Bo Burnham is the Only Person Who "Gets" The Internet

I’m writing this in the moments after finishing Bo Burnham’s special Inside. I’ve already spent a lot of my day writing—writing media criticism—and it’s strange that my first instinct upon completing (because “finishing” doesn’t seem to do the show justice) is to analyze/deconstruct it. Perhaps that’s just the way I interact with art, but perhaps Bo would say that that’s just the way we live today.

I had multiple friends reach out to me to tell me to watch Inside on its release day.
“You gotta watch bo burnams Netflix special that came out today.”
“This is so good, and it gets real. I think you especially will really like it.”
“How it Works with Socko was right up Jackson’s alley”

Fine. I’ll watch it.

It was great. And I did enjoy How it Works with Socko.

The show starts with some funny numbers. First, about the legitimacy of making a comedy show when the world is “so fucked up.” Then, about how the world works in all its capitalistic and genocidal glory. Then, a funny sketch about the performative wokeness of brands. Soon it becomes clear that Bo isn’t just taking aim at random aspects of internet culture but that he’s identifying something underneath.

I found it nearly impossible to just take in Inside on its face without thinking about it in relation to what I do for a living. “Comedy special” doesn’t feel like an appropriate name for this piece of art. There are times you’ll laugh out loud, sure, but the show reads like an amalgam of Internet content: part music video, part Casey Neistat vlog, and part video essay.

But then, the more I think about it, the more I think about how that self-comparison is an intentional choice and not something that just a video essayist would think. The equipment is all around him, there's no distinction between on-camera and off-camera, which I suppose is how we all live our lives today, and what Bo was so interested in exploring in his film Eighth Grade.

Throughout the show, I wondered how much was staged and how much was authentic. Indeed, authenticity is a key ingredient to the special’s power. We believe we are watching a man slowly go insane, chasing an artistic vision and perhaps we are. But with so much of the show’s production and content explicitly about how the camera changes us, it’s impossible not to wonder. How real was that angry retake?

In between these raw tete-a-tetes with the camera, Bo dramatically pantomimes, and then watches those pantomimes, and then reacts to those pantomimes, and then reacts to the reaction—media created from media in a kind of ouroborus of art and consumption and creation. “What is real here?” isn’t the right question. What Bo is asking—a world where we treat the physical world as a staging area for our “truer” digital selves—is what does “real” even mean anymore?

It’s enough to drive anyone mad on its face, and that’s setting aside the “fucked up” nature of the world.

There’s a duality to the project that I think people are relating to even if they don’t realize it. There are jokes about white women’s instagrams and the horrors of the world and sexting but the crux of the show is the need to be seen juxtaposed with the pain of always being seen.

Constrained by the limitations of producing his special during a global pandemic, Bo is constantly “performer” and “audience” to himself. But that’s just a magnifying glass on how most of us live our days on the internet anyway—Twitch streaming our own sad lives in an effort to give them meaning in the form of entertainment or art.

The most succinct exploration of the show’s thesis statement comes pretty early on when Bo sings a song about unpaid interns. The song ends and then we watch Bo react to the song like any YouTuber might. He tries to give a director’s commentary, explaining the deeper themes he was going for (a modern day working class song), but as the video he’s reacting to comes to an end, his own reaction begins playing and he’s forced to react to the reaction.

He points out how he actually sounds quite pretentious because he feels that he always has to give deeper meaning to his jokes when, in reality, they don’t have one. As that video ends, the cycle begins again, and he’s made to react to his reaction to his reaction, lamenting that he actually called himself pretentious as a coping mechanism, to preempt anyone who might accuse him of being pretentious. It’s neurosis dialed up to 11 and multiplied by the many screens of the internet.

Self-awareness and self-critique are inherent to the Internet. We compare our bodies, jobs, passions, and lives to each other. It’s painful, but a pain that we don’t seem able to turn away from. The Internet offers us “anything and everything, all the time” and it’s paralyzing. The only thing we can do to cope is to turn to the small dopamine bumps that scrolling through it provides.

For as wide reaching as the Internet is, Bo points out that it turns us mostly inward. We become critics of ourselves, refining our digital performance to meet the expectations of others. We lobby for the right causes, we get turnt even when we don’t want to, and we create idyllic lives of small pumpkins.

Reality—a world in which we lose that control over our image—becomes horrifying. As Bo waited for the clock to count down to his 30th birthday, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much of my last year was spent inside, by myself. Like for so many of us, it’s been painful and isolating. I’ve spent more time glued to a screen than ever before, and it’s made me feel alone in a life plagued by feelings of loneliness. But I also am terrified by the prospect of the pandemic ending, and being once again subjected to the eyes of the outside world, for them to get the raw data of my life, and not just what I choose to share with them.

Inside might feel like a prison, but it’s one that Bo doesn’t want to leave at the end of the special. The light from the outside world, and an audience made up of others is too overwhelming. Directing, acting, editing, and shooting your own performance all the time is exhausting, but the only thing more intimidating is the prospect of stopping—the idea of actually releasing control to the world.

I didn’t have the same emotional reaction that my friends seemed to (or that they expected me to have) but perhaps that was because I was too busy looking inward, directing and performing my own reaction, even though I was all alone on my couch.

*****

It’s been nearly 24 hours since I watched Inside and I haven’t been able to think about anything else yet. In my humble opinion, the show is an undeniable masterpiece. But it also reminds of this article and an idea that caught fire in the early days of the pandemic: “well actually, Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine.” The implication is that the mental anguish you are feeling is nothing more than fuel for the next great artistic achievement.

And it’s hard not to think about in relation to Inside. The main underlying narrative for the show, if it can be said to have one, is Bo’s deteriorating mental health. We see it in his increasingly scraggly beard. We hear it in the lyrics of his ever-bleaker songs. We feel it in the moments between music numbers, where he breaks down talking to the camera or struggles with his camera equipment.

While he spends time critiquing the various forms of digital personas, he is creating one of his own, one based on raw authenticity. His mental struggles have given way to this piece of art, and he’s laying everything bare for us. He’s providing us with an expression of what it’s like to experience the digital rose-colored glasses of the Internet, but in doing so, he’s also creating a digital representation.

There’s no way around this, of course (well, “while being paid, and being the center of attention” at least). Bo is self-aware of this fact, but there is also something really strange about making the pain that goes into creating your digital self into part of that digital self—essentially commodifying his own mental illness.

I don’t say that to detract from Inside. As someone who has often connected with media depicting mental illness, I couldn’t have related more to Bo’s visual representation of the cycle of self-criticism. And as someone who has their own mental illness issues, I’m envious of his ability to make art and money out of them.

But that’s also kind of my point. By foregrounding his emotional struggle and creating a piece of art that is so deep and so profound, I can’t help but see in Bo the same thing he sees in the rest of the digital world. I can’t help but compare myself to him. Why can’t I make my depression work for me like that? Why can’t I create art that gives meaning to the pain I feel?

I think that to some degree that is the point of Inside. Just as Bo serves the role of audience and performer, so too do we. Because of how hyper self-aware the show is, it forces us to become aware of our role as an audience and to perform it. There’s no way to just sit back and enjoy the show, because we are part of the show.