{"id":9261,"date":"2018-08-07T17:12:28","date_gmt":"2018-08-07T22:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ragtagcinema.org\/blog\/?p=9261"},"modified":"2018-08-07T17:12:28","modified_gmt":"2018-08-07T22:12:28","slug":"westerly-a-review-series-eighth-grade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/westerly-a-review-series-eighth-grade\/","title":{"rendered":"Westerly \u2013 a review series: Eighth Grade"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Nancy West<\/a>, a longtime cinema member and Professor of English at The University of Missouri, writes about Ragtag films for our website.<\/em><\/p>\n

Eighth Grade: two small words that evoke any number of wince-making associations: acne, body odor, gym class, oily hair, fumbling episodes of making out, and a soul-devouring envy of the cute and popular kids whose names and faces you still recall decades later. \u201cA lot of bad shit,\u201d as my friend recently remarked. Eighth grade was a long time ago for me, but this movie brought that shit back; it\u2019s a visceral film. Be warned.<\/p>\n

Eighth Grade<\/em> is Bo Burnham\u2019s debut movie about a 13-year-old girl named Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) trying to navigate her way through the final week of middle school. Burnham is a stand-up comic who was also one of YouTube\u2019s first luminaries (at 17, the satirical songs he posted went viral). In an NPR interview, he said that he wanted to make a film that \u201csimply walks viewers through\u201d what eighth grade is like now, in the age of social media. And compared to a lot of teen movies, where kids wreck their dads\u2019 Ferraris or turn their parents\u2019 suburban home into a brothel, not much happens in Eighth Grade<\/em>. Most of the film\u2019s drama is inside Kayla\u2019s head, her anxiety and self-consciousness concentrated in scenes of cringing verisimilitude. The most memorable: a pool party (remember those?) in which Kayla appears in an oddly-green swimsuit, bulges of baby fat spilling out of its sides. Convinced everyone is watching her, she dives underwater the first chance she gets. No one is watching her.<\/p>\n

As its title suggests, Eighth Grade<\/em> offers an almost anthropological look at the strange, primitive being known as the 13-year-old. It studies her with wry fascination, depicting mundane events like putting on makeup with over-the-top strategies such as zoom shots and slow-motion (not dissimilar, now that I think about it, to Planet Earth<\/em>). At the same time, it is filled with moments of real poignancy, as in the scene where Kayla asks her father (played by Josh Hamilton) if it makes him \u201csad\u201d to have her as a daughter (his shock that she would feel that way about herself is heartbreaking).\u00a0This alternation between irony and emotionalism is one of the things I liked best about Eighth Grade<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I also loved Elsie Fisher as Kayla, maybe because, unlike most young actresses (Saoirse Ronan, say, or Thomasin Mckenzie), she is stubbornly ordinary. Playing Kayla, she moves awkwardly, hunches her shoulders, slumps at the lunch table. She also has a lot of pimples. But Burnham never takes his camera off of her. Attention, he says, must be paid to this girl.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to that great thief of human attention and Eighth Grade<\/em>\u2019s other principal subject: digital technology. Kayla is tethered to her cell phone and laptop, scrolling through images\u2014of celebrities, random strangers, her peers\u2014deep into the night. Burnham portrays this with marked ambivalence; on the one hand, Kayla\u2019s hyper-connectivity is pathetic and obsessive. On the other, it gives her a means of self-creation (she makes affirmational videos and posts them on her online channel, clearly enjoying the process). This ambivalence, I admit, is one of the film\u2019s strengths. The trouble for me is that I can\u2019t share it; I am deeply disturbed by our obsession with social media and our neurotic use of cell phones. Which is why, unlike a lot of viewers who have variously described it as \u201cheartwarming,\u201d \u201chopeful,\u201d and \u201cupbeat,\u201d I found Burnham\u2019s movie to be very, very sad.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a truth universally acknowledged that eighth grade is a crummy time of life. But what makes it worse for this generation are the pressures and dislocations of digital culture, which don\u2019t end after eighth grade. We adults also stay up late at night with our iPhones, checking to see how many people liked our Facebook<\/em> posts, friending people we barely know, texting one vacuous message after another. Watching this film, I couldn\u2019t help but think that social media and our cell phones have sent us all back to eighth grade. Permanently, it seems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Nancy West, a longtime cinema member and Professor of English at The University of Missouri, writes about Ragtag films for our website. Eighth Grade: two small words that evoke any number of wince-making associations: acne, body odor, gym class, oily hair, fumbling episodes of making out, and a soul-devouring envy of the cute and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news1"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}