I remember my first zit.
Luckily, it was along my hairline, so it wasn’t super noticeable. To anyone but me. It was in seventh grade, when I didn’t want anyone to look at me anyway. I was that weird girl who wasn’t into makeup, so that wasn’t going to help anything either. So I solved the problem by poking and prodding at it until it exploded. Several times. Luckily the scar is gone.
Middle school is like a three-year-long zit. I think most of us feel that way. Our discomfort bubbles up in extremely noticeable places and finally when we “graduate” eighth grade – Pop! Goes the awkward. (And then high school is like chronic acne, but we won’t get into that right now.) It’s no secret that middle school is the most awkward, hormonal, and angsty time in most peoples’ lives. One minute we’re cute little kids who follow our parents everywhere with bright eyes and bushy tails and the next we are these weird trolls with BO and bad attempts at styling our hair.
It’s not easy. And Bo Burnham captures that in his indie flick Eighth Grade.
I would never, ever, ever go back to eighth grade, even if you paid me money. Sure, there were fun things about being that age, but mostly everyone just feels weird all the time. As the main character, Kayla puts it in the film, it’s like feeling nervous all the time, like waiting for a roller coaster, but all you’re doing it waiting. And like, okay, as the kids say, I feel seen by that.
Although this was filmed in 2018 and there are some differences, it definitely hearkened back to my own experiences as an awkward, shy fourteen-year-old. The cool thing when I was that age was being old enough to have a Facebook (unless you LIED about your age to get one earlier) and play cool games like FarmVille and one that had to do with like the mob or something. Burnham originally intended for the main characters to communicate via Facebook, but according to his star, 15-year-old Elsie Fisher, no one uses Facebook anymore. So their method of choice is Instagram DMs and Snapchat.
But while the medium has changed, the song remains the same.
There’s layers to middle school. You’re growing up, no longer in elementary school but not yet in high school, and your body and mind are doing weird things. As Kayla says, “It’s like, the middle.” And it is. That’s the best way to describe it. You don’t want to be treated like a kid anymore, but you still can’t drive yet, and maybe your parents don’t let you have a phone (when I was their age, I couldn’t, she said grumpily, sipping decaf tea in a rocking chair.)
It’s a time of deep self-awareness that you’ve never experienced before. As a kid, you’re just that – a kid. You do wild and dumb stuff all the time but it doesn’t matter – because you’re a kid. And transitioning out of childhood is rough. Not just because of zits.
Because it seems like everyone is staring at you – you become aware of how your face looks, how your body smells (which is usually bad) and what you wear. And I can’t imagine what it’s like with additional social media presence in kid’s lives these days.
After watching this, I begin to wonder if we’re making kids grow up too fast. You could argue that they grow up faster every year, but in 2019, they literally have the world at their fingertips. And I’m a total advocate for limiting screentime for kids and teens. There’s no reason they need to expedite their growing-up process.
But that doesn’t make peer-pressure and the need to be cool or popular any less real, with our without social media to perpetuate it. It’s a very real part of the middle school experience – and it sucks. But it’s a necessary part of who we are. In Eighth Grade, we watch a 14-year-old girl become more grounded in who she actually is, not just who people think or say she should be. She finds true identity in her family (namely her Dad, whom she’s embarrassed by, but who doesn’t have an embarrassing dad) and friends who are actually, like, friends.
I think this film is a good reminder of where we all came from – we were all awkward once. We all got lippy with out parents for no reason. We all felt like we needed to fit in. But what colors our experience now is that we’ve grown beyond that (hopefully? If you peaked in middle school I’m extremely sorry.) Spoiler alert: Kayla finds her way and does just fine. And we all did. We watch her knowing it’s going to turn out okay, as horrible as those three years can be.
Cuz it’s like, the middle. You know?
Audrey D. DeBoer 