Inside (2021)

directed by Bo Burnham

Jacob Valadez

Inside is a film that speaks a different language on different screens. Inside is also a maelstrom, one that begins on the surface of a calm, pleasant ocean only to drag you into its own violent, churning depths. Bo Burnham’s treatment of the camera as a diary gives the audience a lens through which they can experience the pandemic with him. Experiencing the pandemic again, great…

I’ve seen Inside three times. The first was in bed on a laptop with my fiancée, Kristin. We were deciding between a recommendation from our friend, Jonathan, or continuing with our rewatch of Gilmore Girls. Jonathan’s recommendation also came with a quote: “There’s no piece of art that should come out of the pandemic other than Inside.” Bold take. Combined with Jonathan’s recent string of recommendations that we absolutely loved (Survivor, Normal People, Leftovers), that quote convinced us. We clicked on the tile showing this gangly, bearded man staring directly into the camera.

I should note that prior to our initial viewing, neither me nor my fiancée were aware of who Bo Burnham was. Famously in our friend circle, when she first heard Jonathan talking about him, Kristin replied, “Who is Bo Barnabus?” 

Jonathan’s quote wasn’t asserting that there haven't been other great pieces of TV, film, or music that have come out during our two weeks... twelve months... going on I’ve lost track of how many months of life in the pandemic. Mike White skewered white privilege in The White Lotus. Questlove gave us a look into selectively forgotten music history in Summer of Soul. Olivia Rodrigo burst forth from HSMTMTS (High School Musical The Musical The Series) with Sour. Lil Nas X in “Montero”… enough said.

Instead, Inside defies classification in a way that the pandemic defied all of our expectations. The film is simultaneously hilarious and defeatist, joyful and acerbic, always blurring the lines between fiction and reality. If you’ve ever seen Bo’s standup, this is where he chooses to operate and where he is his most powerful. In many ways, it is a natural evolution of the millennial comedian: someone equally comforted and disturbed by the world in which they grew up.

On that initial laptop viewing, Bo’s confessional felt direct and intimate, as though he was yet another person I was having a Zoom call with who had maybe just left their camera on. His moments of despair and self-doubt, which became more frequent and intense as his time spent in quarantine lengthens and lengthens, felt like they were happening in my own small room.

I thought of the space my fiancée and I had felt forced to leave at the beginning of the pandemic: a tiny third-floor studio apartment in Alameda, with a view of the Bay. We loved that apartment and it was our refuge for the first several months of the pandemic. However, with both of us working remotely, it soon became clear that the space we had lived in for over four years was no longer going to be sustainable for us. It was a sad day when we had to leave that little haven, but if we had stayed, would we have followed in Bo’s footsteps?

Once we had completed that first viewing, we understood what Jonathan was saying. We craved to watch it again, to pore over every detail of the dense lyrics, to throw ourselves into the whirlpool and let our bodies get taken away. So, we scheduled a viewing party. The second time we watched was on a large TV with Jonathan. It took nearly four hours due to each of us grabbing the remote at various moments to pause and interrogate, to discuss, laugh, cry.

I should note here that prior to our second viewing, we had never hung out with Jonathan as a trio. Jonathan was part of a larger friend group that had existed for decades that we just joined in the months prior to the pandemic through a mutual friend. Jonathan was somewhat of an unknown quantity, someone who we had turned to throughout the pandemic for content recommendations and shared the occasional group text with. Watching this intensely emotional and relevant piece of film together satisfied our yearning for connection during this time of isolation and brought us closer to someone who was really a stranger.

Perhaps what I feel is so engrossing about Bo is how closely his thoughts mirror my own. He is a privileged cis white male who thinks critically about the world around him in a way that drives him to self-hate, despair, and ultimately continue to make money doing virtually nothing to change anything at all. The mirror does not show an attractive figure. I never said I liked the reflection. How often have I thought of myself as “...a special kind of white guy?” How often do I tell myself that I am making a difference simply because I have a career in education and I am leaving “the world better than I found it?” There’s a sick vanity in watching Bo succeed on screen; if he can do it, then so can I!

Let’s also talk about turning thirty. I am twenty-nine. That fateful day is quickly approaching. Bo did it in the pandemic, in a room by himself, in nothing but his tighty whities. “Oh, fuck (oh), how am I thirty?” Bo sobs. For Bo, turning thirty is the beginning of the end (quite literally as this is the final song of the first act and what follows is the subsequent chaos of the second act). This sentiment is a chorus felt by many millennials who have little hope for their own future. Who cares if life expectancy is increasing if the world will be cooked by 2050? Let’s say we solve that one…lol, jokes. Then, social security will run out and we will be working until we’re 90. Oh yeah, and don’t forget about our entire economic system constantly manipulating us by using our cultural values against us. “Who are you, Bagel Bites?”

Bo despairs, “2030, I’ll be forty and kill myself then.” Yeah, the stakes are that high.

During a time when people turned en masse to art as a tool to self soothe and maintain sanity, it’s striking that Bo’s journey does just the opposite. His creative obsession during the pandemic is not marked with all the checkpoints we experienced. He doesn’t get into Tiger King. He never searches for instant coffee to try to make a Dalgona (remember those?). There is zero bread and absolutely no toilet paper shortage. Rather, Bo strips off the veneer of those moments that we collectively organized to give us markers of time passing, of hope that this will all go away.

Instead, Bo’s experiences are not markers of time passing but the infinite time fillers that have become parasitic controllers of so much of our lives. “I’ll waste my time FaceTiming with my mom.” Repeat, ad nauseum. Scroll, “Latte foam art, tiny pumpkins.” Scroll, “Fuzzy, comfy socks… Is this heaven?” Swipe, text, sext. “Sitting alone, one hand on my dick and one hand on my phone.” Sit in the dark, lights swirling: “...a little bit of everything, all of the time…”

He shows us our fear, the one created by social media companies and capitalism: that without their platforms to share and talk about our collective experiences, we would be lost amidst our own anxieties and isolation.

“How we feeling out there tonight?” Bo shouts to his imaginary audience. He answers, “Yeah, I am not feeling good.”

What was more remarkable than all that doom and gloom was that after that second viewing, the three of us actually did feel… good? Inside had provided something that we had been grasping at all pandemic long: connection. It had given me and Kristin the excuse to get to know Jonathan better, to invite him over, to include him in our bubble. That has now evolved into a weekly hang where I make food, Jonathan brings wine, and we play games or watch movies or TV shows together.

So when it was announced that Inside would have a one-night-only screening in a local theater, we got tickets with Jonathan immediately. We were freshly vaccinated, still masked, in what was one of our first social outings in an inside (I know, I couldn’t resist) environment since the beginning of the pandemic.

Seeing Bo’s degeneration on the big screen felt closer to a group therapy session, allowing each of us in the audience a chance to share in his and each other’s pain, laugh with his impressions, and have the cathartic moment of collectively, ironically yelling “Jeffrey Bezos... you did it!” The promise of sitting in a packed theater, freshly vaccinated, felt similar to Bo’s eventual emergence from his tiny room. Light streamed through the door and there was no choice to go back out into the world. It felt good at first, and there was also no going back.

So why is Inside the only piece of art that should come out of the pandemic? Was Jonathan right? To me what makes Inside so successful is that it isn’t just about the pandemic: it is the pandemic. Bo’s usual searing wit and conversational comedy meld perfectly with his interrogation of social media, an inescapable part of our pandemic life as we attempted to connect with people from our own little rooms (queue the Black Mirror/Orwell references). His personal story, having quit his successful stand up career due to crippling anxiety attacks five years earlier, is placed into a comically sad circumstance: this was going to be his foray back into stand up. The entirety of the project masterfully vacillates between Bo’s creative process and polished songs/videos in a way that left me questioning how much was scripted and how much of that final product was purely a glimpse into the mind of an isolated creative. These go to eleven, anyone?

Inside almost ends with Bo finishing his project and deciding to emerge from his room. When the camera shifts to outside for the first time, Bo is suddenly fearful of the applause and laughter he hears in the background, and claws to get back to the absurd world he built for himself in the shed behind his house, only to find the door locked.

And, yet… Inside doesn’t end with him clawing to get back in his room. Instead, we see Bo watching a projection of Inside, hearing that terrifying laugh track in the background, and finally, he smirks. I can’t help but feel something by seeing that smirk. What that feeling is, I still haven’t put my finger on. It isn’t comfort. Those gashes in our societal framework that Bo plunges the knife into all film long are not healed by his ability to turn a phrase, despite the initial insistence that he is indeed “...healing the world through [his] comedy.”  It isn’t despair either. I don’t feel that Bo left me feeling that we’re all fucked and that’s it. Could it actually be acceptance, hope, or something positive? Is that okay? Bo, like all comedians, ultimately finds it all funny, which is another way of saying wrong.

A house on my block sold for over 3 million in a weekend. Facebook rebranded to Meta. A cryptocurrency company bought the naming rights to LA’s former Staples Center. Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted.

“Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul.
A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall.”

Jacob Valadez is a high school math teacher located in the Bay Area. He writes poems, murder mysteries, DnD campaigns, and an increasingly absurd movie script that will never be finished. You can find his six-pound chihuahua named Smudge on instagram @smudgelife510.