Inside Review (Film, 2021)

content warning: death by suicide (discussed a lot, it’s a large part of the film, please be safe), mental wellness, foul language

Inside is Bo Burnham’s first comedy special since 2016’s Make Happy. The special was written and filmed during quarantine in a single room in Burnham’s house. He served as the entire production team, filming, lighting, directing, editing, etc. the entire project.

I’m not the target audience for Inside and that’s okay. I’m aware of Bo Burnham. Until watching Inside, I had seen more feature films he’d written for the screen than comedy specials from him, which is a snarky way of shouting out his masterful debut narrative film Eighth Grade. I think he’s talented. I also think the five years in difference in our age and perspective puts me just outside of the audience that grew up with him and the rise of YouTube. He’s not necessarily writing joke songs for me and that’s okay.

That’s not the point of Inside and that’s not what drew me to it. Bo Burnham did what many artists did during the pandemic: create. Remember last fall when I released a short musical, a new podcast, two YouTube channels, and my debut collection of non-fiction criticism? And a few months before that I started obsessively producing short video content on TikTok? Yeah, that’s how I coped with the pandemic. I went back to things I loved doing and “didn’t have the time for” when the world was running like it used to. Bo Burnham, a standup comedian who previously said he wasn’t going to tour anymore because of the impact on his mental wellness, wrote and filmed a feature length musical comedy film during the pandemic. We’re not the only artists who did this. You’re going to be seeing these quarantine-born projects for years from artists who survived COVID-19.

Bo Burnham’s Inside is a scathing piece of social commentary inspired by his experience living through quarantine and viewing all these different social movements, trends, and contemporary events play out. There’s an aesthetic quality to the musical segments inspired by social media. “White Woman’s Instagram” is cropped to a square frame and edited with various filters to look like Instagram. The opening song “Content” features viral lighting and projection techniques that blew up on social video. Different sketches also use the reaction video and let’s play/game streaming formats to interact with the previous songs. These songs and sketches comment on the form of the media, the content produced for the media, and the inflated sense of self importance associated with producing this kind of content.

That’s the angle that absolutely fascinates me. Artists believing in the importance of their work is not a new trend. Social media gives everyone the platform to do it. Yes, I do think the media criticism I produce is important in the context of media criticism. Some of the jokes in the film stung more than intended as Bo Burnham himself begins to comment on his own complicity in this cycle of self-importance in creation. He’s not wrong, but being confronted with the argument by an artist realizing the impact of what he’s doing while doing it regardless of his intent is not what I expected.

Even if you’re not an artist or creator who regularly, I don’t know, becomes so overwhelmed with work/life balance that they sometimes, unannounced, take most of a week off, there’s plenty to relate to in Inside. It’s often been described at this point that COVID-19 and the quarantine is a collective traumatic event that we, as a global society, will be dealing with for years to come. The think pieces on people freaking out over not being required to wear a mask in public anymore are already coming out. Bo Burnham is a comic with a large fanbase using his comedy to craft a portrait of a person exploring their very reality while trapped in a single room because of COVID-19.

Sure, we know that Bo Burnham, the person, can walk out of the room he filmed in and enter other parts of his home, but Bo Burnham, the character in the film, tells you that everything will happen in this one room. There are windows, but we never get to look outside them. There is a door, but it never gets opened. His connection to the outside world is limited to his cellphone and his laptop.

As Inside progresses, the difference between the songs and everyday life becomes more apparent. The room is pristine when a song is being “performed,” with all the lights and clever editing that comes with it. When it’s just day to day life, the room is increasingly messy. There are piles of clothes on the floor and equipment piling up everywhere. What starts with one camera turns into a production studio’s worth of lights, sound, camera, and editing equipment. Like many art and content producers (myself include), the Bo Burnham character is clearly hiding the mess of his reality from the art being produced. The artist spends the energy to clean the space for the content they produce but doesn’t have the energy to clean the space beyond the digital lens.

Inside, intentionally or not, functions as a modern musical film. The songs in many contemporary musicals, such as Once, Come from Away, and The Band’s Visit, offer a glimpse into the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters onstage more than an actual advancement of plot or narrative. The story is happening around the songs. The songs themselves are an ironic theatrical device, with the characters not realizing what they’re actually revealing about their lives and their stories by singing about how much they love a film actor or what they ate after getting off a plane.

Inside’s narrative is the story of an artist grasping at a goal just to have something to reach for and realizing what that actually means; the songs reflect individual ideas that happen over the course of the story. It’s a fascinating, often experimental film that can be enjoyed even by people who aren’t necessarily preexisting fans of Bo Burnham.

Inside is streaming on Netflix.