REVIEW : Bo Burnham - Inside
On a podcast, back in 2016, Bo Burnham talked about his overall disappointment with mainstream culture. His advice to the world was simple: Stop posting every day, stop creating "content" (a concept he hates). Disappear from the public eye and make something exceptional that will blow everyone away… In other words: “Try harder.”
At the time, he had just released Make Happy, a live stand-up special where his usual blend of absurdist comedy and humorous piano tunes culminated in an unexpected coda.
Conceived as a parody of Kanye's rants from the Pablo tour, the song Can't Handle This was dissecting mundane fast food annoyances before letting the mask crash down. For the first time since his not-so-humble beginnings as a YouTube wunderkind, the comedian was addressing the crippling anxiety that plagues his creative process, and the vulnerability he feels as a result of living his life in the limelight.
Jumpcut to last week when, after a period of 5 years spent largely away from comedy, Bo Burnham is back with a Netflix special he shot entirely by himself, in a one-room bungalow. Simply titled Inside, the film blurs the line between the documentary and the one-person show.
I'll spare you the platitudes. Inside has been dissected ad nauseam in the past week, and a simple Google search will return some much better critiques and Easter egg hunts than what I could offer.
The only thing I can do here is write about how much this special means to me.
When people started posting about Bo Burnham’s new special, I had a hunch that I would probably enjoy the new Netflix show. What I didn't anticipate was that Inside is an Oops-All-Goosebumps type of movie. Following his own advice, Burnham has created a true masterpiece, a patchwork of musical numbers directed with ingenuity that manages the impossible: To be both funny and transforming. It's not taking any easy exits or cop-outs. It's a show about alienation, heavy depression, and doom.
I would say these are underlying themes, but they're right there at the surface, at every moment.
A great example is the musical number How the World Works. It starts off as an optimist - albeit naive - kid show song about the equilibrium of the ecosystem, before tipping in some extremely lucid social rhetoric. when we're introduced to Socko, a hand-puppet that has more in common with Adam Curtis than with Kermit the Frog.
The songs of Brett McKenzie meet the twisted universe of Hans Teeuwen in a sketch that exhibits the power dynamics at work in our late-stage capitalist society through a lean back and forth between the singer and his prop.
Every song in the special has this level of depth, those about-face moments where something unexpected is revealed. This ironic push-pull where he can defend progressive ideologies while exploiting their flaws, arguing a point and its opposite, never settling for righteousness.
The song Comedy exposes the futile narcissism of using art as a mean of societal change while it does, well… exactly that. White Woman’s Instagram is a nihilistic look at the shallowness of the social media façade… until it becomes a humanistic ode to how hard it is to grapple with death and the loss of a loved one. Problematic acknowledges the need for what has been recently referred to as a “cancel culture”, while also mocking its shortcomings.
To say more would be to ruin the fun of discovering all those mind-fucks, one after the other.
All I can say is that, as an artist, Inside has made me re-think songwriting. In the past decade, an increasing amount of pressure - whether internal or external - has pushed musicians to fit the molds of the music industry, at the fear of being left behind. I have experienced that first-hand, I can tell you. Bo Burnham's special has taught me to be more centered and to have the courage to listen to my intuition rather than try to please whatever algorithm or playlist curator.
Burnham has also shown us that a songwriter can be just as immediate as a stand-up comedian in their process, and that you don't have to dumb down your ideas and retell the same generic love story, over and over again. You can use your medium to explore new ideas and let ideas or sketches evolve organically in a challenging work of art.
The heartbreaking monologues and the glimpses we get of Bo Burnham between the musical numbers also add to the songs themselves, putting them in context, making the whole thing more human, involving the public in an ever-growing tension that we can't be indifferent to. It’s like a meta-musical where the story arch has been replaced with a post-modern look at life under lockdown.
I'm not done re-listening to the song, re-watching the special, peeling its many layers. In the past week, I've been obsessed with Inside the way I haven't been obsessed with a song cycle for years.
The last thing I'll mention, for now, is that, beyond all the sadness expressed here (and boy do I relate, don't get me started), beyond all the mental health struggles and the depression, I think Inside documents of a young adult becoming a grown-up.
There's something really touching about seeing Bo settle in his natural, lower voice register and transform in front of our eyes, both psychologically and physically. If his goal was to disappear in the shadows and re-emerge with something exceptional, mission accomplished.