How Bo Burnham Cured My FOMO
Millennials be like, Bo Burnham did a thing.
Once a bright, shiny reflection of the zeitgeist, in Inside (Netflix, 2021) he’s the mirrorball in his darkened, one-room studio, reflecting only the dim light from his laptop screen.
Mirror Ball Kit: street photo by Adalena Kavanagh.
Inside operates on the level of what Seanbaby at Cracked calls “the Ready Player One of philosophy”: “You create this elaborate world of fantastic bullshit around yourself where your ordinary whiteness suddenly becomes the most important trait a hero can have.” Burnham does that, and then admits that he’s doing it, and then admits that he’s doing that, and then admits that he’s doing that, and so on. It’s like starving in a feedback loop. It’s like taking a shower when you’re thirsty.
I hate to put Burnham on blast because I know that to create something—to truly create something—is to open yourself up, to make yourself vulnerable. To deliberately open yourself up as an act of creation, as he has done here, is several steps further out, making him several steps more vulnerable. I also know that paratexts like this review are just part of the show. I started writing this to excise the feeling Inside gave me, and if that isn’t a testament to its importance, then never mind the rest.
If Inside is about anything, it is about depression. It is also in itself depressing, but there’s no denying Burnham’s talent. Even with the curtain pulled back, the technical aspects of the special and Burnham’s command of them are simply staggering. In lesser hands, this would be like… Well, it would be like the internet.
As for the “content,” as he insists on calling it here, missing is that definitively Bo moment where the whole thing leaps to a level no one else can touch, up where it becomes so meta you get a nosebleed, out where French theorists fear to tread. He’s not Charlie Kaufman. He’s not even Andy Kaufman. The most relevant Kaufman here is William Kaufman. In his book The Comedian as Confidence Man (1997), Kaufman coined the condition “irony fatigue.” It’s the juxtaposition of earnest critique with the escape hatch of the joke. Kaufman argues that one cannot be a Crusader for Truth and be just kidding about it at the same time. As for Burnham, you can’t be this sincere about detached irony for very long before that context collapses too.
Maybe I just grew out of it.*
Bo Burnham still might be the voice of the millennial generation, but on Inside, he’s dangerously close to being the internet version of Weird Al Yankovic. That’s fine, but he’s so much better than that.
-royc.
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My wife, a millennial herself, did suggest that I was too old for this special.
