Bo Burnham: Inside

 2021, d. Bo Burnham - Netflix

The pandemic has been hard on everyone, some more than others.  There will be piles and piles of "our COVID year" content pouring out.  We've already covered films like Locked Down and Songbird which use the pandemic and various restrictions applied to it as their setting, but struggle to fully capture the weight of it.  Reality-based productions like the Borat sequel and How To with John Wilson also had the pandemic interrupt their productions, and I think it's only the latter with its eye-on-self lens really got to the heart of it.  Saturday Night Live at Home gave the long-in-the-tooth sketch show a real shot in the arm before vaccines were a thing yet, allowing the individual voices of its creators to shine through in a way they're rarely allowed to do on the show.  It wasn't all fantastic, but it was relatable, and in a way, made being locked down a little easier, a shared experience.

If anything, How To... and SNL show the power of the personal touch, and they highlight that it's not scripted content that's going to tell the story of the pandemic. At least, not right now.

Bo Burnham is this comedy/musical comedy wunderkind, bursting onto the scene in his mid-teens 15 years ago, and if his massive success wasn't already a force to be reckoned with, he recently wrote and directed the multiple award winning Eighth Grade and also directed both Chris Rock and Jerrod Carmichael's latest comedy specials, on top of costarring in last year's Promising Young Woman.  But if his star wasn't already bright enough, Inside is basically Burnham going supernova.

Fitting somewhere between a concert film, experimental documentary, and bedroom recording, Inside is a feature-length comedy set from Burnham using all the tools at his disposal... and Burnham is the Swiss Army Knife of content creators.  For Inside Burnham is performer, writer, director, editor, lighting, sound mixer, stage hand, key grip, best boy, cinematographer, set design, wardrobe artist... just everything.  It's all him, and it's all so, so precise.  

The setup of Inside is that Burnham is going to use his time trapped inside during the pandemic lock down to create content.  This is both that content, and the journey of creating it.  What this would have been were he making it for the stage as a touring comedian, it's hard to say, but it would be very different for sure.  He clearly needed to rehearse his songs before committing them to film, but it's not just playing the music, creating the backing mixes, but it's also his sometimes intricate light shows, or doing a duet with a sock (puppet? no, just a sock), or specific physical movement (not quite dance...), or in-camera effects...or a combination of any of these...and much more.  And there's such precision, it's so abundantly clear that Burnham is a perfectionist.  As accomplished and funny as his songs are, as endearing and entertaining a personality he is, as insightful and thoughtful his commentary is, foremost what stands out is his skill as a director, as the grand orchestrator of all of this. And it shouldn't be something you notice, but it is, because it's such an accomplishment.

It is the content that it's all about.  Creating content.  Made during the pandemic in one room, during a massive shift in our understanding of race and gender and politics, content seemed a tricky thing, especially for, as Burnham points out, a white guy.  What does he have to say about any of it?  Does it even matter?  He struggles with the fact that he has a voice when so many others do not, and in having a voice what is his responsibility with it?  But that's the early worry... that his voice perhaps doesn't matter right now, but also that he has a drive to create content so what should he actually say?

As the pandemic moves on, his beard and hair grow longer (there are stark examples between songs/set pieces of his beard and hair noticeably longer, intoning just how much time and effort went into rehearsing and perfecting each piece) his content starts focusing more on both the personal - loneliness, his mental health - and the existential. 

He has moments of deep depression fueled by anxiety and doubts that wind up in confessionals, where he conveys the most concise but impactful message about suicide prevention:
"..If I could kill myself today and be dead until, like, 18 months from now, I would do it, but, alas, when you kill yourself you're dead forever."
It's a statement that gets to the heart of whatever it is that's troubling and seems inescapable... that the troubles are often temporary.  And that, hell, 18 months from now, anything could happen, things could be so much different, if not better.

He has a brilliant number about the internet, how perfect and yet insidious it is that it exists. He has a super elaborate music video accompanying his song "White Woman's Instagram" that is ready to be memed and thirst tweeted.  His songs often feel like Weird Al's best pastiches, (at one point he draws a ven diagram with Malcolm X on one side Weird Al on the other with himself in the middle), so it's clear the Weird one had a big influence on him, but it's not a crutch he needs to lean on.  His final three numbers are earnest and each kind of wrenching in their own right.  The music in this lead me to believe that Burnham's next big writer/director project needs to be a big budget original musical.  He's got it in him both as a songsmith and a visual stylist.

I know I'm making this sound like a very heavy "comedy" special, but it's also immensely funny, with some supremely silly bits like Burnham doing a "live play" of the Inside video game - press "X" to cry, or Burnham doing a youtube-style commentary on the song he *just* played, which then becomes a commentary of the commentary of the commentary.  But all of it is grounded in the self.  All of it is a deep expression of who Burnham is or what he thinks about the world around him at this time.  

I related to all of it.  At one point Burnham marks the transition from his 20's as the clock hits midnight and he's 30 years old.  I just turned 45 today, as I write this, and despite the 15 year age gap, the thoughts and feelings, the doubts and anxieties about himself and the world are not exclusive to Millennials.  Also the drive to create, but the self doubt that goes into it.  The fact is there are people like Burnham who are so driven they push past it, but then people like me who can't get outside their own head.

It's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant work of art.  We haven't seen anything like this before, a film this personal, this individual, and yet this technically accomplished.  It's not stand-up comedy, it's not a documentary, it's not a bedroom recorded album, it's not a scripted feature, it's all of these things and more. It's a soul laid bare on film, but put there with the express purpose to entertain.  And you get entertained, but you also can't avoid the soul.