The Social Media Disconnect

After snapping the photo, the girls walked off, staring at the phone as they did. They were probably checking to see if the lighting was right, if their smiles were big enough, if what they were doing was captured in the best possible way to show to potentially thousands of people. Mind you, we were at The Happiest Place on Earth™️, but these girls seemed more focused on capturing their happiness to show others, rather than truly feeling it.

This validation obsession we get from social media is something we all deal with every single day. We're capturing our lives in the most lush, pristine, edited moments that we can show to people who are also doing it right back to us. It’s almost a competition now, seeing who can construct the most appealing version of themselves, showing they’re having the most fun. But there’s no winner in this competition. No medals. Only a certain amount of likes and the occasional comment from the weird guy you met at Subway.

Then, you go back to your fairly dull life, which is almost everyone’s reality. Most people live a dull, anxiety-filled life where they feel unfulfilled. Even if you’re a famous celebrity, whose day is filled with interviews, red-carpet premieres and parties, you’re still probably human. And because of that, you still probably feel what most humans feel: insecurity, anxiety, loneliness, feeling disconnected from others, worried of the world's consensus of you. Social media is our new way of escaping those feelings, but at the same time, it magnifies them tenfold. 

I haven’t seen this subject manner handled correctly in film, until I saw Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade. In the new film, main character Kayla is finishing her last year of middle school—a middle school full of social media-addicted pre-teens with their phones in front of their faces. But to these children, and our hero, Kayla, this new way of life is all they know. They were born into it—they don’t know a world without it. So they Snapchat, they post photos to Instagram, they check Twitter. They follow, like, retweet, comment, share, subscribe—all words and actions now permanently engrained into their brains, Kayla’s included.

The only difference is, we see how this lifestyle is affecting Kayla. We see (and feel) her anxiety that's amplified by social media. How it’s the thing that gives her the most comfort, while being the thing that’s holding her prisoner—like Cerebral Stockholm Syndrome. We see Kayla making YouTube videos about “being yourself,” then see her painstakingly crafting the perfect photo to post to Snapchat with the caption, “Just woke up like this.” We see her make a video about putting yourself out there, then see her almost having a panic attack attending a fellow classmates pool party. And because we’re being shown these very intimate, raw, emotional moments, we relate to her. Because we’ve all lived her adolescent anxieties, and because of social media, I’d argue we never really grow out of them. 

Now, I don’t believe Eighth Grade is an anti-social media propaganda piece—far from it. It’s a modern coming-of-age film, written by a man who got his start posting videos to YouTube when he was 16, not too different from his main character's age. Burnham has lived this life and launched a career off of it. But because he was on social media at such a young age, you can tell that Kayla's anxieties in the film are funneled through his own. (Eighth Grade does not explicitly address mental-health issues, although Burnham has discussed his own struggles with anxiety and panic attacks.) It's clear that the reason this character feels so grounded and genuine is because it’s written by someone who’s lived it, who’s been in those trenches. It's not by some 50-year-old screenwriter who knows zero about modern teenagers, but for some reason is in charge of having them spew illegitimate bile out of their mouths.

No, Kayla is who she is because Burnham knows who she is, because she’s all of us. He’s smart enough to understand that what Kayla feels is what we all feel—and that no matter how “grown up” we claim we are, we all still feel self-conscious at a pool party. We all still feel awkward trying to make conversation with someone we just met. We all still want validation, to be loved by someone, or everyone. Eighth Grade shows us that we’re all like Kayla, in one way or another. It holds a mirror to its audience, exposing a raw nerve and showing the social media-driven behavior we don’t wanna admit that we enact behind the scenes. That we’re all alone, together, and that’s OK.