Video killed the Hollywood star: will vloggers take over the film world?
Let Eighth Grade count the ways in which social media has warped teenage life beyond all recognition. Insta-envy, artificial vlog personas, painstakingly posed selfies, Snapchat etiquette – generally engaging more with your smartphone than any human, and still getting it wrong. But as well as highschool social intercourse, the film also marks how social media is changing the movies, and not necessarily for the worse.
Top-ranking vloggers, Instagrammers and YouTubers have begun landing insignificant roles in movies to no great effect. But Eighth Grade is the first time one of these upstarts has made it behind the camera in any meaningful way. Bo Burnham, its writer and director, became an online celebrity back in 2006, when he started uploading comedy songs, performed in his bedroom. YouTube hits translated into a Comedy Central deal, agents, standup specials and acting roles. Now Burnham has made a movie. And it’s a good movie, attuned to the pressures on its 13-year-old heroine (Elsie Fisher), who lacks Burnham’s verbal dexterity and internet savvy.
Meanwhile, that YouTube-beaten path from bedroom to movie set has received a massive boost from Steven Spielberg, no less. He recently announced that the role of Maria in his new version of West Side Story had gone to … Rachel Zegler? Exactly. Zegler is a 17-year-old whose highest-profile stage experience to date was her school production of Shrek. But Zegler has thousands of subscribers on her YouTube channel, where she’s been belting out pop covers and showtunes.
Performing to the camera is a part of everyday life for this generation, and a YouTube channel is a permanent showreel – edited, curated and subject to the demands of the medium to be sure, but for the time being, an authentic showcase for raw talent. Old Hollywood practices such as the “screen test”, the “audition” or the “talent scout” seem quaintly redundant in this new realm. It could spell the end for a whole tier of middlemen, not to mention that other notorious tool of movie-industry exploitation, the “casting couch”.
It doesn’t always go swimmingly, mind. Take Kian Lawley (3.4 million subscribers), who was working his way into movies on the back of his YouTube persona. He landed the boyfriend role in race-themed drama The Hate U Give. But then an old video resurfaced of Lawley making racist jokes. He was removed from the film and fired by his agents. YouTube giveth and it taketh away.
In its own gentle way, Eighth Grade is about that exact same disconnect between online and real-world identity. Rather than exploit his online celebrity like his peers, Bo Burnham chose to analyse it. He’s the right person for the job. Eighth Grade is out in cinemas on Friday 26 April