Virtual Realities SOCIAL MEDIA AND COMING OF AGE IN EIGHTH GRADE

The more honest among us will readily admit that our memories of our early secondary school years are riddled with awkwardness, acne and a lot of general confusion. Adolescence is a time when our friendships become complicated, our bodies betray us and the opinions that tend to matter most are those of our peers. Eighth Grade (2018), written and directed by YouTube star Bo Burnham, is a coming-of-age film that remains true to these themes. Where this narrative differs from those of films of the same genre from an earlier generation – such as John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985) and Sixteen Candles (1984) – is the way it portrays the trials of being a teenager in the digital age, a time in which nearly every important moment, staged or real, is recorded and published on social media. Set within this context, Eighth Grade is more than just an interesting example of a coming-of-age drama; it reflects a period in history when the construction and representation of teen identity (private and public) have become intrinsically entangled with and reliant on technology. In particular, it explores how contemporary teenagers obsessively engage with multimodal text – that is, text that communicates using a variety of modes, including audio and video – through their use of social media. As a film, Eighth Grade is entertaining as well as insightful; as a cultural document, it is both a snapshot of the zeitgeist and a window into the complicated ways in which a teenager builds their social identity, and the private gap or void that this construction can create. The film can thus be studied for its relatable characters and themes, or for its demonstration of the unique relationship that teens have with multimodal text as a means of engaging in creative acts of self-presentation and meaning formation.

A time of transition

The traditional coming-of-age narrative structure involves a metaphorical journey in which