EIGHTH GRADE (2018, written & directed by Bo Burnham, starring Elsie Fisher)

maybe i like this.

i don't think weird al is a good point of comparison. these aren't parodies, this is a singer-songwriter project. the topical comedy stuff gives way really quickly to concerns that are wholly personal. the former is almost always just a premise.

the best part of the special might be the sequence following "unpaid intern," where he does that meta-trick, overlaying his commentary on the song, then his commentary on the commentary etc, each new layer disavowing what he had just said before, apologizing for it. that sense of paralysis -- or shame, really -- at the fact that everything he says is really just a projection of his own insecurities and need for attention.

i feel like there is a central fear at the heart of this project, which is that he is only able to care about the larger world insofar as doing so allows him to receive praise from others. (performative politics):

You say the ocean's rising like I give a shit
You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did
You're not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried
Got it? Good, now get inside

i think the kind of isolation he is exploring in this special is a lot bigger than just, like, covid/quarantine.

there is another part of the special where he talks about the real world only existing because it, like, provides an opportunity to document things for instagram, and that instagram feels "more real" than reality. this is a movie about drifting away from something and not knowing even what that thing is you need to get back to. all that's left is the feeling of being diminished and ashamed.

why do we keep posting st vincent lyrics

some of it seems a little cringe or on the nose

for sure

the funniest part was when he turned 30

forget Weird Al, these lyrics being posted are like a pretentious Mark Russell

i honestly didn't think any of it was especially funny.

the social commentary joke songs, like "how the world works" and "white woman's instagram" are kind of unbearable on their own. but the juxtaposition of this material with the more searching, psychological stuff is interesting. like the "white guilt" he says he feels early on isn't really that at all. he isn't just worried that he has no role to play in furthering the cause of justice -- i think the ending of the movie shows that sentiment is bullshit. it's at best a sublimation, or socially acceptable version, of his real fear, which is that he is a narcissist and everyone else is too.

I can think of at least one way he could have taken a principled stand against narcissism

good posts treesh

...his takes on early 21st century internet ennui are all just cliches tho?

i know this is kinda ‘the online miserablism knower has logged on’ of me to say but i feel like his depiction of why social media in 2020 is a hell of our own making was so generic, it felt like it was cribbed from old tweets rather than anything personal

maybe that experience is just really universal, so regurgitating tired memes *is* his genuine personal experience. if so, that makes me sad

i personally don’t relate to a lot of the cw about how twitter is a “hell site” and how instagram is so awful and commodified our lives. i see why ppl say that, and there are aspects of it that annoy me, but it also seems ahistorical and short-sighted (every era has people freaking out about new forms of media, and it seems quaint in hindsight to read people freaking out about like, how the radio has poisoned our minds) and also ignores a lot of the good parts of online

it feels like tired “trenchant social commentary” at this point, and didn’t bear the stamp of an authentic relationship to the internet imho. eighth grade seemed smarter in getting at that kind of relationship. i guess comparing his A24 movie with his ‘what if Nanette but Tenacious D?’ Netflix special isn’t fair, but i’m surprised the same person made both

https://imgur.com/Fxj8Myj

https://i.imgur.com/Fxj8Myj.png

Bo has begun his ditch trilogy

i don't think weird al is a good point of comparison. these aren't parodies, this is a singer-songwriter project.

― treeship., Saturday, June 12, 2021 10:17 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

weird al wrote originals too and they fuckin owned
bo uses a nasal voice that sounds like al to go into "funny songman mode"

i'm not trying to say that this is better than weird al, just that it's really different.

i personally don’t relate to a lot of the cw about how twitter is a “hell site” and how instagram is so awful and commodified our lives. i see why ppl say that, and there are aspects of it that annoy me, but it also seems ahistorical and short-sighted (every era has people freaking out about new forms of media, and it seems quaint in hindsight to read people freaking out about like, how the radio has poisoned our minds) and also ignores a lot of the good parts of online

i think this is valid. i am more of a cassandra about social media and i think the immersive parasocial nature of it can warp people's sense of reality and perspective. however, i don't think the value of this special lies in it saying anything new about these phenomena. what it does is describe the mood of online, feeling hyperconnected but increasingly alone, this grand and paranoid solipsism that *does*, to me, feel like the texture of our times. like how chekhov* described the particular loneliness of country doctors and schoolteachers in late imperial russia, burnham is trying to show our particular misery, not because it's new, necessarily, but because it's ours.

*i am in no way saying he is as successful as chekhov. the comparison is more about marking a distinction between what a sociologist or cultural critic does and what an artist does when it comes to describing and evaluating the times.

it's not at all a new theme either, not even in popular music. radiohead didn't think computers were "OK" either.

social media is not merely a "new form of media" despite the shared presence of the word "media"

what it does is describe the mood of online, feeling hyperconnected but increasingly alone, this grand and paranoid solipsism that *does*, to me, feel like the texture of our times

ya i agree w this. a lot of the shots of him just lying in bed half nude staring blankly at his phone were uncomfortably relatable lol

it is hard to get past how cringe some of the social commentary songs are. i tried to explain this special to my wife earlier today and put the soundtrack on when we were driving. by the time we got to the song about facetiming his mom, she just said, very gently, "this is really bad, sorry."

and she's right. that song sucks. and a bunch of others just seem like buzzy talking points. if there is any value in this, it only comes later in the special where the original schtick kind of gives way to something stranger, darker, more personal. i feel like this latter material shows up the former as a facade -- like it's actively working against it -- but some viewers haven't seen it that way.

i feel like the biggest influence on bo's sense of humour is seth mcfarlane

Lol

major Tonetta vibes on that turning 30 song

― Western® with Bacon Flavor, Thursday, June 10, 2021 9:24 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

ty this prompted me to check out the special, which is v good

xxp i believe he even admits it the special!

This was one of the most exhausting things I've ever seen

Simon otm about all the material working very hard to strike exactly the right tone. I was preoccupied with why he was presenting himself as a complete shut in. I doubt he spent the year quite so alone, or if he did the whole thing would've been much more interesting as an exploration of that. Odd to shout out unpaid interns and not the people bringing food to you. Or maybe the sock puppet was supposed to cover that off.

I doubt he spent the year quite so alone

learning (as I did via letterboxd) that BB apparently lived with his partner of several years through all this really did add an extra layer of "fuck off buddy" to my reaction

lol fuck this special

Eigth Grade did rule tho

All Eyes on Me, the new version without the skit, stands alone as a great song. Laurie Anderson vibes, and the lyrics, suggestive of digital anomie, are actually better without the surrounding movie, which overdoes the idea.

Burnham should just make an album of real songs, not joke songs.

“We’re going to go where everybody knows everybody” is a great start to the chorus. It feels like ILX to me.

“Hands down, pray for me”

Everyone itt made this sound shit and then the lyric that got posted in the we didn’t start the fire thread was far shitter than everyone made it sound, I was gobsmacked

Like if the Patricia Lockwood novel got bonked in the head by 30 falling coconuts in a row and then wrote a song

if you take this song, on its own, like T.S. Eliot would, just looking at how it hangs together internally, i think you will find that is good.

or perhaps not.

but this is my take, weeks later. much of the special is embarrassing but i like this one.

watched some pieces of this and dunno if I want to go for the whole thing. his sense of humor is very much like a bunch of Twitter accounts I eventually unfollowed, except it's presented as him singing it to you while nothing funny happens in the background. dude is definitely talented and interesting but I feel like this stuff is supposed to make me laugh at some point? like the "Welcome to the Internet" song, that sort of thing has been done a thousand times but it's so much funnier in the hands of someone like say Neil Cicierega.

re. "welcome to the internet," i think the line "a little bit of everything all of the time" is a good and pithy description of the internet. it captures the way it repels absorption -- you just end up skimming the surface.

there are flashes of poetic intelligence like that in each of these songs.

like, in "white woman's instagram" where he is just clowning on #basic ladies until, all of the sudden, he switches to a verse about how the curator of this instagram page misses her dead mom and wishes she could see she is doing Ok. it's good human moment -- like a lot of social media is just people aggressively trying to reassure themselves and their community, maybe their parents too, that they are OK. we just want to be OK.

i am very torn because i see the cringe too.

I'll probably never watch Inside but I kind of like this album! It's like a melancholy Weird Al?

If you like the album you should definitely watch the movie

i heard the special was good so i checked it out. "i made you some content" was funny but then a few minutes later i was like "wait, does he sing throughout this entire thing? i'm out"

treeship, we are having such similar journeys with this special and explaining it to our partners lol

if a special this successful has a sock giving marxist analysis i'm for it and don't care how cringey it is. also the "get your hands up" song is weirdly effective/sad and i agree that it's a good song and he needs to stop with the musical theatre vibe but also that's who he is, so whatever. he's not doing this for me. also more men should talk about their vulnerabilities around mental health in mainstream media

the only moment i actually laughed was when he said "is the guy big or is the room small" when he was being a twitch streamer playing his own life

Only made it partway through when it first came out. Went back to it tonight, in the middle of Omcrion, and got pulled into the first.

The Phoebe Bridgers cover of "That Funny Feeling" was a good entry point, taking the song without the Burnham persona.

In some specific ways (voice, vulnerability, specificity), parts feel like a mix of Johns Darnielle and Mayer (the Mayer of interviews more than his songs).

Anyway, works well, especially when we're still in that Inside zone for almost two years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEUl4DThSwE

*Went back to it tonight, in the middle of Omcrion, and got pulled into it.

i just realized the guy who did that thing i don't want to see made this. huh.

ignore that. the movie is much better than anything he's directly made as a standup, totally different vibe