Why Bo Burnham’s Inside is “The” Movie of 2021

Hey, all, it’s been a minute!

I haven’t been in a theatre to watch a movie since No Way Home and boy do I feel the FOMO. Licorice Pizza? Matrix 4? Tragedy of Macbeth? There’s a new movie from my new favourite franchise, Scream (no I haven’t watched anything beyond the first movie yet but I will get there)? I think it’s funny because I had a friend shout me out on Twitter and immediately gained like 50 followers or something and then proceeded to not post anything for about a month. Whoops! It’s a very weird time for movies! Things are simultaneously very open and also more closed than they’ve been since, like, the start of the pandemic. And it’s with this mood that I return to Bo Burnham’s Inside.

This looks much cozier than it should. Also how much does it take to frame this shot?

I first ran into Bo Burnham during high school at the recommendation of a friend. At that point, Bo was just starting to transition from an edgy early YouTube comic to a guy doing full-on shows with production and everything. From the beginning, he’s always been defined to me by his opening words in the song “Art is Dead” – “this song honestly isn’t funny at all, but it helps me sleep at night.” Burnham’s comedy sat on this razor-sharp wire between the sort of edgy humour that was the rage in 2012 and a perilously honest depiction of anxiety and depression. “My drug’s attention, I am an addict / but I get paid to indulge in my habit […] I am an artist, please don’t revere me / I am an artist, please don’t respect me.” In a way, Burnham sat on the edge of the future, predicting – or perhaps even influencing – Gen Z’s tendency towards layers of irony and self-reflection covered in a veneer of humour. In 2016 he put out his special Make Happy which perhaps got him closer to bald-faced depictions of his mental illness than ever before. His big conclusion to the show is a semi-stream of consciousness rant inspired by a Kanye tour where he jokes about the size of Pringles cans and the stability of burritos. But then, halfway through the song, the building musical production strips away as he states “the truth is my biggest problem is you,” going on to encapsulate his nebulous relationship with the audience, wanting all at once to entertain the audience while being true to himself. “Come and watch,” he says, “the skinny kid with a steadily declining mental health, and laugh as he attempts to give you what he cannot give himself." While in a significant way, the performance of his anxieties is itself performance, there was always a sense of reality behind it. He ends the Make Happy finale with the simple words, “I hope you’re happy.”

Bo, putting himself in the spotlight, in a special where he talks about not wanting to be in the spotlight.

Eventually, Bo Burnham’s health declined to the point where he was having panic attacks on stage, and he pulled away from live comedy. He shifted towards film, often as an actor, but he did also write and direct the movie Eighth Grade in 2018, an absolutely delightful and haunting coming-of-age movie about modern adolescence. Eighth Grade hit the same tone between comedic and deeply reflective, presenting maybe the best exploration of middle school that exists in film? It’s anxious and awkward and lovely and suffocating and a perfect encapsulation of an awkward transition period in the human life. But mostly, Burnham strayed away from the limelight. By his own confession, he stopped for a few years to work on his mental health and himself – to the point where he was ready to write a new comedy special and return to the stage. And then March of 2020 hit and with it the pandemic that shut down the world.

Enter Inside, released at the end of May of 2021. Produced entirely during lockdown within Bo Burnham’s one-room guest house, Inside is a claustrophobic exploration of the collective mental state of the past few years. While it’s pitched as a comedy special, and it definitely has comedy, the majority of the special and especially the second half feel more like a slow descent into a cyclical whirlpool of madness. It’s filled from wall to wall with tableaus of loneliness and isolation, capturing an age where people are often forced or at least encouraged to turn towards social media in lieu of physical human contact. Behind all the glitz and glamour and genuinely impressive production is a story about how people live in the cultural malaise that is the year of 2021.

It needs to be said that all of Bo's fake instagram shots look needlessly beautiful.

Like he’s always done, Burnham taps pointedly into the well of internet culture. One song spends the majority of its length critiquing the vapidness of “white women’s Instagram,” only to peel back the façade with an image of a young woman writing to her deceased mother; “your little girl didn’t too bad / Mama I love you, give a hug and kiss to dad.” We live in an age of layers of personality; the mask we display on the internet that everything is fine, and whatever lies beneath that peeks through. One does not cancel out the other, they exist in tandem. Bo pokes out the absurdity of internet culture only to go back and give it meaning and remind the audience that these are people. This theme is encapsulated by the song “Welcome to the Internet” towards the end of the special, a song where The Internet is framed as a Disney villain coercing youths towards an environment of chaos of confusion where reality and unreality coalesce. “Welcome to the Internet!” the character says, “put your cares asides / Here’s a tip for straining pasta / here’s a nine-year-old who died.” There’s no barrier between the various landscapes of the Internet, everything is thrown at you at once at a break-neck pace. “Could I interest you in everything all of the time? / Apathy is tragedy, and boredom is a crime.” There is no slowing down from the barrage of ‘content.’ And while the internet has led to a lot of awareness about problems in the world, especially problems by those who have not traditionally had the voice to speak up, the internet also encourages a culture where everyone has to have their own opinion about said problems, leading to a paradox were many speak up about said problem only to draw attention to themselves.

"We've got a million different ways to engage."

Speaking the language of this generation, Burnham approaches the topic through fractal layers of irony. “Can anyone shut up about any single thing?” he asks, while aware that he himself is not shutting up. The song “Problematic” pictures this through a concentric set of apologies as Burnham at once tries to genuinely apologize for some of the more offensive humour of his past whilst also mocking the way that people often go about said apologies in the present. He pictures himself stretched on a cross of his own design, depicting the way people are desperate to look persecuted by modern culture. There’s a need to acknowledge the sins of the past while also to not idolize yourself within that acknowledgment while also shutting up and making way for more important voices while still clearly growing from your past. Burnham effortlessly depicts both the necessity of growth and the anxiety of this cycle, and the way people often still manage to make it all about them. There’s a sense of performative action; Bo often also critiques the way that people call on beloved brands to make sweeping statements of social change while still toeing the company line, ultimately accomplishing nothing. Much of the Western world is trapped in a state of stagnant progress, where people want to look like they’re making steps while also accomplishing as little as possible. And in the meantime, harvests die, people starve, and a global pandemic kills millions. Burnham’s special harrowingly depicts the way that global, systemic apathy leads to a state of hopeless, individual apathy.

Bo depicted on Bo.

Why the name “Inside?” As it becomes clear, the special isn’t just about being locked indoors. It bears noting, given the whole theme of cyclical irony and layers of reality, that Burnham wasn’t actually trapped in a one-room guest home for a year. He didn’t actually sleep there, amidst all his cameras and production tools. He wasn’t even actually fully alone, as he spent the time living with his girlfriend Lorene Scafaria. Rather, being “inside” becomes a metaphor for one’s own consciousness and mental health. In a world where everything is on fire and no one in power seems to care, a world in which physical contact is diminished and digital contact leads to miscommunication and chaos, a person retreats inside of themselves. “I was a kid who was stuck in his room,” he sings halfway through the special, doing anything he could to get out of it and run in the world. “Well, well, look who’s inside again / went out to look for a reason to hide again / well, well, buddy you’ve found it / now come out with your hands up we’ve got you surrounded.” This motif, which becomes a recurring musical hinge for the entire show, lays bare the drain on mental health a season like this brings about. Staying mentally locked indoors, locked behind the layers of your own subconscious, is not exactly a healthy place to be – but it feels safe. It certainly feels safer than stepping out and braving the risky, often chaotic world. And yet the world drags you out kicking and screaming. In “All on Me” he describes the core cruel irony of this special, that he was ready to go out into the world again and put on a special, but the onset of the pandemic sent him hurtling back into anxieties and illnesses he had grown from. “Am I right back where I started 14 years ago?” There’s a sense of total futility, that there’s no progress, only regression.

"Hey, what can I say? We were over due. But it'll be over soon."

Inside is ostensibly a comedy, but it’s hardly fun. “You say the whole world’s ending – honey, it already did.” Real or fictionalized, the end of “All on Me” feels like the depiction of a mental breakdown, with the character of Burnham grabbing the camera and dancing with it in handheld to intense bass lines. No longer a cheeky satire of the world and the internet, Inside become a depiction of the state of a lot of people in 2021 – lost, without guidance, and any certainty as to what the next month, nevermind the next year, will look like. The song prior to “All on Me,” “That Funny Feeling,” takes the form of a stripped-back acoustic song depicting the cruel ironies in the world. “A gift shot at the gun range / a mass shooting at the mall,” “the whole world at your fingertips / the ocean at your door.” The depiction of Burnham is at a loss to find any sense of hope in the world. Corporations and franchises continue to choke out mass media, real-world problems are shoved to the background, and nothing is accomplished. “If I wake up in a house that’s full of smoke,” he sings in his final song, harkening back to a joke from the beginning of the special, “I’ll panic – so call me up and tell me a joke.” Where he starts by questioning the validity of putting out a comedy special in the middle of a world crisis, he comes to the end and suggests, “actually, this is the one thing I have. This is the bit of light to keep my going. The special ends with Burnham stepping out of the guest house, only to find himself still in the spotlight, and the door to go back inside locked – and then cutting to Burnham watching himself… and managing a slight smile. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a glimmer of hope, that art can make this burning heap of a world just a little bit better.

For real, this thing is visually stunning. One man made this. That's insane.

Bo Burnham’s Inside is not pretty. It’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, and even it were it’s still a hard thing to sit through. But, for me, and for others I know, it’s become weirdly comforting. It’s good, sometimes, to see the worst of the modern world, to see all the collective unstated anxieties and fears of the world displayed in a tight 90-minute package. As I look back on 2021, a confusing, awful mess of a year, Inside feels like the movie that most encapsulates and represents this era. It’s not the best movie of 2021 – that right would probably go to Dune or Green Knight or something. But it definitely feels to me like the movie of 2021, the one that best depicts this year. It reveals the precise intersection between toxic internet culture, awful modern bi-partisan politics, and the mental cost that weighs in the balance of all of it. People are going to look back on this one for a while.