“Art is a lie” — Parsing what is real in Bo Burnham’s “Inside”
Early in his 2013 special what., musician, comedian, filmmaker, and actor Bo Burnham knocks over his water bottle. He sheepishly apologizes, picks it up, and then launches into a dance set to a pre-recorded musical number about how he meant to knock the water over. The brief ditty ends with the gleeful proclamation, “Art is a lie. Nothing is real.” In retrospect, that goofy trifle of a bit feels like the first step on the path toward creating Burnham’s latest Netflix special, the masterful and, on occasion, oppressively heavy Inside.
Released in 2021 just as the COVID-19 pandemic finally, sort of, seems to be coming to an end, Inside may turn out to be the definitive piece of quarantine art (far more than the misguided, masturbatory “celebrities on zoom” genre Hollywood thought it could cram down our gullets). It captures all those funny feelings we felt at one point or another during those sludgy months locked inside our homes: creativity, depression, anger, manic inspiration that only makes sense to us. And it asks a dark but important question, “When we no longer have the option of using our lived experiences to define our lives, what is the point of living? What is real?”
The puzzle of what is real and what is a lie lives in every frame of Burnham’s special. At first, telling apart the real Bo from the fake ones seems easy. There are the silly characters Bo plays: the brand awareness rep, the Twitch streamer, the YouTube reactor, the children’s show host and his subjugated sock puppet who’s only alive when his master allows him to be. There’s music Bo — he’s the one singing funny songs with elaborate editing and practical light shows. And, lastly, there’s “real” Bo — he’s the one we glimpse setting up gear, testing lights, cursing himself for fucking up his vocals, or delivering rambling confessionals with a head lamp strapped to his face. Right at the start, “real” Bo takes time to point the camera at the ordinary room where he’ll be working and living for the duration of the pandemic, as if to say, “Nothing up my sleeve. There’s no trick. I’m doing all of this. Everything you see, I meant for you to see. It’s all me.”
But what if the “real” Bo is a lie too, just like the water bottle on the ground? Perhaps these moments of vulnerability are a staged, directorial necessity for the sake of thematic coherence. The Bo on screen might as well be another sock puppet worn by the writer/director of the special.
Or maybe they’re all the same person and that person is truly going nuts.
The Twitch streamer and reaction video characters seem like the lightest, goofiest bits in the special. But after sitting with Inside for a few days and rewatching a couple of times, they’ve begun to feel like the most autobiographical expressions of the REAL real Bo — the one behind the camera. As the director of the piece, he must have at times felt like an ambivalent gamer blithely pushing his avatar around the room, or a vlogger having an existential crisis over whether he could stomach another second of staring at his own face.
The motif of Bo observing himself recurs beyond the clever reaction video sketch. Whether with editing or with his trusty remote lighting kit (an instrument he wields just as impressively as his piano), Burnham is constantly creating screens within screens — the screen of his phone projected over his body, his body being used as a screen, the screens “real” Bo watches playback on — all housed within the screen you yourself are watching. We spend so much time watching him watch himself, we have to ask what he’s trying to say here. Moments like the reaction video sketch offer facades that tell us, “Oh this is just a funny sketch. I can relax.” But when we see the “real” Bo in a naturally lit room surrounded by his mess of gear and cords, once again reacting to the special in progress, this time humorlessly, there are no clues about what we’re supposed to feel.
Burnham’s ever growing hair and beard are the secret MVPs for keeping the magic trick of the special alive. It makes us think SOME of his onscreen freak outs must be real. “Robert’s been a little depressed.” By his third suicidal ideation, you may wonder what you’re watching, perhaps assuring yourself, “They’d tell us if he dies at the end… right?” One of the most seemingly vulnerable moments of the special shows Bo at his shaggiest — leg shaking, his shirtless body getting doughier — speaking about how his mental health has reached an all time low… only for that confession to be interrupted by a brightly lit, fully produced stanza about panic attacks. It sure looked like he was struggling, but it was another water bottle lie. “Are you feeling nervous? Are you having fun?” He’s sincerely asking; it’s his authorial intention for us to experience both feelings.
The artist’s caustically satirical hand can be felt most strongly in the homestretch of the special. Right after the aforementioned headlamp rant, we get a brief, ludicrous lunatic yop of sarcastic praise for Jeff Bezos followed by a hard cut to yet another new version of Bo — this one a broken stand up comedian in his underwear driven completely insane by the isolation, talking to even more silence than usual about what is real. He reasons that real world human contact can kill you, so we’re all better off just staying inside and on our phones. “The outside world […] is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital digital space. One must only interact with the real world as one interacts with a coal mine: suit up, gather what is needed, and then return to the surface.”
Of course the real Bo (not the “real” Bo) doesn’t believe this, anymore than he would sincerely congratulate Jeff Bezos. It’s a warning. The fictional mad man sitting naked on a stool with a glazed smile on his face is admitting defeat. He’s a sock puppet saying, “Yes, sir,” before being put back in the dark. He’s letting Bezos win. “I’ll never go outside again.” We can’t be like the main character Burnham created for this special. The puzzle of what is real and what is a lie lives in every frame of Inside. The end credits insist that the special was “filmed in Bo Burnham’s house.” But we see the outside of “his” “house.” Just a theatrical space where he can perform more content for the digital world. We can’t engage with real life like a coal mine. Not after the fucking year we’ve had. Not when there are only seven more to go. We have to switch the screens off, go outside, and appreciate what is real while we still know the difference.
