The Bridge Builder: Bo Burnham's 'Inside'

After just watching Bo Burnham’s Inside I feel… confused. It asks me of nothing and everything. Despite that, I feel lost - isolated from the artist himself. It’s as if a slice of his soul has been dropped onto my plate, but the problem is I don’t have the proper silverware for the meal he surprised me with.

There’s an idea that I had a long time ago about the modern age, about the idea of the perfect Dystopia. I came up with this: the mind as a society that excludes itself. That makes no sense, but I believe Inside has given me insight into what that would look like. I appreciate watching an artist include his process, however wrong and damaging it may have been, in the art itself. Bo Burnham is showing us the bridge to his own personal Dystopia. He lets down the drawbridge - but as you cross it you must witness all the monsters of Burnham’s moat. There is no other way.

I’m going to try, now, to be more concrete because this is something Inside doesn’t do very well.

I can’t help but mourn Bo for seemingly falling to an extremist left position that definitely seeps into his work. It’s ironic because his work seems to be categorically free of any politics, but that simply isn’t the case anymore. The sock-o bit (comprised of a literal sock on his hand) speaks to, of course, some iteration of irony or facetiousness but doesn’t provide enough substance to do it well.

That is the recurring emotion I feel after watching inside — a lack of productivity.

There is nothing new, but yet it is still poignant. And that makes sense with our times, it is impossible to produce anything inside a society that strangles us in many ways. This is felt in a concentrated form by the youngest of us.

With a little bit of everything comes nothing new and nothing made, instead the artist has become the consumer and vice versa. That is what Inside really asks of the audience: by being inside the camera in which he films, the audience is an artist in the same Bo. That’s why he can’t be serious, or why the message can’t be serious. There’s almost a comradery in the material he creates for his audience. The image of myself sitting beside Bo Burnham in the mirror makes this special feel intimate in more ways that are comfortable.

It asks me to be the artist that Bo is because it feels as if that is all society has room for: to consume and do nothing more than just parrot, just as I’m doing now.

Good luck with this one.