Film Salon In My Living Room #1
By: Valerie Kittell
Tags: TV, Short Story, Movies, Life

Film Salon In My Living Room #1

Eighth Grade (Because who doesn’t want to relive the hell?)

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

I’m going to open the initial session of Film Salon with Eighth Grade , currently streaming on Netflix.

This is a 2018 movie directed by Bo Burnham starring Elsie Fisher as our eighth grade protagonist, Kayla Day. It would be very easy to scroll past this offering thinking it was just another tween angst comedy or dramedy, but if you did you would be passing up a movie that I found unexpectedly moving and profound. Yes, that’s right, profound. It’s been weeks and I find myself thinking of Kayla Day as the events of the day bring her to front of consciousness.

I thought this was a great movie to kick off with because quite honestly, me burbling about it on Medium to an imagined enthralled group of reader/cineasts is uncomfortably reminiscent of Kayla herself, a lonely and isolated teen in her darkened bedroom, recording her life coaching, how-to-be-popular tips to her own illusory group of fans and followers on You Tube. Gulp. First gasp of self-recognition. One of the central questions posed in this quiet yet lethal commentary on our modern condition is:

How do we distinguish ourselves to be seen and heard and to communicate into the vast electronic void that surrounds us? Why are so many morphing into bloggers and vloggers and podcasters and tweeters and Instagrammers and Facebookers and gamers, not as an enhancement to real physical life, but as a replacement? When did we exchange being a human being for being a “brand”?

In one of my favorite moments in the movie, a group of older high school teens ask Kayla how old she was when she got Instagram -answer: sixth grade- and then marvel at how technologically ahead and adept her “generation” (3 years!) is from theirs and how they’ll never catch up. I found this insight of teenagers and young adults already feeling like they’re losers in a hamster wheel race of technology and celebrity to be chilling and sad.

In the course of the movie Kayla makes social mis-steps and some potentially disastrous decisions about how far she has to go to be popular with boys that had me wincing and hugging myself and almost hiding my eyes. Elsie Fisher is pitch-perfect as Kayla. I marveled at her walk which was a dogged, slump-shouldered schlump as she soldiered through her day to face or elude her many obstacles.

Unlike the teen heroines in so many movies, Elsie’s Kayla is believable, with non-Hollywood pimples and a realistic tween physique, including a slightly protruding tummy revealed unselfconsciously in the pool party scene. Her speech cadences and pauses in various scenes reveal how quickly or slowly Kayla is processing her surroundings and evaluating her best response. Elsie Fisher was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress, A Critic’s Choice Award for Best Young Performer and a Gotham Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Actor and I would say she was richly deserving of all of those, no age qualifier necessary.

A central motif in Eight Grade is Communication, most often the lack thereof, particularly between Kayla and her single dad, Mark Day. Despite rarely talking with each other in any meaningful way, Kayla and Mark have a deep and abiding love for one another that is poignantly revealed in the one abridged conversation that they do manage to have, which I’ll be honest, moved me to tears.

One of the through joke/ironies in Eighth Grade is that Kayla has distinguished herself through anonymity and has won the Class Superlative for “Most Quiet”. She is embarrassed by being recognized for her invisibility and chafes against this in one of her video pep talks to her “fans” which are all really motivational role plays for herself, in which she asserts that while people think she is “shy or whatever” that her friends know she really isn’t. Sadly, she doesn’t appear to have any actual friends, but one of the beauties of the Kayla character is that she is a quiet and indomitable optimist, despite numerous setbacks and embarrassments, who believes that another, better day is right around the corner if she’ll only persevere and live her affirmations. This bio-feedback loop of Kayla’s does actually seem to reap some results by the movie’s end as her halting and incoherent delivery has stepped up by several notches as life starts to become more lived reality than unlived, superficial theory she is parroting from others.