INSIDE: Mal Content

Director: Bo Burnham
Writer: Bo Burnham
Cast: Bo Burnham
Runtime: 87 mins.
2021

You can tell when a work of screen art is cheaply made. Shot in a warehouse, corners cut on sound and lights, repeated locations, reduced scope. This phenomenon in an otherwise well-produced TV show is called a 'bottle episode,' the result of other more spectacular episodes going overbudget. The funny thing is, these episodes' narrowed scope often emphasize character dynamics and intimate moments, thus creating better television than more souped-up stories.

Bo Burnham quit performing live comedy because he started having panic attacks onstage. After taking years away from the public spotlight to work on himself, he finally felt well enough to book a new comedy tour. Then COVID hit.

Ripped away from his audience as if the punch line of a cruel cosmic joke, Burnham decided to make a bottle special. He wrote, performed, filmed, and edited the entirety of Inside by himself, in one single room. All great artists understand that obstacles lead to greater opportunities, and quarantine becomes something of a dare for Burnham. How do I create something visually and emotionally engaging using the bare minimum? How do I manipulate a single location to fit the jumpy whims of sketch and song? How do I not go insane working on a project alone for months and months and months?

The room is not merely a product of necessity, though. Its context suffuses it with a grander meaning. We have all been in our own bottle episode this past year; Inside is the first great work of art that reflects on the trauma of COVID quarantine. "Well, well, look who's inside again," the signature motif of the special blares, seeming to taunt both Bo and us with all that we've missed, and all that we've gained.

Although Inside may not be as full of an experience as Burnham's previous comedy specials, he uses the unique limitations of the project to essentialize his work, themes, and experimental tendencies. It's his most focused work, even as it seems at first more fractured. The special begins lighthearted enough, with songs about white privilege, FaceTiming mom, and sexting. These are unquestionably the low point of the piece, clever and enjoyable as always but lacking substance. They function as something of a trap, a way to get us to let our guard down for the heavier material to come. "White Woman's Instagram" is the linkage between these two parts. It is a goofy satire about how all white women's Instagrams kinda look the same, but Burnham smuggles in a devastating riff eulogizing the anonymous woman's dead mother right in the middle, right when we are least expecting it. These cracks in the facade have increasingly become Burnham's signature move. They allow him to get at something far beyond what we normally think of as comedy. He's using comedy to get at something universal, or perhaps using the universal to get at something comedic.

The ugly question rears its head again and again: How can we do comedy as the world burns? "Oh shit, you're really joking at a time like this?" Is comedy dead? Do you really want a white man to be your oracle for the times? How does one find anything new to say when stuck in a room? These moments of doubt aren't just self-flagellation for flagellation's sake. They are representative of the lack in ourselves that each and every one of us has been confronted with as we've felt trapped and helpless against this global pandemic. It's not just the virus though. It's the human condition, a condition that is all too easy to repress when out in the world working that capitalist grind. Bo points fingers of blame at quarantine, and at capitalism (most delightfully in a sadistic sock puppet sequence). But depression is far more elemental than that. You must go back to the onstage panic attacks. You must go back to the problematic nature of your early work. You must go back further, as we see him watching friends and family clap for him in a videotape from his childhood. He looks upon this affirmation with abject horror. Back, and back, and back, to a childhood of making funny sounds to escape captivity. Back even further...

That is why the solution cannot be so simple as getting up and leaving the room. There is no salvation outside, as inviting as the light can be. "Come out with your hands up, we've got you surrounded," Burnham sings, evoking the omnipresence of the police state layered upon the paralytic expectations of the social world. For Burnham, this monstrosity takes the form of clapping and cheering fans, upon whose behalf he feels so much guilt for withholding himself for so long.

It's incredibly sophisticated, multilayered work that is also punctuated by deranged little ditties about Jeff Bezos's megalomania and rambling abstract monologues. As we progress through the runtime the cracks multiply. Burnham has a gift for visual spectacle that overcomes claustrophobia, but for every immaculately-produced piece like "Welcome to the Internet," he includes footage of false starts and fuck-ups. We see him bored. We see him depressed. We see him suicidal. We see him reflective, horny, frustrated, delighted, and again, bored. Bored, bored, bored.

We are never bored though. We sit riveted watching someone sit, riveting. And just when we are at our most comfortable in Burnham's content, he interrupts the flow by showing us what he sees: the all-consuming black void of the silent camera. Always watching, always hungry, never allowing us to simply exist.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS