BO BURNHAM: INSIDE will shatter your soul in twain
this contains some spoilers for bo burnham: inside.
content warning: discussion of suicide
when bo burnham ended 2016’s make happy with a hidden jump cut to a final musical number, i knew the man was destined to be a filmmaker. when he made eighth grade (one of the best films of the 2010s, full stop), that promised was completely fulfilled. now, with inside, he has come full circle.
inside’s only teaser was bo combining the jump cut ending of make happy with a single shot of his bearded face barely visible in a strip of light, haggard and at the breaking point. in a single cut, the entirety of our pandemic-triggered isolation was laid bare on his face.
this is not a comedy special. i only laughed a handful of times, and was annoyed for the first half hour that it wasn’t really trying to be funny, that he kept making songs instead of jokes. gradually, it begins to click. gradually, i begin to see where he’s getting at. i have always loved his work for being both confrontational and brutally honest (george carlin as a tall beardless twink, basically), but this is jagged and raw and the kind of thing a streaming service usually never releases. bo does not bother with any attempt at formality. you are thrown right in. whether he’s faking his emotional reactions to over a year of work is irrelevant.
some of these pieces feel like topical digs at things he’s been rehearsing. one really fantastic bit is a tune called “a white woman’s instagram” where he deftly uses a single room in his apartment to recreate the most obnoxious influencer trends. you have scene these poses and snapshots and abstract images before. it’s playfully making fun of the exact kind of content elsie fisher’s kayla in eighth grade would obsess over for societal approval. bo ends up making it look better by virtue of his manic rictus grin making these normally cheerful images quite disturbing. or there’s a piece that feels like a distorted sesame street number where he and a sock puppet go over the evils of capitalism. did netflix only let him be this unfiltered because there are two entire musical numbers dedicating to viciously roasting jeff bezos, their closest competitor in entertainment? probably!
but it’s not just those kinds of topical digs. how about a reaction video to a reaction video to a reaction video, looped in on itself until bo has no idea which bo is the real one? how about a twitch livestream where he plays a version of himself having an extended crying fit? bo has always distinguished himself through his uncanny ability to recreate trends with disturbing closeness? every sketch feels like a version of his gleeful parody of country music back in make happy, or at least his digs at the aristocratic keith urbans playing at knowing a hard day’s work. the specificity of a reaction video or a livestream is right there on a streaming service. bo did what every other one of his cohort couldn’t do: he was able to become respected. even he seems aware of this, as he calls out logan paul by name during a musical number invoking a campire song with an artificial campfire. he is not the wealthiest content creator, he is not the most successful, but he is actually liked by people who are worth a damn, from all walks of life. he is considered an artist, and this means he has the anxieties and self-awareness that a pewdiepie thoroughly lacks. if other media about social media only understands its influencers through trying to recruit a bunch of them in cameos, bo understands it because he arrived right at the cusp of the entire trend going red-hot. it is so wild to see a full-length beard and wrinkles on him, or when he stops the show in its tracks to record the exact moment he turns 30 years old. how does he celebrate it? a musical number exploring his existential dread at feeling less mature than his friends.
if eighth grade was a film about the kind of person who has a parasocial relationship with bo and treating them with empathy and kindness(itself calling me the hell out), this is a film about the person on the other side. bo has used both his comedy specials to address his own fear of being perceived and not being allowed to dictate what he can create. he is, in many ways, the first true parasocial relationship. he is to social media content what spielberg was to the blockbuster, and heavy is the head wearing the crown.
it’s terrifying stuff. i was left so drained and miserable and reconsidering the place i was at when i saw his videos for the first time. i know i’m not the only one. it took me an entire day to figure out what to write because it left me so shattered. if one of the world’s most successful comedians can’t hack it, what chance do the rest of us have?
i mean, that’s not the point. he very blatantly goes into his own history of suicidal ideation. at one point. i was introduced to his videos after a suicide attempt. my best friend at film school would send me the clip of his song “a world on fire” every time i felt awful. once when a bunch of people i knew bragged about celebrity encounters, my only response was that bo burnham had liked a tweet of mine once (it was about eighth grade). it’s weird to be forced to compare yourself to your old self, much as he does when he randomly faces a projected image of his first video on YouTube at one point, nearly breaking down crying. bo desperately needs to be freed from himself. and we’re his captors.
