<nettime> Interiors

Films

Nearly a decade separates Aaron Sorkin’s brightly vindictive movie Social Network from Bo Burnham's *8th Grade* a hymn to teen

anxiety and panic attacks, a decade in which the psycho/social consequences of Zukerberg’s vision have come home to roost. Burnham

a former Youtube star and charmless stand up has in his big screen debut delivered a masterclass in the depiction of teen anxiety and

alienation refracted through the cracked (literally) glass of social media’s hall of mirrors. To my surprise (I was not a fan till now)its a match for

any of the post war coming of age classics from Catcher in the Rye onwards.

For anyone who has suffered from social anxiety this is a difficult at times excruciating movie to watch. In a New Yorker feature Michael

Schulman declared to Burnham that "8th Grade felt visceral in the way that adolescence feels when your in the middle of it.” To which

Burnham responds "I wish life was a little less visceral the "worst thing about a panic attack for me is that I feel more alive than I ever felt”. This

statement has all the looped ambivalence of the movie’s relationship to the ways ‘smart’ devices have insinuated themselves into every corner

of life no longer a separate ‘virtual’ realm, insertiability is total, this is the digital condition. Mission accomplished

If the movie does one thing it screams of the need to radically re-make the ideal of ‘participation’. An ideal that remains ubiquitous but utterly

transformed into zombie form. Filmically what is so arresting is that such psychological intenisty can coexist with such a lack of dramatic incident.

A simple visit to a teen pool party is made to appear as physically hazardous and traumatic as the body horror of any slasher movie.

One aspect of the film is its ability to use the confessional aspect of the youtube channel to embody the intense "interiority” of teen life. It is through

the medium of Kayla Day's (Elsie Fisher) youtube channel made up of stumbling motivational movies that we first introduced to Kayla talking about “how to

be yourself”. Unlike Burnham whose followers are in the millions Kayla has so few followers she is effectively talking to herself which of course is the whole

point.

This way of using the term interiority is taken from a piece by the novelist Zia Haider Rhamen in which he speculates about the difficulty film has in replicating

the first person dimension of the novel. He uses the example of the Great Gatsby. His argument is that in general film cameras show everything in the third

person, rather than from the vantage point of a particular character. But from a stance separated from any consciousness.” Rhamen argues that “If our

reading experience of a first person novel is substantially conditioned by the particular perspective of the character telling the story, (and when is it not)

then recreating that reading experience through the third person of film is impossible”. His point is that there is a basic difference between fiction grounded

in the *interiority* of characters on the one hand and film and TV on the other. One of the many achievements of 8th Grade is that it opens new doors to

demonstrate that this is no longer true.. if it ever was.

David Garcia