Cory's Reads #7: Stepping Back Inside
After two and a half weeks, I'm back! And after five years, so is Bo Burnham.
I picked a bad time to disappear.
Don’t get me wrong, the last two and a half weeks have been among the best of my life.
We began in Jackson, WY, hiking through the nearby Grand Tetons National Park. We then traveled north to Yellowstone National Park, before continuing towards Glacier National Park. After Glacier, my friends and I drove westward, making a pit stop in Couer d’Alene, ID (as well as nearby Silverwood Theme Park) and eventually arriving in Seattle, WA. After a few days exploring Seattle and its nearby national parks (an unsurprising thumbs up for Mt. Rainier, a disappointed thumbs down for Olympic), my group drove a few hours south and reached our final destination. Portland, OR quickly entrenched itself as my favorite American city, a stunning amalgamation of greenery and gastronomy. Its streets lined with food carts, thrift stores, breweries, and bookshops, Portland (and to be fair, the Pacific Northwest at large) enchanted me in a way the great outdoors hasn’t done in a long, long time.
But the trouble with being outside is that you can’t watch movies there (I suppose there are drive-ins, but even then you are technically inside your car...right? I’ve never been to one; is that how they work? Someone explain drive-ins to me!). My friends and I did make a quick detour indoors to view Janicza Bravo’s Zola, a simple yet fun little film, but we otherwise dedicated little time to consuming the plethora of new and exciting entertainment that arrived in the last several weeks.
Of course, that’s not to say I haven’t watched some great stuff in 2021. Pixar’s Luca is surprisingly straightforward and sweet. HBO Max’s Hacks is the greatest television series I have watched in 2021, all but guaranteeing an Emmy win for Jean Smart. I am loving the Loki miniseries on Disney+, and already laughed my way through the entirety of I Think You Should Leave‘s second season. But the most exciting piece of media released in 2021 is the same one that everybody is talking about. Is it a movie? A TV show? A bird? A plane? At its core, Bo Burnham’s Inside is a comedy special, but that label feels incomplete. It did just receive an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Variety Special, alongside such works as David Byrne and Spike Lee’s American Utopia, or Dave Chappelle’s 8:46, but there are some glaring differences between Inside and its fellow nominees. Inside‘s most immediate distinction is its lack of a stage. Of course, those who have seen the special know that even this aspect of the work is not so simple. Still, Burnham’s special is unlike its contemporaries in that it is not a recording of a singular performance. Rather, it is a carefully constructed series of songs, sketches, and soliloquys, all captured within the confines of Burnham’s apartment during the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet, Inside somehow feels more like a piece of theater than similar works that actually take place onstage.
Like all great art, Inside is keenly aware of its own constructedness, and engages with its fragile foundation to dizzying yet delightful effect. And from this delicate space between fact and fiction, performance and personal essay, emerges a profound reflection on not just the sociopolitical state of our world, but the pernicious ways in which we have internalized our environment. Indeed, Inside is filled with contradictory truths. As Burnham bares his heart and soul to viewers, one can’t help but wonder whether his deteriorating mental health is a product of his own personal surroundings, or the broader political and cultural landscape he so cleverly lambasts. The result is one of the most relatable products to come out of the COVID-19 era, and while I still remain skeptical of future pandemic-inspired pop culture, Inside is a welcome meditation on the seemingly irrevocable damage of the last several years.
In truth, I envy Burnham. He stole my thunder! So much of what he discusses in Inside resonates with some of my previous work, namely his concerns over growing media oligopolies and the responsibilities of artists in today’s entertainment landscape. Unfortunately, I don’t have the musical chops to churn out my own Netflix special, but if you watched Bo Burnham’s Inside and thought I wouldn’t cover it here, you are kidding yourself.
Consider the following excerpt from Burnham’s special:
I don’t know about you guys, but um...you know, I’ve been thinking recently that...that...you know, maybe, um...allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit...you know, maybe that was, uh, a bad call by us.
Maybe...maybe the...the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a...lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody except for...um, you know, a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley...maybe that as a...as a way of life forever...maybe that’s, um, not good...
I’m...horny.
Well, that just about sums it up, doesn’t it? Therein lies the beauty of Inside. Burnham articulates some pretty insightful critiques of our cultural climate, but is careful not to establish himself as some sort of cultural proprietor. He’s horny! And therefore, he is reliant upon the same corporate culture he hopes to avoid. Much of Inside deals with how our pursuit of pleasure in all forms binds us to our corporate captors and handicaps our ability to effect any meaningful change. Worse, it erodes our enjoyment of that pleasure until all that remains is a fragile sense of self, increasingly reliant upon those illusory artifacts of pleasure dangling in front of our faces. Instagram feeds and Tinder matches and one-day deliveries from Amazon Prime. They’re all dollar bills attached to fishing line, and we can’t get enough of the chase.
Cheery stuff, I know.
I’m particularly fond of Burnham’s own characterization of this cruel new world, in which he likens our dependency upon the virtual realm to a coal mine: we only participate in reality so as to “suit up, gather what is needed, and return to the surface.” This chilling metaphor comes moments before Burnham busts out an acoustic guitar and strums my favorite song from Inside, entitled “That Funny Feeling.” Its lyrically hilarious, but also overwhelmingly glum. The song is perhaps the most direct bridge Burnham builds between his internal struggles and the external crises plaguing global society. In between ludicrous references to mass shootings and “revolutionary” apparel at the GAP, Burnham acknowledges his dance with depression, and even suicidal thoughts. It’s a devastating admission, but perhaps also an inevitable one in a world so heavily catered towards instant (and illusory) gratification. To be perfectly honest, “That Funny Feeling” put words to a feeling I had felt throughout the pandemic, and continue to struggle with today. I spend so much of my time at home yelling at my family about how fucked the world is; I almost get excited about it. And yet, I spent the last year slipping deeper and deeper into a depression for which I was not remotely prepared. When you are as angry and jaded towards the world as both Burnham and I seem to be, it is only a matter of time until you reorient that aggression towards yourself.
Inside is far from the first work of art to warn us of our impending societal doom; you can listen to a podcast for that. But the special is, well, special because it hauntingly connects these developments with our own personal mental health crises. If the climate crisis or wealth inequality don’t scare you, perhaps your own waning sanity might? We can debate individual political and cultural issues all we want, but these things will wreak havoc on our psyches and our souls regardless. And if this much is true for a privileged white celebrity like Burnham — a label he acknowledges and interrogates with songs like “Comedy” and “Problematic” — I can’t even imagine the mental toll on poor and working class people worldwide. It’s no secret, after all, that those in lower social classes experience higher rates of mental illness.
Of course, Burnham’s own struggles remain valid. As do yours. As do mine. Burnham, either maddeningly or brilliantly or both, constantly undercuts his own pain in Inside. In “How the World Works,” Burnham, via sock puppet, questions why “rich fucking white people insist on seeing every sociopolitical conflict through the myopic lens of [their] own self-actualization?” This line of questioning is worthwhile in a cultural age where white women like Robin DiAngelo are able to accrue a seven-figure income by comforting white people in their pursuit of being anti-racist. But it’s also not a very compassionate consideration. Much of Inside makes it clear that Burnham is hurting, yet part of that pain stems from this perspective of his pain as invalid or unimportant relative to the many other hardships faced around the globe. Socko’s interrogation maintains a kernel of truth, but it fails to recognize the inertia of depression and anxiety. Burnham is “just trying to become a better person,” and while we can all understand this as a privileged position, it’s also a human one.
It is unclear where Burnham himself actually stands on the issue. There are at least five different iterations of “Bo Burnham” throughout his latest special. In “How the World Works,” Socko seems to be the voice of reason, but Burnham ultimately asserts his dominance over the bizarrely woke sock puppet by the song’s end. But can we even recognize this version of the comedian as genuine? There is an obvious facetiousness to his character here, and the break into any one song in Inside suggests an entry into a sort of separate fiction. In between these songs, we get Burnham communicating with us directly, lamenting how lonely he feels, or how long it has taken him to complete this project. This feels like Burnham at his most authentic, but it still exists within the constructedness of the special. Inside ends with Burnham finally leaving his apartment, only to reveal that he is on a stage in front of an audience. It’s a mesmerizing finish, reminiscent of Nathan Fielder’s “Finding Frances” or Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters. But if Burnham himself considers Inside to be a performance, a ruse, can we still believe in the wealth of emotional vulnerability and cultural insight offered in the previous 80 minutes?
The answer is a resounding “maybe.”
Even as Burnham reflects on his genuine past in “Problematic,” we have to keep in mind his words from just a few minutes prior: “self-awareness does not absolve anybody of anything.” The Massachusetts native acknowledges every possible contradiction, loophole, or inconsistency in his story, going so far as noting how even such acknowledgment may be futile. Inside therefore threatens to collapse in on itself, and some might find it frustrating for that reason. But the special’s uncertain nature makes room for one of the more complex ruminations on art and artistry in recent memory. By establishing himself as a performer, a comedian, a musician, a human, a hairy hermit, a fitness guru, a sock puppet, a white man and a white woman, Burnham wonders aloud about what his role as an artist truly is, and what impact his art can truly have.
These concerns take on particular urgency in today’s cultural climate, where art is under unique pressure to effect change, despite it being harder than ever to do so. Burnham’s political insights in Inside are nearly commonplace at this point, as evidenced by the special’s home on Netflix! But if Netflix is so comfortable indulging our anxieties about the “pedophilic corporate elite” or how our “fucking phones are poisoning [our] minds,” those insights may not be as controversial or as revelatory as we previously thought. That may sound promising, suggestive of real change being made, but it more likely suggests that corporations like Netflix are eager to obtain these ideas and repackage them for us via pop culture. For as much as I love Bo Burnham’s Inside, it still can’t escape the “screenshottable” nature of every other Netflix Original. New media artifacts are designed with digital utility in mind, and that’s likely something to which we’ll all have to adjust. But when it comes to art like Inside, directly interested in exposing and interrogating this exact dynamic, it can be harder to forgive. If Burnham’s ideas about class and culture are popular enough to be appropriated for TikToks and memes, then why are we still right where we were before the special ever entered our cultural atmosphere?
I don’t mean to suggest that any one piece of art, or even several, should be held responsible for our political and social failures. Indeed, I am only echoing Burnham’s own concerns. He too questions the efficacy of a special like Inside, joking that he is “making a literal difference metaphorically.” To be fair, that is the best we can expect from any piece of art nowadays: to make us feel less alone in a world custom-built for isolation. Not much may change, but how we feel just might.