Bo Burnham'southward 'Inside' and the limits and possibilities of COVID-era art

Jul 24, 2021

Earlier this yr, I walked in the woods with a friend who is a musician and artist. We institute ourselves in conversation about the art people might create to process the past year of COVID-19.

Neither of usa particularly wanted to see movies or shows with people wearing masks. Information technology felt as well close to reality. What we wanted, we decided, were cultural productions that helped united states of america procedure the social isolation and transformed relationships of the pandemic — including our relationships with ourselves.

I was initially skeptical of Bo Burnham'southward latest Netflix special, partly considering I couldn't get through his other comedic work. Yet his dramatic plow a few minutes into the outset song toward critiquing white naval-gazing art in the confront of social injustice both surprised and hooked me.

In "Inside," the audience is forced to confront the psychological impacts of social isolation and the loss of the social life that both sustains and invigorates artistic practice. The enclosed universe of the room where he filmed the special gradually closes in: synthetic birds and crickets replace the ambience noise of the outdoors; the lite inside replaces the sun; a disembodied laugh runway replaces a live audience; and awkward video-chats and emoji sexting replace in-person relationships.

Like Hannah Gadsby'southward "Nanette," Burnham's "Within" makes public an internal critique of comedy, peeling abroad its anatomy to expose the hurting underneath it. When Burnham asks u.s., "Do you experience like sh*t?!" in an upbeat tempo, it forces a reckoning with the commercialization of misery even pre-pandemic. The thanks and applause as Burnham becomes a depressive COVID-19 video game asks us to reverberate further on the consumption and cannibalization of pain via comedy.

He replaces the initial sense of time, space and possibility with endless loops of metacommentary on the creative process ("So here, I'k reacting to my own reacting, and I'm criticizing my initial reaction for existence pretentious, which honestly is a defense force mechanism").

Unlike "Nanette," all the same, in which Gadsby takes effect with the push for oppressed people to make self-deprecating jokes, Burnham aims at voices with power, including his own. And when he trolls white-male comedy in detail as "making a literal difference, metaphorically," it lays blank the irony of using self-critique as an approval stamp to continue the very thing he is critiquing.

Burnham's self-accountability includes publicly apologizing for the problematic content of his earlier years, shirtless and sweating, in a strange sexualization of white-male-cocky-awareness. Characters like the anti-establishment sock puppet Socko — who eventually gets pulled off Burnham'southward paw to shut him upward — name these tensions and contradictions ("Why practice you rich f*cking white people insist on seeing every sociopolitical disharmonize through the myopic lens of your ain self-appearing?").

"Inside" exposes this blazon of self-awareness as a new make of white male social justice, set alongside an impressive taxonomy of 21st-century white man tropes, including an unbearable "social brand consultant." Lyrical juxtapositions like "the whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door" and "a book on getting ameliorate paw delivered by a drone" farther critique self-appearing through consumption, particularly digital consumption and information overload, picking up on themes from Burnham'southward 2018 moving-picture show "Eighth Grade."

Many of the special's early songs could have been pre-pandemic critiques of whiteness and social media culture, particularly his song trolling white women's Instagram lives, where Burnham ironically uses digital projections to depict a white woman living a fun, quirky life during a global pandemic. Similarly, the consequent references to the corporatization of movements resonates at a moment in capitalism in which Target carries a "Pride" line and Netflix markets a "Black Lives Matter Drove."

And still, something about Burnham'south mastery of all these white tropes saturday funny with me. Mayhap it'due south the undertones of toxic masculinity in this mastery. Maybe it's the fact that, even before COVID-19, at that place remains a large market for the very thing Burnham is critiquing: the private self-deprecating white man who flames himself but is disconnected from larger social struggle, his angst a product of his social and political isolation.

Burnham'southward concrete evolution over the course of the show — and the content shift from making-fun-of-white-people to dealing with a spiraling psyche — strength a reckoning with the psychological toll of the last year and a half. Repeated lines similar "Look who's inside once again / went out to look for a reason to hide once again" draw attention to the fact that social-media-driven creative practice and self-isolation accept long gone hand in hand.

Then, there is the question that nosotros already know the reply to: Who gets to exist a tortured creative person publicly and show mental health struggles — particularly suicidal ideations — without being pathologized for it? Maybe it's the fact that in "Inside," vague references to racial injustice and climate modify remain firmly exterior. Mayhap information technology'south the fact that the evidence's mystique dissolved a bit when I read that his studio is really a stand up-lonely building in his Los Angeles lawn, a far cry from those who spent lockdowns in small city apartments without a business firm to retreat to later on the workday. Maybe it'southward the strange feeling of seeing a cisgender white man so costless in his body, alone.

We demand Burnham to stand for something, not just be in the endless loop of cocky-reflexive self-mastery. Otherwise, "Inside" risks serving as a boilerplate for a new privileged-white-male performance of self-awareness through fine art.

That said, perhaps we can measure out the success of this special not in masterful furnishings and production or catchy songs, just in the space it opens up to procedure and critique the limitations of the art that has gotten us through COVID-nineteen so far — and to create new genres and forms from their ashes.

Vani Kannan

Vani Kannan is an assistant professor of English language at Lehman College, CUNY. She lives and works in The Bronx, New York.

Enter your email address to receive free newsletters from NCR.

Join the Conversation

Ship your thoughts and reactions to Letters to the Editor. Learn more here