Bo knows Eighth Grade and stand-up
“Eighth grade is horrifying, weird, insane and hopeful and ecstatic and depressing,” says first-time writer director Bo Burnham from New York. “It is a time that contains, like, oxymorons. It would make sense as a sort of hopeful horror film.”
If the last three words of that sentence sound contradictory or even impossible, the film they apply to has earned the 27-year-old stand-up comic and musician rave reviews. Eighth Grade, the story of a shy teen trying to survive her final week before high school, received a Grand Jury Prize nomination at Sundance and currently has a 98 percent approval on RottenTomatoes.com.
BREAKING THE SCREEN
Kayla (Elsie Fisher) is lonely and shy, but you’d never know it from the videos she posts from her laptop. She offers confident advice on makeup and facing social situations that terrify her when she isn’t on camera. She dreads attending a pool party hosted by a classmate who ignores her and tells Instagram readers that she just woke up resembling her current photo when viewers see she’s meticulously made herself up.
Nonetheless, Burnham is hesitant to judge her or tell viewers how to interpret either of her lives.
“I think she generally wants to
give advice but secretly she’s talking to herself, hoping that if she speaks it out loud, she’ll become it, which I don’t think is an awful way to go about changing yourself,” he says. “I think thinking out loud is a good thing. It’s a way for her to speak it into existence, almost.”
Similarly, he neither condemns nor praises her perpetual use of social media. Currently, there seem to be two attitudes about Facebook, Snapchat or other social media. In Scream 4, for example, the late Wes Craven seems to be telling kids to get off the digital lawn. In legions of other films, however, one can tell which devices are arranged for product placement.
Burnham has a good reason for withholding scorn for social media. His career took off in 2006 after videos of his self-penned songs went viral.
“I’m so super grateful to the Internet. The Internet connects people and isolates people. It does everything. It gives visibility to groups of people that never would have gotten visibility, and also it has set the country on fire,” he says. “It’s clearly not great, but it’s not cleanly bad. If it was just cleanly bad, it would be easier to address it. Just throw your phones into the ocean, and it’s solved.
I just thought there was so much commentary on the Internet but not enough just depiction of it. We were just trying to depict it honestly and describe it emotionally rather than prescribe anything.”
NO TIME CAPSULES
To accurately describe how teens use social media, Burnham watched a long series of videos they’ve posted. While the writer-director may not be that far removed from his youth in years, he quickly discovered that what current middle-schoolers do is far different from his memories. Fisher told him that she and her peers simply don’t use the seemingly omnipresent Facebook.
He says, “I knew at the end of the day I had to learn from the kids. Things were changing so rapidly. We were just trying to wait until the very last minute and capture a moment in time. I’m sure this movie’s specific references will be dated very quickly, but the meaning is not in the references. The meaning is in the way they engage with it emotionally, which I don’t think will be dated.”
If the film draws from his own experiences, he decided to make the film about a Kayla instead of a Kyle because the young men seemed more interested in talking about video games instead of their lives as the women did.
“I think at that age boys
haven’t gotten there emotionally and are just more talking about their interests. I just think at that age girls are a little more self-aware,” he recalls. “I just think that culturally they’re being asked to be self-aware much earlier than boys. It just appears that on average girls are asking deeper questions than boys are. And that was what kind of confirmed by meeting 300 of them. I don’t know why, but that seems to be the case.”
TOO REAL
Curiously, getting things right earned the movie an R-rating. Unlike something that might air on one of Disney’s youth channels, the youngsters in Eighth Grade have zits and refer to dangerous activities that even some adults shouldn’t do. They also use language that isn’t any worse than what I heard growing up in rural Kansas, but the Motion Picture Association of America has given the film a rating that might prevent real 13-year-olds from seeing it.
“It’s strange that Eighth Grade is R-rated because eighth grade is R-rated. It was my responsibility to try to portray a reality that was appropriate for kids and to portray a reality that kids could understand,” Burnham says.
Perhaps the Hollywood-appointed moral guardians were traumatized by a scene where a classmate
of Kayla’s is playing with the rubber bands in her braces. “I can remember my brother picking out hot dog buns from his braces. My brother got hot dog buns stuck in his braces a lot. Traumatizing image, yeah,” Burnham recalls.
It might be tempting to wonder if Burnham has weathered attacks on the blue language in his stand-up act or songs. In his 2009 special Bo Burnham: what., the comic reacts to a prerecorded computer voice that insults him using a homophobic slur. The audience in a San Francisco auditorium loves it.
“It was a slightly different time,” he recalls. “The world wasn’t on fire at that point. You know what I mean? I understand that some crazy stuff is going down, and people have their ears open trying to hold people more accountable or ask how did we get here? I have more patience for people’s lack of patience. The culture led us into a pretty insane direction in the last two years. I haven’t gotten any flack recently, so I guess it’s OK.”
Speaking of misconceptions and snap judgments, Burnham’s stand-up looks difficult because he performs with intricate lighting and sound cues and accompanies himself on keyboards and other instruments. In what., he drops a water bottle and a prerecorded voice reveals the slip was intentional. Without proper timing, the joke
wouldn’t work.
When asked about the challenge, Burnham says, “The show has a built-in safety net. If it goes wrong, it’s kind of part of the show. My show is about being up there, so I make a show of it.”
Despite his relative youth, Burnham has built up a long IMDB page. He has a role in The Big Sick, and he has directed stand-up specials for other comics. His latest is Chris Rock: Tambourine. Burnham calls the comic a “living legend” and “inspiring.”
“I really did sort of fall in love with filmmaking as I was doing stand-up, and I tried to conceive of my shows cinematically. I tried to introduce film grammar into a standup special if I could or if it made any sense. I just feel like making things prepares you for making things. I’ve been making things for a while, so that’s definitely helped me prepare to make this movie.”