Bo Burnham's Inside and Finding Beauty in the End of All Things
A lot of folks in Hollywood have been trying to make movies/shows/whatever-tickles-their-fancy about the COVID-19 pandemic. And almost every single one of those projects has been rejected outright by the general public. The clear disconnect between the pandemic perspectives of these Hollywood creators and the audience makes these projects unpalatable. After all, one group is wealthy, powerful, and minorly inconvenienced by having to take a break from work, while the other is dealing with unending tragedies and the struggle to survive financially and physically. Naturally, attempting to make a devastating natural disaster into a profitable piece of media leaves a pretty bad taste in the audience’s collective mouth.
And yet, from the very beginning of his career, that kind of disconnect with the audience is exactly what Bo Burnham has been trying to cultivate. His stage persona is exactly that concept of a rich white man, who looks down on those looking at him and isn’t afraid to offend in order to push them away emotionally. It’s a layer that keeps him separated at a supposedly safe distance from that audience.
Now, all that’s gone. In his new special, Inside, all pretense has been stripped away. In his own words, “it’s just [him] and [his] camera, and you and your screen. The way our Lord intended.” And it’s in that intimacy, that complete vulnerability and honesty that this “comedy special” quickly transforms into a deeply upsetting, but wildly accurate, depiction of a creator’s life during the pandemic.
Before the pandemic even began, the question of why on Earth someone would be a comedian at this fraught time was already a huge theme of Burnham’s work. But this theme, which was just poked at a little in songs like “Straight White Man”, is now the focus of Inside. How can we kid around with everything happening every day? And is there any truth to all those old sayings about art being a healing force anymore? How can that possibly be?
This feeling of helplessness was a common thread for most of us during 2020. How could the work we did on a daily basis possibly make a difference? Whether our work was in art, like Burnham, or other fields, like technology or communications or whatever have you; our day-to-day routines were revealed to be purely artifice. It felt impossible to make a difference as we sat at home, separated and staring at our work screens for eight hours until we could stare at our fun screens.
Well, they were supposedly fun screens, because through those we watched every single societal system crumble around us. America was led by a rich fool who cared only for increasing his wealth and not at all for our well being. Cops murdered people in the streets, on camera, and many of them got away with it. The ice caps continue to melt as the world slowly self-destructs. And the people in power could not have cared less about any of it. They still don’t.
Yet, with rare exception, we kept sitting alone. Watching screens. Working, even though it could not possibly feel more useless. Each and every one of us becoming the real-life manifestation of the “this is fine” dog meme.
This weird life definitely took its toll on many of us, and despite his status as a wealthy white man in entertainment, Burnham is decidedly among those who suffered mentally from this dichotomy. This becomes clear as soon as the special starts, as the content warning on the top left of the Netflix layout screams the word “suicide” at you before Burnham can even begin to hint at his mental state. Not that his “hints” are any more subtle than that really. He directly says that his work is the only thing stopping him from ending it, then jokes in his song about turning thirty, and that he’ll just wait ten years until he’s forty and kill himself then.
In his younger days as a comedian, Burnham would have made light of this kind of thing. He’d make an emasculating, self-deprecating joke about his mental health and his emotions, then move briskly on to make sure the audience didn’t dwell too much on that dark bomb he’d dropped in the middle of the show. Now, though, Burnham stops the momentum dead and makes you sit in the discomfort, in one of the darkest confessions a human being can make, smack dab in the middle of a Netflix comedy special.
The second half of theshow becomes an even deeper dive into all that good stuff, as multiple different parodied mental breakdowns come one after another: the streamer parody, his song about feeling like shit, a song about how the Internet is the source of all our collective woes, the panic of realizing the work is nearly done.
Then, the coup de grâce of it all: the double whammy of “That Funny Feeling” and “Eyes On Me”. The former: a beautifully melancholic look at living through the end of the world. The latter: a sobering cry for help that would leave anyone a little shook. There’s something intensely sobering about watching the boy I once watched perform “Rant”, a song full of rage and fury against the hypocrisies present in modern Christianity, now brought to his knees as an adult, begging the audience to pray for him. The song is a dizzying, climactic moment of someone trying so desperately to find any meaning in the end of the world.
And there isn’t any. At least, not that Burnham can find. Yet, the journey of reaching that conclusion is, in and of itself, the meaning. There’s innate value in the act of showing everyone that they were not and are not alone in grappling with the meaninglessness of life in the pandemic or, hell, just life in general.
Yes, it’s true that we, as a species, are heading directly for destruction. That is, if it hasn’t overtaken us already, like Burnham says. But in that journey, we aren’t alone, no matter how often it feels like we are. No matter how long we spend cooped up inside, our emotions are the same. Inside has felt so meaningful to so many of us because there’s beauty in finding solidarity, even if that solidarity is at the end of all things.
The songs from Bo Burnham’s Inside are now available on various music streaming services.
