How Bo Burnham's 'Inside' Broke Me

Bo Burnham: Inside. Bo Burnham in Bo Burnham: Inside. (c) Courtesy of Netflix 2021.

There’s a line at the beginning of comedian Bo Burnham’s new Netflix special Inside that haunts me.

The special, running an hour and a half, was made during the height of the pandemic and America’s racial justice uprisings. Burnham uses lights, lasers and projections while filming himself singing songs that are clever and sad enough to indicate a dramatic departure from the teen who got famous publishing cringey songs on YouTube over a decade ago. The special has provoked a lot of conversation – on speaking out against anti-Black racism as a self-aware white man with a Netflix deal, for example, or highlighting deteriorating mental health during the pandemic – and reviewers have done a thorough job of analyzing it. But nothing caught my attention like this one line.

Burnham begins the first song of Inside sitting in his house, completely dark except from a light rig to his right, casting some Rembrandt-style lighting across his face. He’s singing, his head pointing downward, an object strapped to his forehead, but obscured by his shaggy hair (he’s got a pandemic beard to boot). In the song, he explains that he’s a little depressed and that he’s started writing songs, because at least it couldn’t hurt.

“I’m sorry I was gone,” he sings, “But look, I made you some content!”

Burnham grabs hold of the thing on his forehead, a headlamp, switches it on, swings his head up, and the beam flashes over the camera lens, and then hits a disco ball spinning madly above him.

Now, horizontal dashes of lavender light scatter across the walls, illuminating the studio’s clutter of keyboards and equipment stands. A second track starts singing under him in harmony. He continues. “Daddy made you your favorite, open wide!” The disco ball slows down and then reverses course. “Here comes the content! It’s a beautiful day to stay inside!”

All Burnham did was swing a headlamp into the trajectory of a spinning disco ball, and I saw a metaphor for how I’ve lived my pandemic life as a journalist in the internet’s Big Take Machine. And there’s two parts to that joke, really. As a reporter, you shine your metaphorical light on something happening in the dark. Then there’s the feeling of producing glittery entertainment while the apocalypse rages.

I started my career in the 2010s – a heyday for personal essays, especially for younger women and queer people whose editors pushed them to excavate their traumas in return for “exposure” and little else. I took seriously the warnings of my peers that not everything needs to be submitted to the Personal Essay Industrial Complex. And then the pandemic hit, and creating content under these pressures felt, quite seriously, kind of impossible. My well ran dry, again and again. I found myself producing personal essays that weren’t totally ready to be written, baking half-risen dough. I wrote pieces that fulfilled a quota and said something, despite wanting nothing more than to say nothing. My brain felt deflated, but my fingers kept typing.

Sometimes when I’m trying to write a “take,” and I have no words left to give, it feels like shining a light into a reflective surface to make some more light bounce around a room and going, “Is this something? Is this anything?” I am Burnham, throwing words into the abyss, going, “But look, I made you some content! Daddy made you your favorite, open wide.”

The line is supposed to be a reference to the people who are consuming content generally. It’s all of us – we are all, in some medium or another, content consumers, even when we don’t want to be, especially during the pandemic. What else are people to do to enjoy their time during lockdown?

The journalist Karen K. Ho popularized a term for a particular strain of this phenomenon – “doomscrolling,” spending excessive time scrolling through dystopian news. If I don’t write, what else am I supposed to do? If I don’t consume content, what else am I supposed to do? I wonder if, despite my exhaustion, despite feeling like I was merely shining a flashlight on a cheap reflective orb, throwing myself into this work helped distract me from living my life, a life thrown into disarray by COVID.

Bo Burnham sees me:

“So I’ve been freaking out for a long time, thinking that I’m never gonna finish this special and I’m gonna be working on it forever,” he says halfway through the special. “And recently I’ve been feeling like, ‘Oh man, maybe I am getting close to done with this, maybe I’m gonna finish it after all,’” he says. “And that has made me completely freak out, because if I finish this special, that means that I have to, um, not work on it anymore, and that means I have to just live my life.”