Teen angst in 2018

On a day when Facebook lost $120 billion of its market capitalisation, I watched Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade at a swanky theatre in Denver. The protagonist Kayla’s classmate, Kennedy, one of the popular girls of her class, summarily dismisses the social networking site in front of her mother when asked to create an event there: “No one uses Facebook anymore.”

Not just Mark Zuckerberg, the rest of us, too, need to watch this winsome movie to understand the current zeitgeist of teenagers. The movie opens with Kayla (Elsie Fisher) dishing out beauty tips on YouTube, coupled with aphoristic headlines such as “how to be confident” and “how to put yourself out there”.

The movie portrays the emotional upheaval of Kayla over the last one week of eighth grade before she graduates and goes to high school. Burnham’s equal parts smutty, shameless and delightfully self-aware story is as fresh as the air in the Swiss Alps. He shows how the current crop of teens seamlessly flits between Snapchat filters, Instagram messaging and Twitter timelines. Kayla is happier seeing her acne disappear on Snapchat and telling the world that this is how she woke up.

Josh Hamilton as her super-understanding dad is perhaps the movie’s lynchpin. He keeps walking on eggshells to give his daughter some space while also being adequately protective. A scene between him and Kayla where he pours his heart out over how he raised her being a single parent made me relate to the closing lines of James Joyce’s Dubliners more intensely: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Film still from Eighth Grade

In the wake of school shootings across the US, the movie takes a swipe at how much kids are internalising this violence. When the safety protocols and drills are underway, the kids are glued to their smartphones because, by now, they all know them by heart. Fisher’s smothered grace, mulched with her cherubic features and incandescent grin, is the movie’s beating heart. Everything she does, including saying Gucci at the end of each YouTube video, warms the cockles of my heart.

Burnham turns out to be an indefatigable explorer of the sexual mores of Generation Z. Kayla’s classmates discuss oral sex like it’s another social network waiting to be conquered. The high-schoolers are aghast that people four years younger than them are already sending each other nudes in the fifth grade. The movie’s most chuckle-worthy scene involves a banana and I shall not spoil any more of your fun.

Burnham topples the food chain with this film where dads act cool and near-peers are the prudes. Eighth Grade is probably the first movie I have ever watched where teen acne isn’t glossed over, which is saying something considering we are living in 2018. Having Anna Meredith score the music is a masterstroke. Here’s an experimental musician who specialises in blending synthesisers and acoustic instruments for a soundtrack tailor-made for a movie set in Mars rather than in middle school.

But her big, booming sounds are note-perfect whenever they are blasted off, especially when Kayla goes into mini-delirium as soon as her secret crush Aiden appears in front of her.

Andrew Wehde’s ravishing cinematography is another asset for a movie made on a shoestring budget. He seems to be a fiend for natural light and makes complete use of street lights for a wrenching scene in which Kayla nearly gets molested.

Burnham never lets his lead character stew in a toxic stream of self-pity. Kayla is as woke as teens get in America these days. That’s why it’s a little jarring to see Netflix bankroll a show like Insatiable, which sparked debates about diet culture and female objectification. The show is about an erstwhile fat person who transforms into a size-zero figure through sheer rigour. She then proceeds to take revenge on all her bullies. While the producers are asking the public to see the show in its entirety before making a clarion call for its cancellation, it remains to be seen if body-shaming can make for a compelling TV series.

Burnham doesn’t deal with such low-hanging fruit though and that’s why Eighth Grade is the best indie delight of 2018 so far.

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