6

Thursday, June 7, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

I lingered in the Michigan 
Theater’s main auditorium last 
Thursday 
after 
the 
screening 
of 
Bo 
Burnham’s 
directorial 
debut, “Eighth Grade.” A crowd 
of teenagers, young adults and 
retirees had just finished giving 
Burnham a standing ovation after 
his short Q&A and were now 
streaming out the back of the 
theater while I fought to make my 
way to the front. Not a seat in the 
theater had been empty that night. 
The movie, which marked the 
beginning of the Cinetopia Film 
Festival, had sold out earlier that 
day — and for good reason. 
“Eighth Grade” is a continuation 
of movies like “Lady Bird” and 
“Call Me By Your Name.” While 
they’re not all explicitly similar in 
genre or plot, they evoke a similar 
feeling from their audiences — 
something like nostalgia, but not 
quite, and like nervousness, but 
more trepid. These films zero 
in on the familiar and universal 
experiences of growing up and 
falling in love, while skillfully 
retaining 
the 
autonomy 
and 
individuality of their characters.
“Lady Bird” and “CMBYN” 
fit nicely into the coming-of-age 
category of films, but “Eighth 
Grade” 
narrowly 
avoids 
this 
label. While the movie introduces 
an 
expectedly 
coming-of-age 
abstract — Kayla (Elsie Fisher, 
“Despicable Me”) is a shy middle 
schooler entering her last week 

of eighth grade who decides to 
put herself out there before the 
school year ends — the entire 
movie 
is 
undercut 
by 
larger 
anxieties concerning technology, 
social media and problems beyond 
Kayla’s impending high school 
career.
Burnham, who got his start in 
comedy by making Youtube videos 
filmed in his childhood bedroom, 
has always had these concerns 
on his mind. Much of his standup 
challenges our expectations of 
technology and tries to illustrate 
the 
complex 
relationship 
our 
generation 
has 
with 
it. 
“I’m 
addicted to the internet too,” 
Burnham conceded during the 
Q&A after the screening, but that 
doesn’t mean he still doesn’t share 
the anxieties we all do, especially 
when looking at the effect it could 
have on younger generations.
“There 
is 
a 
much 
subtler 
conversation to be had about 
the internet beyond Russia and 
cyberbullying, 
something 
very 
personal 
and 
interior 
to 
the 
internet and what it does to people 
that is not okay,” said Burnham 
earlier that night in response to an 
audience member’s question about 
this aspect of the film. “There’s 
this sudden impulse to see yourself 
as a commodity or a character. To 
sort of float above your life and 
watch other people watch you 
and watch other people watch you 
watch them.”
Much 
of 
“Eighth 
Grade” 
concerns this kind of watching. 
Kayla aimlessly scrolls through 

her Instagram feed, liking pictures 
and videos of other 13 year olds 
pulling pranks and painting their 
nails. She makes videos with 
survival guide tips on how to be 
more confident, while suffering 
from crippling shyness in her day-
to-day life. She wants to be seen 
as someone she’s not, an expert on 
relationships and “Being Yourself.” 
Access to Instagram and Youtube 
makes this very easy for her to do. 
Kayla’s the eighth grader most of 
us were: awkward and introverted 
with acne-prone skin. But unlike 
us, she can hide this under 
Snapchat filters and good lighting.
Making my way to the front 
of the Michigan Theater under 
the massive chandelier, swarms 
of people moving in the opposite 
direction of me stared. I found 
Burnham’s representative, who I 
was directed to in an email, and 
taken backstage to wait for him 
to finish up another interview. As 
I waited, no matter who I talked 
to, be it Ella, the A24 publicist 
traveling 
with 
Burnham 
on 
the tour or a 68-year-old male 
Michigan 
Theater 
employee, 
everyone’s reactions stuck on the 
same point: The universality of 
a 13-year-old girl’s last week of 
middle school and her efforts to 
woo the cool kids in school.
“What’s the score?” Burnham 
asked Ella as we walked down 
the narrow hallway towards the 
dressing room. He was referring 
to the Cavs and Warriors game 
taking place that night, and I was 
immediately 
worried 
I 
would 
have to make small talk about 
basketball, a subject far from my 
specialty. But Burnham barely 
acknowledged this pause before 
sitting down next to me. He had 
been answering questions all day; 
it was 10:45 p.m. and he admittedly 
looked tired.
A 
question 
many 
people 
have fixated on in relation to 
“Eighth Grade” is how Burnham 
managed to perfectly capture the 
experiences of a 13-year-old girl 
without basing it off himself or 
someone else. Multiple years of 
touring has exposed him to the 
age demographic he was trying to 
paint a picture of but, as he pointed 
out, anything we need to know 
about middle schoolers these days 
is right at our fingertips. They put 
everything online to be seen.
“I 
think 
it 
would’ve 
been 
different if it had been sort of 
polluted by like ‘Oh this is my 
little cousin or my friend’s sister,’” 
Burnham responded when I asked 
how he managed to draw such 
a perfect portrait. “When I was 

writing it, it felt like someone I 
knew, but it wasn’t specific.” This 
is how he avoided the nostalgia 
trap this film could’ve easily 
become. He was chasing a feeling, 
not nonfiction.
“I just wanted to do an intense 
movie about being this person, not 
what it means to be a kid always 
throughout all of time. I was 
feeling very nervous and panicked 
and anxious on the internet, and 
I was looking at the internet and 
meeting people, and I saw all these 
people also feeling very nervous 
and panicked in their lives too. So 
I wanted to explore what it felt like 
to feel anxious, to feel …” Burnham 
paused here, thinking. “Anxious is 
the opposite of nostalgic. It’s the 
opposite of distance at least. You’re 
locked in it and you can’t really 
see outside of yourself. So it was 
important that the movie didn’t 
see outside of her. I didn’t want the 
movie to know any more than she 
did.”
It’s terrifying to think that 
the common thread from one 
generation to the next is anxiety, 
but the internet undeniably doles 
out this feeling of uneasiness 
from one user to the next. And 
all the details of the film lend 
themselves to creating this feeling 
of uneasiness, but also the feeling 
that we are in Kayla’s world where 
every look, word and wink is a life 
or death situation. The audience 
truly doesn’t see outside of Kayla 
as Anne Meredith’s EDM score 
ropes us into the film, dropping 
a hard-hitting bass drop when 
Fisher’s character sees her crush 
for the first time or confronts the 
mean girl in school.
As far as influences go, Burnham 
didn’t have any but the faces he’s 
come across in life and online. But 
there’s something to be said about 
how the experience of 27-year-old 
Burnham can be easily translated 
to 13-year-old Kayla or 20-year-old 
me. Why did he think that is the 
case? I wondered, and then I asked, 
“What do you think it is about the 
internet that allows you to write 
convincingly from the point of 
view of a 13-year-old and not have 
the audience bat an eye?”
“I think the culture at the 
moment is existing on an eighth-
grade level, you know what I 
mean?” Burnham replied. “The 
national conversation is taking 
place at an eighth-grade level, our 
president has like an eighth-grade 
reading level. So it just feels very 
true to me. I think the internet 
makes eighth graders of us all.”
What struck me about this 
conversation 
with 
Burnham, 

and replies like these, was the 
concern and anxiety seeping into 
his voice as he talked about these 
topics, and how starkly it contrasts 
from the Burnham confined to 
Netflix specials and computer 
screens. While his standup drips 
with vitriol and is known for 
its dramatic flare, this movie is 
entirely different. It’s smart and 
clever and honest, tackles similar 
subject matters as “what.” and 
“Make Happy,” but isn’t the least 
bit arrogant or pretentious.
As Burnham put it, this movie 
is truer to who he is. “I am not 
naturally 
that 
pyrotechnic, 
overridden, cynical thing. It’s 
what the medium called for … 
and the truth was I was onstage 
terrified every night.” Making the 
move from irony to sincerity for 
Burnham was “freeing.” “It was 
natural. It felt more like dropping 
things like finally I can drop all 
these tools. I’m so excited to finally 
do something that isn’t ironic, isn’t 
satirical.”
When we’re children, we just 
want adults to recognize the 
magnitude of our situation. “Eighth 
Grade” captures the life and death 
feeling attached to being 13 years 
old. Between the music, Elsie 
Fisher’s 
fantastic 
performance 
and Burnham’s attention to the 
most minute details, the audience 
was dragged into this feeling 
and left laughing, squirming and 
occasionally shielding their eyes, 
unable to stand the familiarity of 
it.
“I didn’t want to make a 
nostalgic movie,” Burnham said 
during the theater’s Q&A session. 
“I wanted to know about what it’s 
like to be young now. I watched 
hundreds of videos of kids online 
talking about their own life and the 
boys talked about Minecraft, and 
the girls talked about their souls.”
I don’t think Burnham made a 
nostalgic movie. It’s difficult to feel 
nostalgic about such a confusing, 
anxious, hormonal time in one’s 
life. But he did make a reflective 
movie, an honest one. He made 
a movie that triggers feelings of 
anxiety and terror as we feel them 
in eighth grade and now on a larger 
scale. As Burnham put it, “sweeping 
decisions about the future of our 
brain’s neurochemistry are being 
made by nine guys with no social 
skills in Silicon Valley.” And while 
being a girl in eighth grade is a 
common experience among many, 
these sweeping decisions make 
every 
generation’s 
experience 
in middle school more and more 
unknowable.

Burnham shares 
the inner worlds 
of ‘Eighth Grade’

ARTIST PROFILE

A24

NATALIE ZAK
Daily Arts Writer

