Dissecting INSIDE by Bo Burnham (Part 1)

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in China can tip. As long as coronavirus is a future. It's infected hundreds in China has now reached the United States. Imagine all the people. To piggyback off of what Matt said, if you guys are struggling working from home, there's a lot to do right now for the company. I can't taste any pain. Oh my god. I can't believe what people are doing inside Shelsar MT. And stay the fuck at home Matt. And put in place the first federally mandated quarantine in over 50 years. Kind of dark. I'm currently in the jungle in Mexico, somewhere. And I don't see expanded. I'm on a horse and I got drunk and I don't know how I got here. We need justice for George Floyd. We all witness his murder in broad daylight. We're broken and we're disgusted. We cannot normalize this. I can't breathe. It's a daily one. And we dispense the peace. For all the black people we've lost, do the police brutality and racial injustice. Do the worst for residents. America has ever had. It allowed them to produce a single sound. Can I not hate your lunch? Urgent message to stay home. Imagine all the people. Moistly. 43 more deaths. And we're going to the Capitol News on his hand. Let's walk down Pennsylvania to pretty best. God bless. From Spotify, this is Dicect. Long form musical analysis broken into short digestible episodes. Welcome to part one of our seven part series on Inside. A music comedy special shot and performed by Bill Burnham over the course of a very unusual year. I'm your host, Cole Kushner. [Music] [Music] Bo Burnham's Inside begins with the chilling dissonance heard over a solid black screen. Fading up from black we find ourselves inside a dark room as big as a studio apartment. What is in reality the small guest house and bows back yard. Our eyes are drawn to a sharp sliver of daylight piercing through a crack in the door that leads outside. In the center of the room is an empty chair facing us, facing the camera. To the right of the chair is a keyboard. This static image is held for exactly 30 seconds. The music then trails off somewhat abruptly as the outside door suddenly swings open. A jarring pool of bright natural light momentarily fills the room before Bill Burnham emerges as a silhouette, backlit by the daylight behind him. He steps inside and shuts the door. The screen goes black and we hear the opening moments of the song content. The performance has begun. [Music] The opening moments of inside are not unlike the experience of being in the audience at a theater, waiting for the performer to take the stage. But due to the extended quarantines caused by a global pandemic, both stage is now inside his home. Opening inside with both stepping inside does feels like a subtle acknowledgement of the shared experience of 2020, when we are all shut inside. Beyond this, a stage inside one's home also feels like an appropriate setting for a film that in part examines our relationship with technology and the internet in the 21st century. Where historically performances were reserved to the confines of dedicated spaces such as theaters, now everywhere is a potential stage, and everyone is a potential audience member. Even our most intimate, private spaces like our homes or bedrooms have become stages, the homogenization of our internal and external worlds. While the cultural symbolism of this opening shot feels significant, it's equally significant to Bose personal life. To understand why, we have to take a brief but incredibly necessary look back at Bose origins as a comedian and has increasingly fraught relationship with performance. Every time I go to dinner, it seems like I'm getting a little bit thinner. It was a doubt at the breakfast table, I can talk, but they're not equal when I look at them, I find myself. Recorded in 2006, when Bose was 16 years old. This is My Whole Family, an original song in which Bose comedically describes how his whole family suspects his gay. My whole family thinks I'm gay, I guess it's all a bit of a bad way, maybe it's causing a way I walk into the mix and think that I like Bose. And I like Bose. Technically, My Whole Family is Bose's first public work, though that was hardly his intention at the time. He had been writing comedy songs and wanted to share them with his brother who is away at college. So he recorded a video of himself performing the song inside his bedroom and uploaded it to a new video sharing website he'd heard about called YouTube. Without any effort on Bose part, the video was shared on a humor website called break.com. And from there, My Whole Family blew up, jumping from 9,000 views to over a million, which was astronomical back then. And the months after, Bose uploaded more of his comedy songs, incidentally growing his online audience, becoming one of the world's first YouTube stars. You make me laugh, you're my better half, though you wait twice as much. 350 pounds of love, he must have fell from up above and killed the townspeople below. You had a crush and you let it show when I want to pleasure you. I need an expedition crew with all those trips to KFC. You eat out more than me. Recorded in the same bedroom in his family's Massachusetts home, these early videos and songs were all similar to My Whole Family. Very much influenced by the kind of intentionally shocking comedic tendencies a family got. Bose had songs about overweight women, high school parties, even poking fun at Helen Keller. While his online material was a massing views, even early on, Bose noticed a disconnect between his life on and offline. It didn't really change my life. My actual life stayed the same. I had these crazy numbers going up online. I don't know, there's like a world right now where if you go viral or something, you're like on Ellen and you're on Instagram and all these others. There wasn't that. There was no Twitter, there was no Instagram. So I kind of just hit my videos. There was no way to contact me. People were just kind of liking it. I just was hoping at that time to, I knew I wanted to somehow transfer to doing it on stage. I wanted to, I didn't want to make a career out of making videos. It's not because I looked down on it. It was just like I liked performing. And I started performing and when I would perform the songs that were already online live, they would get like tepid laughter. And then when I performed songs that no one had ever heard live, people would react for the first time. So then I was like, okay, this is what I want to do. I want to build a show and start writing to perform live. So that's what was really nice is that having that little built-in audience made it so I could go to sell 100 tickets in every city. Momentum continued to build as Bill moved from performing inside his bedroom to performing in the outside world. In his senior year of high school, Hollywood agent Douglas Endley, who also represented Dave Chappelle at the time, offered to represent Bo. By 2008, at age 17, he became the youngest person to record a performance for Comedy Central. He also signed a four-record deal with Comedy Central Records, debuting his first full-length album in March of 2009, the self-titled Bo Burnham. After graduating high school, Bill was accepted at Harvard, Brown, and NYU. But he decided instead to tour his new album, which included performances on late night with Jimmy Fallon, Conan, and others. Thank you so much, what an honor. My ex-girlfriend had a really weird fetish. She used to like to dress up as herself and act like a raging bitch all the time. In 2010, Bo released his first full-length comedy special, Words, Words, Words. While the show was still song-based, Words, Words, Words showed early signs that Bo was interested in more than just shocking punchlines. Well, still just 19 years old, and been nearly four years since uploading my whole family, and he was starting to take stock of his experience. He turned his critical lens onto himself and began to question the underlying motivations of his performances. I must be psychotic, I must be demented, to think that I'm worthy of all this attention, of all of this money he worked really hard for. I slept and laid while he worked at the drugstore, my drugs attention. ♪ I am an addict, but I can pay to indulge in my habit ♪ ♪ It's all an illusion, I'm wearing makeup ♪ ♪ I'm wearing makeup, makeup, makeup, makeup, makeup ♪ ♪ Art is a dead ♪ ♪ So people think you're funny ♪ ♪ How do we get those people's money ♪ - Bose critical examination of himself, as well as the general dynamic between performer and audience, only deep in with his next comedy special, 2013's "What?" Regarding the show's title and concept, Bose said, quote, "Comedy is very strange to me, and I don't fully understand "it's purpose or function," hence the title, "What?" And furthermore, I am very confused on how comedy relates to me, and how it helps or hurts me, and how the audience relates to me. Are they my friends, my customers, something in between? It's all very strange, and this show wasn't meant to give answers to the audience as much as it was meant to let the audience in on those questions, if that makes sense, unquote. He's isolated himself over the last five years in pursuit of comedy, and, in doing so, has lost touch with reality. You're an asshole, Bose. You hear me. You think you know better than me. You think you know better than everybody. You will die alone, and you will deserve it. But in the meantime, you might as well tell those silly jokes of yours. See if that helps. Bose increasing anxiety about performance climax during the opening night of the "What" tour, when he experienced a panic attack on stage. It was the first of 12 panic attacks you would have on the tour. Provence Rhode Island, it was like a theater, like 3,000 people. Had a panic attack, it was really bad. Then went to New York, had three shows, had a panic attack in the middle show, and then I had a panic attack on the train to DC, the next day, which was another show, and I had like, this was like the first week of a tour, there was like 45 shows in 50 days, and that was when I was like, "Yeah, like this is bad, and I can never do this again." That was the worst time of my, I felt a pretty fortunate life. That was definitely one of the hardest, yeah, stretches of my life. While these panic attacks were new, Bo's anxiety actually began at a young age. He would often experience extreme stomach aches that would land him in the hospital. It wasn't until later in life, he realized these stomach aches were actually symptoms of anxiety. The panic attacks during the "What" tour forced Bo to confront his anxiety, and his early self-diagnosis was that fame, consumer culture, and other people's perception of him was the problem. This sentiment can be heard in the closing moments of the "What" show, where Bo impersonates a Hollywood agent, a groupie and someone from his high school. Eventually, these three voices merged together as one, surrounding Bo and a cacophony of audio claustrophobia. - Hey! - What the hell? - Oh, hey! - Hey! - You're not gonna hit the girl, that's sex, that's sex, that's sex, that's sex, that's sex, that's sex, that's sex, that's sex, that's sex. - Mr., Mr. Bob, Bob. - We think you've changed, bro. - We know best. - You suck. - We think. - We know. - You. - We think. - We know. - Yeah. - We think. - We know. - Yeah. - We think. - We know. - Yeah. - We think. - After the "What" tour ended, Bo took 2014 off from performing. But by early 2015, he was back at it with May Capi, a new show that in part addresses Bo's performance anxiety. While what attempted to put the onus of this anxiety on others, May Capi is much more introspective. And it turned out, performance itself wasn't making Bo happy. - So it was the thing, you know, it was, it was my enemy up there. What was the fear of my own anxiety and my own panic. And I could pretend like, oh, the thing in the, in the thing, May Capi was the thing I hate about comedy. It was a culture so bullshit and everything's crap and comedy sucks. - Yeah. - And I'm the cool kid. I mean, and it wasn't, the truth was I was terrifying. - Bo addresses his performance anxiety most directly in May Capi's finale. Before the last song, he brings up the house lights, sits at the front of the stage and tells the audience directly what the show is about. - It's about performing. I try to make my show about other things, but it always ends up becoming about performing. I started performing very young as a teenager, you know, professionally, and as a comedian, where he's supposed to do. He's supposed to talk about what you know and what I knew always was performing, so to talk about traffic or laundry felt incredibly disingenuous. But I worried that making a show about performing would be too meta, it wouldn't be relatable to people that aren't performers. But what I found is that I don't think anyone isn't, you know, and I feel like I was born in 1990 and I was sort of raised in America when it was a cult of self-expression. And I was just taught, you know, express myself and have things to say and everyone will care about them. And I think everyone was taught that and most of us found out no one gives a shit what we think. So he flocked to performers by the thousands because we're the few that have found an audience and then I'm supposed to get up here and say follow your dreams as if this is a meritocracy. It is not, okay, I had a privileged life and I got lucky and I'm unhappy. They say it's like the me generation. It's not. The arrogance is taught or it was cultivated. It's self-conscious. That's what it is. It's conscious of self. What the social media, it's just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform. So the market said here, perform everything to each other all the time for no reason. It's prison, it's horrific. It is performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it. Both followed this dialogue with the show's final song. He tells the audience that he recently saw Kanye West perform on the Yeezus tour. And how during the song runaway, the instrumental would break down to just piano chords and Kanye, who with autotune on his voice, would talk directly to the audience and a lengthy stream of consciousness. I saw the Yeezus tour, which is an incredible, incredible live show where he comes out in a jeweled mask and performs the entire first hour and a half of the concert without you letting him see his face, which is just so smart and incredible and brave and bold. But he would do this thing every night where he would stop for 15 minutes and autotune rant about like a deas and geopolitics. It was like very weird. And you can see them online. There was an amazing one at the United Center in Chicago where he was talking about the fact that they didn't let Michael Jordan buy the bulls. And the chorus that he kept doing was we should have never ever let MJ play for the wizards. It was like over and over again talking about Michael Jordan should have played for the wizards. But I watched that thing and like, you know, what even if the sort of scope and paradigm of the value system he's talking in doesn't match up to me. He's speaking his truth, you know. So I thought, well, what if I spoke my truth? Titled can't handle this conny rant bow interpolates the chords of Kanye's runaway to recreate what he witnessed at the easiest war. The first half of the song is a comedic rant about the size of Pringle cans and oversized Chipotle burritos as if those were his problems. But in the second half of the song, bow does actually speak his truth. I'll sit here and pretend like my biggest problems are Pringle cans and burritos. The truth is my biggest problems you. I want to please you. But I want to stay true to myself. I want to give you the night out that you deserve. But I want to say what I think and not care what you think about it. Part of me loves you. Part of me hates you. Part of me needs you. Part of me fears you. I don't think that I can handle this right now. Handle this right now. The this and can't handle this refer to the very thing bow is doing at that moment, performing in front of an audience. So after finishing the make happy tour, he quit performing. Just like the title of the song he was singing over, he ran away taking his own advice. He gave the audience every night that if you can live your life without an audience, you should. But I felt like I need to re-choose my life. I'm not I'm not just because I fell into something when I was 16 years old doesn't mean it's what I have to do for the rest of my life. And like, what if this hadn't happened? What if I didn't have this success? And I'm 25 or 4 at the time? What would I do if I didn't have to because that's and you really see that on YouTube with some people where it's like they're literally. playing the character of themselves that they invented when they were 14 and they're 30 now or something, but that's across genres. I mean, across mediums, across the but going like, I need to re-choose my life. At the end of the May Capy special, we get a glimpse of what direction Bose New Life might take, at least symbolically. As the audience gives him a standing ovation after can't handle this, Bose walks off stage. There's a sudden but seamless quick cut to Bose now walking into the very same room we see at the beginning of inside. He sits down at a piano, turns to the camera and says, "Oh, good, it's just us." Bose has brought us inside and he performs one last song in this intimate, dimly lit space, an epilogue of sorts. These are Bose's very last words in the special, and his answer to his own question was pretty self-evident. He was not happy. So after finishing the song, Bose walks out the very same door he walked into at the beginning of inside. He crosses his backyard grass toward his back patio, where he's greeted by his girlfriend holding their small dog Bruce like a baby. Bose gives Bruce a kiss and together they all walk into the house and the special ends. The end of May Capy seemed to signal that Bose was leaving the stage to focus on family, himself, and his well-being. And in the ensuing years, Bose turned to creative endeavors behind the camera. He directed two comedy specials for Drod Carmichael and Chris Rock respectively. He also reworked a film script he'd written called 8th grade, which he directed and released in 2018 to great critical acclaim. The film is about a young girl expressing herself on a YouTube channel Nobody Watches while attempting to navigate the anxiety-ridden dynamics of middle school. The film was partly inspired by Bose's experience on the May Capy tour. As I started to experience panic, my way to cope with it was to talk about it on stage. Me talking about it on stage was in the context of what I was doing, which is performing for audiences at that point, a thousand people or so. I started doing my stand-up and thought no one is going to relate to this unless they're a sea-list, delist, celebrity comedian that performs for audiences. And then I did my shows and talked about this stuff and 15-year-old girls would come up to me after the show and say, "I feel exactly like you do exactly what you're talking about is what I'm going through." I'm going, "What are you talking about? You're not on tour. You're not performing." I realized that I had sort of, through talking about performance anxiety, I had sort of unknowingly backed into a, I think, a shared generational experience of me and the people younger than me. It was sort of the realization of my career, which is that this stresses I feel as a sort of, again, delist celebrity have been democratized to an entire generation. Now, everyone feels like they're being watched. Everyone feels like there's a proper noun version of their self that they have to maintain and curate and perform. Here Bose says something really important, that the realization of his career was that his performance-related anxiety is shared by an entire generation, that he was not alone, that his story was not only his, it was ours. So we return to the opening scene of Inside, understanding now the personal symbolic significance of Bose walking in the same door he walked out of at the end of Maycapie. After five years away from the stage, Bose with a performer is back. Only now, because of the circumstances of 2020, his audience is a camera, and his stage is his bedroom. A true full circle moment for the kid who got to start performing songs in his bedroom. In fact, the way the empty chair and piano is positioned and framed in the opening scene of Inside is remarkably similar to the positioning of the chair and piano in his very first video, My Whole Family. A video that will actually make an appearance later in the film. And so at this point, with Bose now back on stage for the first time in five years, we are only left with questions. Why now? How will he handle performing again? And perhaps most importantly, what does he have to say? That's right after the break. Shack here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana or 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you, your car is here, Mr. Shack. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shack. Hey, have you always been so big tall and handsome? Not always. I was 6-10 once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shack. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com. Welcome back to Disect. Before the break, we took a brief look at Bose history with performance, discovering the personal significance of Bose stepping back on stage. It's with this history in mind that we dive into inside's first track, content. Content begins with the repeating low E played on a synthesizer before a simple drum loop picks up behind it. We see Bose center screen seated in the chair that was just empty next to the keyboard. The room is dark and Bose lit by a small stationary light on his right side, illuminating a headlamp wrapped around his forehead. He's looking down and away from the camera and brings a microphone up to his face as he begins to sing contents opening lines. If you would have told me a year ago that I'd be locked inside of my home, I would have told you a year ago, interesting, now leave me alone. Without explicitly saying it, Bose addresses the quarantine orders of the pandemic, establishing the circumstances under which the special was created. Bose responds to someone hypothetically telling him he'd be locked in his home is a little strange. He tells the person to go away, perhaps because pre-pandemic, anyone describing the reality of what 2020 became with some ridiculous and unbelievable. But understanding Bose's personal journey and his retreat from the spotlight after Maycapie, Bose might actually be disinterested by this information because a year ago, he had already isolated himself from the world. Staying inside wouldn't be a change for him, and even telling this person to leave him alone displaces disinterest and engaging with others. Sorry, man, I look like a mess. I pulled the haircut, but it got pre-scheduled. Robert's been a little depressed, no, and so today I'm going to try just giving up, sitting down, going back to work, might not help, but still it couldn't hurt him, sitting down. Bose continues content singing, sorry that I looked like a mess, a book to haircut, but it got re-scheduled. At the time of Insides release, it was a relatable punchline, recalling when barbershops and hair salons were shut down during the pandemic. By the time we hear this line, the camera has zoomed out enough to see what Bose is wearing, a white t-shirt and white gym shorts. His hair is long, and he has a full beard. He's a long way from the clean shaven, crew cut, Bose of Maycapie. With the next line, Bose throws a bit of a curve ball singing, Robert's been a little depressed. Once again, recalling the conditions of 2020 is a relatable sentiment, as so many of us struggled through the year. It might also suggest another reason why Bose looks unkempt, as depression can sometimes lead to poor hygiene. Beyond this, it's hard to know this early into the film why exactly Bose would be depressed, and if it has anything to do other than the general state of the world. Bose doesn't elaborate, and seems he's more planting a thematic seed at this point. He then follows with what feels like an attempt at improving his mental health, singing. And so, today, I'm just going to try just getting up, sitting down, going back to work, might not help, but still it couldn't hurt. Establishing a structure can help with depression, and it appears that Bose is going to attempt to use work in a daily routine as an attempt to feel better. There's a kind of going through the motions undertone to the phrasing of these lines. It doesn't feel inspired, but more a way to survive. With the next lines, Bose makes clear what kind of work he's referring to. ♪ I heard I'm sitting down, riding jokes, singing city songs ♪ ♪ I'm sorry I was caught, but look, I made you some content ♪ ♪ Daddy made you your favorite open wide, here comes the content ♪ ♪ It's a beautiful data stay inside ♪ O'Continue singing. I'm sitting down, riding jokes, singing silly songs. I'm sorry I was gone. We understand now that going back to work means Bose is creating comedy songs and sketches all of his past specials. While sorry I was gone, it's a direct acknowledgement of his hiatus from performing. Then with a crescendo of vocal harmonies and added musical layers, Bose flips on the headlamp he's been wearing and points it to the ceiling, directly onto a rotating disco ball, which sends a tornado of swirling light fragments around the room. He sings, but look, I made you some content. Daddy, my. made you your favorite, open wide. The phrasing is obviously comedic, a playoff what you say to a child spooning them their favorite dinner. Referring to his own special as content, does raise some interesting questions. What is the difference between content and art? Where exactly is that line drawn? Is all art content, but not all content art? Are all artist content creators, but not all content creators, artists? And as a comedian songwriter who began on YouTube, who is still making songs in his bedroom, who is uploading this special to be consumed on the internet, where does bow fall in all of this? The way the word is used today, content is closely associated with the internet and social media. But if art is presented alongside content on the internet, for example, on Netflix, is there a difference? If the answer in theory is yes, how does the distinction between the two change our consumption of it? How does sitting down and watching inside differ from sitting down and watching a video on YouTube or spending an hour and a half on TikTok? How much of the onus is put on us, the consumers of content, the observers of art, to make that distinction? Both and closes out the song by singing, here comes the content, it's a beautiful day to stay inside. Of course, the play here is on the common phrase, it's a beautiful day to go outside. This, along with both stage being his bedroom, establishes one of inside's running themes, the blurring of our inside and outside worlds. Traditionally, inside is a place of privacy, those places we are not seen, while outside is traditionally where we engage and interact with the world. But the digital dynamics of the modern world have changed that. We're increasingly interacting with the world while indoors through internet-connected screens. We have increasingly invited the world into our homes and interior lives. We take work meetings at our living room, we share intimate details on social media. The internet and the way we've chosen to use it has blurred the lines. We are perhaps moving toward a reality in which there is no distinction between inside and outside at all. The internet's hitting puberty, kind of, almost. The internet was like sort of fun, and it was like playing with trucks and toys, and now all of a sudden it's becoming self-aware in the same way a person does, and it's inviting an emotional life into itself the way. Never really thought of it that way, but I think that's true as well. It's the volume in the bandwidth that carifies me, not the character of it. And I actually think the character erodes because of the bandwidth, because of the speed, because we're moving at a speed and a volume that we're just not emotionally suited for. We're trying to actualize and streamline our social lives. It makes no sense. You can streamline your, we can streamline clean energy. That's great. You want to streamline tech, and think fine. You want to streamline how we view ourselves, and how we view our friends, and how we communicate with each other. You can't do that. We're applying like a crazy capitalist logic to our social interior life, to like our souls. I mean, it's very weird. Oh, it took 10 minutes to get to work. Now it takes two minutes, 'cause we made this really cool car. Okay, that's fine, that's great. You talked to 10 people, 10 years ago, now you can talk to a thousand. Oh, wait, wait, no, no, that doesn't stop. Like that doesn't, we don't need to, we don't need to streamline that. We don't need to actualize that part of ourselves. I don't think, I mean, I don't know, it's weird. Content usures us inside, and establishes the necessary context of the film. Content is our table of contents. We understand that Bo has been stuck inside both before and during the pandemic, and that he's returning to comedy or work to ward off depression. There's also some interesting implications in the title itself. Aside from its modern use as internet-related material for consumption, the word content can also be read as content, as unhappy or satisfied. This reading recalls Bo's fraught history with performance, and we wonder as he returns to performing, whether he will make happy, if he will finally become content with the process, or will he struggle with it like he has in the past. The idea of content as it relates to satisfaction, also recalls something like Karl Marx's famous quote, "Religion is the opium of the masses." Only today, with a religious devotion declining rapidly from generation to generation, the phrase that feels much more apt is something like content is the opium of the masses. If we stretch the definition of content as it relates to this opening song and film, we can also think about contents as the things that are held in something that which is held inside a container. In this way, Bo is the contents held inside. Now before we move on from this opening track, I have to point out a striking similarity between content and the 1984 song I Want to Break Free by Queen. Both are in the same key, e-major, both feature the same repeated eighth notes in the main synth, and they're very close to the same tempo with content being just a few BPMs faster. Here's the two back-to-back. (upbeat music) We know that Bo has a history of interpolating and recontextualizing existing songs. At the end of Maycappi, he repurposed Kanye's live rendition of Runaway, likely used in part because the title foreshadowed exactly what he was going to do, Runaway from Performance. And given the direct connection between the end of Maycappi and the beginning of Inside, Bo could be doing something similar here with Queen. As the title I Want to Break Free feels like an appropriate sentiment for someone stuck inside. Even one of the verses of Break Free feels incredibly relevant to Bo's fraught relationship with Performance and his need of an audience as Freddie Mercury sings, but life still goes on. I can't get used to living without you by my side. I don't want to live alone. God knows, got to make it on my own. So baby, can't you see, I've got to break free. ♪ So baby, can't you see ♪ ♪ I've got to break free ♪ ♪ I've got to break free ♪ During the closing moments of content, Bo suddenly points the headlamp directly into the camera, triggering a quick cut to a new scene. We see a static image of the room, now fully lit, cluttered with an array of music and lighting equipment. The word Inside appears in large letters across the screen before cutting to a title card that reads, written, edited, shot, and directed by Bo Burnham. This continues to establish the context around the creation of the film, and it's important for the audience to understand that Bo is creating this work alone, not as a brag, before thematic reasons that will become clear as the film progresses. Given the opening song's title content, we also recognize that Bo is utilizing the typical process of a content creator. It's very common for a YouTuber, influencer, or even someone just posting on social media to execute the entire content creation process by themselves, often in their bedroom or home. This idea will also become more relevant as the film goes on, as Bo seems to be examining the disassociative effects of this process, where a creator's life becomes synonymous with their content, where they watch themselves and make the thing they're making, and then, after uploading, watch their audience, watch them. Finally, as it's my personal belief that Inside is in part art about content, we should recognize how the film feels like an accumulation of the many skill sets Bo has developed throughout his artistic career. He is comedic songwriter, as he was for his early YouTube videos and comedy specials. He is storyteller and director, as he was for his film eighth grade. He is actor, as he was in the 2020 film, promising young woman. In this, in addition to a whole laundry list of other unlisted roles required to make this film by himself, staged designer, lighting specialist, cinematographer, score composer, music producer, and probably a lot more. Regarding the specific limitation of having just one room to film an entire special, we can point to something Bo said about directing comedy specials for "Drawed Carmichael and Chris Rock" as an example of Bo's creative history and forming Inside. - But, like, working on my specials, directing specials, yeah, that definitely prepared me as a filmmaker, for sure. There's a sort of preciousness to film extent of specials, and, you know, you have to make one look really good in one room, be able to be filmed for an hour. So, you learn how to. And you learn, in standard specials, you are just serving the comedian on screen. So, you really learn, like, how to serve the person on camera. (gentle music) Camera test. Ugh. (gentle music) As Inside continues, we see a montage of Bo's setting up various lighting and camera equipment, firmly establishing that Inside is, in part, about the creative process, and, more specifically, about the process of making the very thing we are now watching. There's actually a word for this, "poioma non", which is, quote, "a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation, sometimes the creation of the story itself." According to Alistair Fowler, who coined the term, "the poioma non" is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality, the limits of narrative truth. I think this framework does apply to Inside, as the film progresses and Bo's mental health deteriorates, will begin to question more and more whether or not what we're seeing is truth or fiction, or perhaps some dramatized space in between. And part of what we'll discover is that Inside seems to be drawing our attention to the fact that we're moving toward a world in which we are all in a way living poioma, that our lives entangle with social media and soon things like the metaverse find us increasingly out of body. - You know, Bo Burnham, but then you have Bo Burnham in the world, you have a brand, you are your own publicist, you walk through your experiences, but you also float behind yourself, like a camera, following yourself through your own experiences, you're sort of out of body all the time, you're disassociated, you're in a situation situation, but you're already thinking of how that situation is going to be perceived when presented to the world digitally. You're anticipating the backlash to that perception, maybe even before you've even had the experience. It's that weird sort of hall of mirrors, strange meta thing that makes you not want to leave the house, makes you not want to ever open your mouth, and it makes you not embodied, not in yourself, not in your mouth, which is very similar to anxiety, which is just objectifying yourself, objectifying your own experience. It's weird, and I feel like it's to be a 13-year-old kid and feel that way, to feel like you have a brand, and a narrative, and that you're in a movie. Every thing you do is a quantity to be sold and presented and thought about and attended to, even after the fact. Plan a moment to reminisce on that moment, it's crazy, you know, weird. Throughout the montage of bow-testing equipment, we see his hair and beard get progressively longer from shot to shot, foreshadowing the long, arduous journey that was the making of this special, and the toll it took on bow mentally and physically. Midway through this montage, a new recurring shot is introduced. Center frame, we're confronted with the face of Bose camera, as if we, the viewing audience are being recorded. In terms of inside being a poya manan, this shot seems to be drawing our attention to the fact that throughout this film, this is Bose Vantage Point, a reminder that the audience he actually is performing to is not us, but a camera, and somewhat similar to Bose turning up the house lights at the end of Maycappy to destroy some of the artifice that separates him, the performer, with us, the audience. Instead of allowing us to completely escape into an alternate reality, which is actually the goal of most entertainment, Bose instead deliberately drawing attention to the recorded, constructed reality of the film, as that's in part what the film is examining, the dynamic of performer and audience, and the camera's critical position as the center of that dynamic. As the shot progresses, the camera slowly zooms in on itself toward its large circular lens, an ominous solid black sphere, and zooms so far into itself that the black of the lens overtakes the entire screen. Quite literally, we have been brought inside the camera. Because this shot was created by placing the camera in front of a mirror, we props up to think about this all black screen as a black mirror, a phrase coined by Charlie Brooker, creator of the technology center dystopian TV series, Black Mirror. Brooker told the Guardian, quote, "Any TV, any LCD, any iPhone, any iPad, something like that, if you just stare at it, it looks like a black mirror, there's something cold and horrifying about that," unquote. Bose keeps the full black screen up for ten whole seconds, more than enough time to see our image reflected in it. It's an incredible effect, especially because it's created by zooming all the way inside of camera's lens, and what we see there in the soul of the camera is us. Along with this visual metaphor, Bose also seems to be drawing our attention to the ubiquity of the camera in modern life. Based on interviews where he speaks on this topic directly, it seems he feels this ubiquity has completely changed the dynamics of our everyday lives over the past decade, and that we ought to be thinking a little bit more critically about the effects of such a sudden dramatic cultural shift. When talking about his favorite TV show, the original British version of the office, Bose spoke about its examination of the ways in which cameras alter our behavior. The British office is probably the most formative actual thing for me in some ways, right? It's a TV show. I know people overstate that, but I watched that once a year, and that's probably that probably had the biggest effect on even eighth grade was that movie, just that style of performance, that sort of, the thing that's gotten lost, I think, in all the adaptations of the British office, and all of its forms in America, like, and not just the office, but every form is just like, yeah, just the particular relationship of people to the way a camera changes a room, right? Really specifically the way a camera changes people, which is like, that to me is like one of the central questions that we have to, and the more we've forgotten about cameras and rooms, the more we need to examine that question, the more normalized they've become. There is something like psychically violating and insane about being in front of a camera. It's just like the eye of God and the devil staring at you, like immortalizing you and taking your soul and it's just like, it's just naked. As the screen goes black by the enveloping camera lens, we reach the end of what feels like the introduction of inside, bookended by solid black screens. Like many great stories, in these opening few minutes, both establishes the story's protagonist and setting, while also foreshadowing some of the film's overarching themes and symbols. For those coming into the film with an understanding of Bo's background, he suffuses details that provide clear narrative continuity from make-happy to inside. And so now that we're inside, now that we know who the story is about and where it takes place, the next question we as an audience are going to ask is, what does this character want? What do they desire? And how do they plan on getting it? In another seamless transition, the black screen of the camera lens transitions to the black dark of the room, and Bo's seated center frame in front of his piano, flips on a huge spotlight that shines down on him as if he's performing on a traditional stage. This is comedy, a song that will establish Bo's desire and how he plans to achieve it. A song will examine note by note, frame by frame, next time on Disect. This episode of Disect was written and produced by me. If you enjoyed today's episode, please tell a friend about the new series or share on social media. It really helps. Digital analysis by Camden O. Strander. The series intro was designed and scored by So Wiley, audio editing by Kevin Pooleur, theme music by B.R. Prattick. Alright, thanks everyone, talk to you next week.