Movie Review : Inside (2021)
* Follow me on: Facebook - Twitter - Instagram *
I’ve said it before: it’s difficult to make great art about recent world events. Whether it’s COVID-19, police brutality or anything else we don’t have control over, it’s difficult to detach yourself from the obvious point of view. That said, I believe comedian, actor and twenty-first century renaissance man Bo Burnham doesn’t have an obvious bone in his body. That’s why he was called up by the forces of creativity to talk about his confinement in his new Netflix special Inside.
I usually don’t review comedy specials, but this is more of a psychedelic musical about being semi-comfortably trapped in your own home and witnessing the world pass you by. It’s about the services and objects you used to take comfort in turning against you and making you lose your goddamn mind. What makes Inside tick is that it’s not abut being a victim or anything, it’s about the fragility and the silly nature of twenty-first century living.
Performing Normalcy
One of the important themes of Inside is the silliness of performance in a quarantine setting. Both as a professional performer and as a connected human being. I believe my favorite song in the entire special is synth pop banger Problematic, where Burnham sings his heart out about mildly shitty stuff he did when he was a kid, like dressing up as Aladdin for Halloween. He dares the listener to hold him accountable while going an exhaustive list of sins.
If that song works so well, it’s because Bo Burnham found a way to laugh at this issue without accusing and belittling anyone. Problematic is a song that acknowledges his privileges as a white man and performs a semi-sincere act of contrition because… well, he’s never fucking hurt anyone. His transgressions are symbolic and theoretical at best. It helps that the song also slaps. If I’m going to call myself out, I’d rather go out dancing like my life depended on it.
Such earnest and willing self-mockery allows Burnham to laugh at wide array of other topics relating to performative living. In White Woman’s Instagram, Burnham recreates several clichés of the platform with his raggedy, quarantined self, therefore showing how easy it is to fake. There’s another awesome skit where he plays a brand consultant and explains like any brand consultant would that the important is not to do something, it’s to adapt the message.
None of this would work as well if Burnham didn’t perform in his little studio, stepping over camera wires and walking by the kitchen sink here and there, underlining the difference between the better world we’re all allegedly fighting for and just… the world.
Commodities and loss of meaning
Another aspect of Inside I thought was great was how it addressed the loss of meaning in contemporary living. It is best exemplified in Welcome to the Internet, which underlines how you can’t fucking want anything anymore if you have a little bit of everything all of the time. It’s bound to become one of the special’s mainstays and one of Bo Burnham’s greatest hits because it points and laughs at something that controls our all of our lives.
I mean, it already has ten million views on YouTube. Whether it’s funny or not, humor is always more popular if it laughs at an abstraction that doesn’t make anyone in particular feel guilty.
My favorite segments about loss of meaning though were the song 30, where Bo Burnham feels like he’s went instantly from young to old because he hasn’t experienced major adversity and this weird skit where he reacts to a video of his and creates an infinite loop of reaction to his reaction, culminating in a commentary about the limits of self-awareness. Going over your failures and calling yourself an asshole doesn’t mean anything if you don’t believe it.
*
Fuck… it was harder to review than I thought it would be. Inside is such a multifaceted work of art, I feel like I’ve barely grazed the surface. It works so well because it’s personal, but it also captures our fragmented, ambivalent relationship to the world we created for ourselves. In that sense, Inside accomplishes the greatest purpose of art, which is to give you access to a different self for a moment. Watch it. Love it. It will make you feel better about all this.
