The internet, according to the unseen
YouTube star’s film explores how social media feels, not what it means, to a 13-year-old girl
“Yes, yes, yes. Of course.”
Comedian/musician Bo Burnham is answering, with only a little impatience, the question everybody asks him about Eighth
Grade, his acclaimed debut film: Wouldn’t it have been easier for him to understand the mindset of a 13-year-boy, rather than 13-year-old Kayla, played by Elsie Fisher, who is the focus of the film?
After all, Burnham, now 27, was a 13-year-old boy once; he’s never been a 13-year-old girl.
“It wasn’t really a conscious decision,” the YouTube star turned feature film writer/director said during a recent Toronto visit.
“I think I was trying to insulate myself from my own experience. I didn’t want it to be a projection of my experience. I like nostalgic movies, but I didn’t want this to feel like a memory.
“I want it to feel fresh. I was never a 13-year-old girl, but I’m not 13 years old now, either, and both lend themselves to just a specific experience. I want it to feel like someone looking out from within their experience, not someone looking back on their experience.”
Burnham had some inside help with understanding the female perspective.
“My girlfriend’s a writer/director, so I consulted her when I was writing Eighth Grade if anything seemed too bulls--t or way off the mark. But I felt a connection to Kayla. I felt like I understood her; I felt like we thought similarly. So I just tried to trust that.”
He gained international fame in 2006 as a budding star of a new phenomenon called YouTube, making viral videos in his suburban Boston bedroom with titles such as, “My Whole Family Thinks I’m Gay.”
The 6-foot-6 Burnham has this much in common with Eighth
Grade’s Kayla, who has her own YouTube show — although Kayla’s show has an audience that seems to number in single digits, judging by the lack of feedback she gets.
Burnham must be doing something right, regardless of whose perspective he’s viewing the world from.
Eighth Grade was a hit at its Sundance premiere in January. It has amassed festival kudos since then, including winning the audience award at Sundance London and similar prizes at fests in Chicago and San Francisco.
Elsie Fisher was such a casting coup for the role of Kayla. She just inhabits the role, and she’s not afraid to look awkward or to be seen having acne. Did you have to audition a lot of girls before you found her?
Yes, I saw everyone. Every kid, every actor that age. And she was the only one that felt real and alive and played Kayla actively.
Everyone else felt like they were pretending to be shy, and she felt like she was pretending to be confident. Which is the whole role.
She felt like she was being Kayla wanting to be other people, and everyone else was just trying to be Kayla.
Kayla isn’t an entirely sympathetic character. She’s a little mean to her dad, ignoring him when he asks her at dinner how her day went.
Yes, and it should be that way. Kids aren’t perfectly sympathetic. No one is. And it’s kind of the job of the dad to be her punching bag a little bit, you know what I mean? She wants to be mean to kids at school but she can’t; we can only kind of be cruel to the ones we love. And that’s kind of his job. She needs to get some frustration out. So let her get it out on you. It’s because we’re comfortable with them, it’s actually a reflection of love sometimes, the comfort to be cruel.
You made it look easy to have a worldwide YouTube audience when you started on it 12 years ago. Kayla doesn’t get anywhere near the traction you did. But it doesn’t feel like you’re criticizing social media, you’re just observing it.
I’m just interested in the way kids interface with the internet. I’m interested in kids that aren’t being seen, because that’s the majority of the way actually people participate in the internet. It’s a very, very small minority that actually go viral, but that’s the only people we talk about. And as someone who went viral, I can tell you it’s actually not very interesting. The more interesting thing is just the base personal emotional connection you have with the thing. So that’s what I was interested in. It was really just trying to say: “You’re hyper connected and you’re lonely. And you’re objectifying yourself. And you’re expressing yourself, and you’re stimulated, and you’re numb.”
So if it was just bad, it would be so much easier to address. The internet would be so much easier to address if it was just this awful place. But it’s not. I just think it deepens the entire spectrum of the experience: the highs are higher, the lows are lower. Everything is just more intense.
You’ve said in previous in- terviews that people aren’t asking the right questions about the internet. What do you mean by that?
I just don’t think we talk about it in the right way. I think we tend to talk about it in these big sweeping social terms, and we tend to hover over it — we’re talking about the forest instead of the trees. And I wanted to tell a story from within the internet, and just take inventory of the emotions, and stop trying to process it, or theorize about it, or hypothesize about it. Because that’s my issue. The internet is being talked about too generally and not specifically enough.
Can you give me an example of what you mean by this?
Maybe even talking about it is the problem. I’m not trying to talk about it; I’m just trying to describe how it feels. Just trying to give a subjective view into the emotions of it. And then 20 years down the line, we can talk about it in theory once we’ve gathered all the information. For now, it just feels like I just want to talk about how it feels, not what it means.
So how does it feel?
Oh, it feels a lot of ways. It feels exciting and confusing, isolating and connecting, and I think it interfaces with anxiety in a very specific way, where it makes us feel sort of anxious and it feels very full and empty at the same time.
You have many aspects of real-world anxiety in your film, not least of which is the scene where students are being trained how to respond if a gunman enters their school.
Yes, it’s become very relevant now. Columbine happened when I was in fifth grade, so it’s always been a part of my life, but so it was in there years ago, this scene, but now it’s taken on a real, real sort of relevancy in what’s been happening recently.
Where do you think the world is headed with social media?
I don’t know, it’s sort of unpredictable. I thought it reached a boiling point, and then it boiled over and kept boiling and now the whole house is on fire. I don’t quite know what’s happening. I hope it becomes slightly more responsible, maybe a few more safeguards we can put into it. Or I hope we can have conversations nationally that aren’t just passing fortune cookies to each other, that’d be nice.
But I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know. I don’t know. I hope for the best. God help us!