This movie is about a girl named Kayla who graduates from middle school in 2017.  That makes her birth year 2003.  In 2003, another movie about a middle school girl, Thirteen, hit the art­house theaters.  The main character in that one started off as essentially a little girl, mocked for dressing like a Cabbage Patch Kid, but in short order fell in with a bad crowd and was soon stealing wallets, huffing gas duster, and blowing older guys.  And that was seventh grade⁠—this one’s eighth!  So this movie was sure to be that much darker, right?

Instead, it’s far milder.  If this had been rated PG, I would have expected that, but it’s rated R.  So I kept looking for plot threads that would justify that rating.  Kayla compulsively watches You­tube videos with makeup tutorials and whatnot⁠—so, she’s going to end up with body image issues and develop bulimia or start cutting herself or something, right?  Nope.  She hears that the boy she has a crush on pressures girls to send him nudes, and she takes this as a hint about how she might win his attention, letting it slip during a conversation with him that she has a fol­der full of lewd pictures of herself that she’s saving for her future boyfriend.  So this is going to end up with a “Kayla is humiliated when her nudes circulate around the school” story arc, right?  Nope, the folder isn’t even real, and that thread doesn’t go any­where.  Apparently the R rating is due to the fact that the word “fuck” is used on five occasions.  Because of that, the film was restricted in the United States to those seventeen and older.  In Britain, the required age was fifteen.  In Germany, twelve.  In Sweden, seven.  In Quebec, all ages were permitted.  Good thing they said “fuck” and not “tabernak”.

Not only is the content mild, but the tone is startlingly positive.  Eighth Grade uses the same trick I used in the interactive ver­sion of Photopia.  Alley is prodigiously bright and as about saint­ly as the bounds of realism will allow; to know her is to love her, or such is the aim.  But while in the book I’ve had 464 pages and counting to paint this portrait of her, in the interactive story I had a few sentences.  So the trick in that version was to have readers view her through the eyes of characters who already loved her: her doting father, a boy with a crush on her, a little girl who idolizes her.  In Eighth Grade, sure, there are a couple of Barbie doll types who don’t think much of Kayla⁠—but they don’t even bully her, just disdain her, and otherwise just about every character acts like she’s an angel descended from the heavens above.  Again, she has a doting dad (single, this time); at a pool party she meets a boy who develops a crush on her and seems like a good match, as they are similarly geeky; when she gets as­signed to “shadow” a high school girl to prepare for ninth grade, the high school girl turns out to be immensely kind and takes Kayla under her wing immediately, talking on the phone with her and even inviting her to the mall to hang out with her and her friends.  The difference is that Kayla is utterly ordinary.  Like, to a great extent that is the point of Eighth Grade.  It’s not a lurid tale of a girl who sets herself apart from her classmates by spiraling into delinquency.  It’s not a portrait of the future artist as a young woman, full of offbeat interests and a unique fashion sense but stifled by suburbia.  It’s about someone whose only “superlative” quality is being quiet, except she insists that even to call her quiet is off the mark.  She has no particular qualities and no interests other than scrolling through social media on her phone like all her classmates.  She even looks ordinary.  In an industry in which roles for teenage girls are cast by plucking models off the cover of Seventeen magazine, Kayla is a little pudgy, with a pronounced case of acne of the sort you rarely see on screen.  And, of course, above all else, she’s extremely awk­ward.  Except that doesn’t set her apart from anyone else, be­cause pretty much everyone in the movie is awkward in pretty much the exact same way: acting like the things you hope will impress others are stupid or embarrassing, transparently engi­neering “accidents” to put those things on display, etc.  This is realistic, but not revelatory.  Middle schoolers are awkward?  The Wonder Years built scenes out of that, more concisely than this movie does, thirty years before this movie came out.

And yet, Kayla’s dad gives her a long speech about how unspeak­ably awesome she is.  That’s fine⁠—he’s her dad.  But the movie it­self seems to expects us to agree, perhaps out of something akin to that parental pride.  “I invented this character! Ain’t she the best?”  Eighth Grade is less an examination of Kayla than a cele­bration of her.  Scene after scene is about Kayla successfully sum­moning the courage to do things like go to party where she’ll be an outsider, start a conversation with a boy she likes, try to make friends with some popular girls, tell off those popular girls when they snub her… the sorts of things that the protagonist of Ste­phen Bond’s Rameses would never go through with, Kayla does, pretty much without fail.  I mean, it’s not even a character arc: she displays the same courage in the beginning of the film as she does at the end.  So where does she summon this courage?  In his big speech, her dad says that “all the things I thought I was going to have to teach you⁠—how to be nice, how to share, how to care about other people’s feelings⁠—you just started doing that on your own. You know, your teachers would always say to me, ‘You’ve got such a lovely daughter. You’ve done such a great job with her.’ But I didn’t do anything.”  And that seems to be the answer here, too.  Kayla’s only hobby apart from looking at her phone is making Youtube videos in which she sits in front of a bedsheet and stammers generic tips for teens about putting yourself out there, getting to know people for who they really are, having a sense of optimism about growing up, etc.  These videos, we see, receive between zero and seven views apiece.  But apparently the real audience is Kayla herself.  She’s using dis­guised self-affirmation to pull herself up by her own bootstraps or some such, and you know, I think I like this movie less than I did when I started this article.  Bootstrap rhetoric is an ideologi­cal scam.

spoiler level:
   poblano

I once read an article in which Orson Scott Card passed along some advice he had once received from François Camoin, a writing instructor at the University of Utah: “When you have a word embodied in a story, the word itself should never appear.” Cory Finley seems to agree.  The word “psychopathy” is conspicuously absent from his movie.  And yet one of the characters explains right up front that “I don’t have any feelings, ever” and that she’s an expert on “watching and imitating other people’s emotions”.  This is Amanda.  And when she discovers that her friend Lily doesn’t like her stepfather, Amanda is puzzled as to why Lily doesn’t just murder him.

Even though I am not currently in a position that allows me to develop my own curriculum, every time I read a book or watch a movie I can’t help but wonder how I might teach it.  Thorough­breds looked to me like it might slot neatly into a unit on char­acter.  One the one hand you have Amanda, whose traits are very clearly defined.  On the other you have Lily, whose personality we need to re-evaluate after virtually every scene.  Like, I can ima­gine showing the first test prep scene and asking students to do a quickwrite in response to a very simple question: “What’s Lily like?”  And I can imagine the responses: she’s privileged, shel­tered, innocent, clearly very smart (home early from boarding school because she finished all her classwork!), compassionate (concerned that Amanda might be upset that a reading comp passage carries reminders of some yet to be revealed past trau­ma, before learning that Amanda doesn’t have the capacity to get upset), uneasy about Amanda’s forthrightness about things.  Some of these early assessments turn out to be accurate.  Some turn out to be wildly off.  This is a movie that makes us re-evalu­ate a lot of things as it unfolds.  For instance, one or two of the sharpest students might catch on that, wait, coming home early from boarding school because you “finished all your classwork” is not actually a thing.  But I blithely accepted it until it was shown to be false by one of the movie’s many backstory revela­tions, and then felt kind of dumb because, duh, of course that’s not actually a thing!  So while this is not going to be one of my favorites⁠—of all the directions the initial setup could have gone, “half-baked murder plot” struck me as disappointingly conven­tional⁠—thirty years ago it might have been, just for its narrative clockwork.

Hmm, looks like this is the first one from the 2018 batch that I bailed on.  It’s about a pair of actresses, one of them a playwright as well, who have failed to break into the Toronto drama scene and have instead found a niche delivering skits about sexual harassment and workplace safety in corporate conference rooms to audiences of maybe ten or twelve.  Promising premise, but after forty-five minutes no narrative momentum had gathered, and after a couple of conversation scenes with extremely artificial cadences, I’d had enough.

	comment on Tumblr	reply via email	support this site	return to the Calendar page