Part of the genius of the film is that Kayla’s not actually that interesting. She’s pretty ordinary. She doesn’t have any hidden skills or passions that are revealed, some long-awaited inner beauty  that blossoms in the course of the last week of middle school. On the contrary, Kayla lacks character beyond her nerves and anxiety–and that lack of defined self makes her much more authentic. The film captures an obvious but essential insight into eighth graders–they’re still kind of boring and unformed. Kayla’s speech about feeling butterflies before the rollercoaster but not the feeling after is an excellent expression of the anxiety that comes to define a particular type of girl at that age. Wife draws a comparison to the antagonists as well, the banality of bitchiness: “The bitchy girls don’t have anything going for them either, they’re just thinner and prettier.” The film that spends so much time staying out of the fray, remaining objective in its depiction of the world of children, sometimes breaks its rule to take the side of late bloomers in this way.

(Wife note:) The juxtaposition of high drama in Kayla’s room with the dad’s mundanity is one of the great comic gimmicks of the film. While dad’s on his kindle or doing the dishes, Kayla’s inner life is wracked with the agony of exclusion and alienation. A Slate writer has cracked wise that the film is (I assume, having insulated myself from reviews ahead of time) really about the adventures of an incredibly hot dad (we surmise that someone is talking about his emotional hotness), but after you’ve seen the movie, check out that article and see if it clears anything up for you.

One of my favorite parts of the film is its decision to be technology agnostic. The adults who watch are going to click their tongues at all the Instagram/Twitter/texting, listening to music at the dinner table. The youths are going to counter with, Friday is the ONLY day she’s allowed to “do her own thing” at dinner, a kind of enlightened detente with a teenage girl to hold her attention on the other weeknights. We see the way that it’s used to hurt, like the way that the two popular girls hold a conversation without ever taking their eyes off their screens, but we also see the way in which it empowers, with Kayla’s publicly working through her feelings on her YouTube channel, the way that she talks to her new high school friend on the phone feels so normal and yet so incredible precisely because it’s not normal for Kayla. The film successfully translates the teenage girl’s thirst for and the grace of female role models in a way that seems so mundane. Tasked with depicting the state of the youth’s relationship with technology, Bo opts for description over prescription.

Even in the way he depicts tech, he avoids tropes of cinema, Kayla never reads a text or email out loud for the audience’s benefit (the unrealistic compromise so many other movies resort to), nor do text conversations on a tiny screen become a way of revealing essential plot information (e.g. Personal Shopper, possibly Sherlock). Her Twitter feed and Instagram browsing is a carefully constructed mess of ads and memes indicating the sheer volume of self-made content and the level of interaction, not escapism, among teens that takes place on these platforms.

The film is as good because of stuff it does as the stuff it doesn’t do. It doesn’t do the Miraculous Makeover of the 80s, it doesn’t go in for the Gut Punch of Things Are Hard Because Mom is Dead monologue. The film never actually shows Kayla crying on screen. The camera cuts away as she stares blankly at the place where two mean girls won’t give her the time of day, her jaw working, her mouth scrunching up painfully. When she comes back from her Big Day at the mall, the sound cuts out and we see things from behind, peering at the scene from the door. (There’s a really cool theory about the tears of Odysseus that I heard once in college, that I think matches the theory about withholding tears from our protagonist here.) There are no abrupt cuts in the continuity of the film. We don’t see a montage of bad days over the course of the school year, the holidays zoom by, Kayla pining at her phone, waiting for friends to text. The story starts in the liminal space in the last seven days of school. There’s no prom. The decision to forgo tired tropes of the middle/high school movie made this film watchable and compelling.

The bonfire is a tearjerker. The band scene cracked Wife up. The Banana scene may be the best scene of the year.

Extra readings:  Jasper Griffin has some cool things to say about objectivity in classic literature. 1980. Homer on Life and Death. Oxford . Chapter 4: “Death, Pathos, and Objectivity” (103-43).