Eighth Grade Is An Exploration Epic
Kayla, the protagonist of Eighth Grade (2018), is an adventurer. Like cowboys exploring the west or astronauts going to space, she faces a great unknown that is difficult to prepare for and even harder to go through, adolescence.
There are few experiences more uncertain, or more volatile in their unpredictability, than being a teenager. Friendships are created and dissolved without warning or explanation. Bodies are stretched and bent as if reflected in ever-shifting funhouse mirrors. Emotions are blown-out and distorted so that getting a stain on your shirt is a worse fate than death and fighting with your parents is as banal as eating breakfast. It seems almost calculated that the period of time where you go through an unprecedented amount of physical, emotional, and mental changes all come at a time when you don’t have the life experience to put those things into a larger perspective.
Eighth Grade is a rare kind of exploration tale that revels in this time. This is not a classic western where a rugged man bravely ventures out into the unknown, fighting off attackers and weather and wild beasts. This is a tale where an insecure girl battles with her anxieties and insecurities, formidable foes that strike during pool parties and trips to the mall. Yet these internal antagonists are no less fearsome than the external ones. Anyone who has been to a middle school party knows that feelings of isolation are capable of shutting down any sort of rational thought pathways and make the act of taking deep breaths as impossible as scaling a rock wall. This time, much like an uncharted stretch of land, is filled with things that can, and will, hurt you, but we move through it nonetheless.
Kayla makes YouTube videos throughout Eighth Grade, and their content ranges from doling out advice about confidence to telling thinly-veiled anecdotes about her own experiences. These videos are more than just a map she creates for other people to follow, they are a solidification of who she wants to be in the present moment. When she advises her viewers on the benefits of “being yourself” she is addressing her insecurities with her own advice. Kayla’s attempts to reconcile her advice with her actions is one of the many ways she traverses identity development. She knows the kind of person she wants to be, but she is still figuring out how to get there.
There is no scene where this journey is more present than the pool party. We start by watching Kayla through her webcam, recording a video about “putting yourself out there” and posing the question, “where is there?” As we shift over to real life, Kayla is getting out of the car to go to a party hosted by a popular girl in her grade. As the voiceover continues, her inner pep talk booms through the speakers to highlight the conflict between her desire to take her own advice, and her desire to escape from the party entirely. This is the intense battle scene where our hero is up against a foe ten times stronger than herself, but here the villain is anxiety and the battleground is a social gathering.
As the narration continues, Kayla’s voiceover constructs an even more distant identity. She describes the pool party but with her perspective as that of the rich, popular girl (her imagined self) taking pity on the “weird girl” (her real-life self). As she explains why it is important to “put yourself out there,” she even acknowledges the kaleidoscope of different identities that exist in one person. “Movie you” is different from “Pool you” is different from “Party you” is different from “Weekend you,” and trying to figure out which one is the “Real you” (or even the closest to the “Real you”) is an unknown that Kayla grapples with during this monologue. By positioning her narrative self and her experienced self as different people, she dives further into exploring the different facets of herself.
To further the introspection on its journey into the unknown, Eighth Grade poses the question: do we have to leave behind our past selves to truly inhabit our future selves? As Kayla discusses in her video about growing up, “[Growing up means] you get to change things you might not like about yourself, and that’s good because change is a good thing.” Yet this idea seems to shift throughout the film. Sometimes, our past selves are not left behind through our own volition but shattered by others.
There is one scene where Kayla is alone in the car with a high school boy, and through a slow, methodical unfolding of a game of “truth or dare”, the boy starts pressuring her to take her shirt off. It’s clear that Kayla feels uncomfortable, and after a firm but fearful “No”, he eventually gives up, choosing instead to berate her with an acidic slew of ways people are going to make fun of her when she’s older.
There is a rupture that occurs during this scene, and the emotional aftershocks lead her to bound up the stairs upon returning home and break into sobs when she gets to her room. There is, unquestionably, a part of her past identity that is lost here. This is not the kind of identity development she was slowly carving away at with tactics that she wrote down in her notebook of goals: smile more, speak louder, make small talk. This is the kind of change that occurs from the outside in, and, unfortunately, is uncontrollable and unpredictable.
But loss is a necessary part of the exploration tale. Often that loss is tangible — a friend, a keepsake, a romantic interest. The protagonist must always continue on their journey without the safety from before. Yet the most common loss is intangible. Once on their paths, the characters cannot return to the homes from their past. Whether it is because the home has changed or they have, it is impossible to go back.
Kayla’s movement through adolescence does include some victories along the way. When she tells off the mean popular girls at the end of the movie, it’s clear that she has gained more confidence, and more importantly, that she has realized their friendship is not the kind of friendship she wants. However, if there was ever a past self that fully trusted high school boys, that didn’t immediately go on high alert when left alone in a car with someone, that past self is also left behind. Change isn’t linear, nor can it be filed within a dichotomy of “good” and “bad.” As she narrates in one of her videos, “the thing about growing up is, it’s going to happen.”
The closure of “great unknown” stories do not come from a final destination. Few films end with the cowboy settling into the new frontier, kicking up his feet, and making himself some tea, content to have seen every part of the new world. There will always be uncharted territory (the horizon, after all, literally does not end) but the journey we watched through the film was always about watching the character overcome through every hurdle thrown at them rather than discover everything there is to know. In one of the last scenes of the film, Kayla is at her middle school graduation, a marker that she will soon move on to the next frontier. Yet whatever her next journey will be, we know that she will be ready.
Michelle Cohn is a New York-based writer and pop culture enthusiast. She is tired. @michcohn
