“Bland, bloodless music ideal for elevators,” as the Los Angeles Times sneered upon release. “I’ve always loved that song, and I felt Enya had gotten a bad rap, because she’d been appropriated into what we think of as, like, massage music.” “I don’t love that it’s always been used as a joke,” he says. But even beyond that, we’ve been conditioned by decades of pop culture to think of “Orinoco Flow” as a punch line, something Burnham was well aware of when he set out to redeem it. Besides, there is something obviously waggish about Enya’s reverie on “sailing away” across a geographically impossible archipelago of pleasantly rhyming islands, paired to someone scrolling listlessly through social media. Still, we’ve been trained by countless commercials and Will Ferrell movies to find the retro needle-drop inherently funny - and “Orinoco Flow” is, as of October 15, now a hilarious 30 years old. “In screenings, the moment it came on, people would chuckle, maybe for just a split second,” Burnham says, though that certainly wasn’t his intention. “How can we feel the internet - not in a way that’s tongue in cheek and funny, but genuine?” Burnham turned to the song he says he “would listen to when I was in eighth grade, to feel bigger than I was, to feel deeper and more exciting.” That song is Enya’s New Age pop hit, “Orinoco Flow.” “I wanted so badly for the sequence to feel spiritual, and not like ‘hacking into the internet,’” Burnham tells Vulture. In this wordless swirl of Snapchat filters, Burnham captures the peculiarly hyperengaged detachment of the Extremely Online generation, like an update on Dustin Hoffman drifting aimlessly around his family’s pool in The Graduate to “The Sound of Silence.” And Burnham gives the scene its own, similarly indelible soundtrack. It’s a mesmerizing and especially poignant moment in a movie full of them - the scene that feels most likely to be placed in one of those time capsules Kayla’s school is so obsessed with. But director Bo Burnham gives Kayla - and everyone else - one much-needed breather: After a tough day at school, Kayla retreats to her bedroom and the ambient glow of her MacBook, where her slackened face floats through a comforting abyss of Instagram selfies and BuzzFeed quizzes, hoping for the abyss to click “Like” back. It is a persistent, low-level hum that trails its 13-year-old protagonist, Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher), in the fluttering electronic heartbeats and 16-bit synth blares of composer Anna Meredith’s score. Eighth Grade is a film permeated by anxiety.
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