Personal Essay / Review by Logan Kenny
When I was a depressed teenager, I often felt completely alone. Even in a house filled with other people, even with friends in digital spaces, isolation seemed to dominate every inch of my existence. I would talk on the phone all night and hang up feeling as lonely as I did when the call started. I would cry all the time for seemingly no reason and drown my sorrows in a cavalcade of cinema and video games. I would lose my control and have meltdowns far more often, leaving holes in walls and bruises on skin. Most importantly, I really didn’t want to be alive. I just wanted it all to stop. It felt like nothing would ever get better and that I’d be trapped amongst those pale white walls, stuck in a sterile routine of oppressive classes and increasingly less tangible friendships. I just didn’t want to be on Earth anymore. When I found Bo Burnham’s Make Happy, it was the first piece of art that felt like it understood the desire to no longer exist. It wasn’t inherently suicidal art, but it got the bigger picture of experiencing so much shit inside your mind that anything seems better than its continuation. I watched it so many times in that year, clinging onto it as a vessel for my emotional entanglements, filtering dysfunctional relationships and suicidal impulses through its cracks and it ended up being the piece of art I most associate with the worst year of my life. It got me through, in a sense, which changed my relationship with the film permanently. Now, when I see Make Happy, I see a special that reminds me of what it feels like to have no faith in the world or things ever getting better. It reminds me of how paralysing it felt to exist in that point of my life, a point that still makes my stomach churn whenever I reflect upon the choices and feelings I experienced in that year. Make Happy served its purpose for me; the impact it has had on my life is something I can never dismiss or stop being thankful for. But I had to let it go. Some things in life, artistically or otherwise, are designed for stages in our overall existences. You don’t have to love everything forever. When I rewatched Make Happy fairly recently, it felt like the defining point to say goodbye to it, to move on and continue finding new art that helps me process my mindset and place in the world. I laughed a few times, got emotional at the ending song like always, but when it was over, it wasn’t the same as it used to be. It made me feel alone for the first time in a long time.
When I first watched Bo Burnham’s new special, Inside, I didn’t like it very much. It felt very derivative of his other works immediately and continued to make that impression over the 90 minute runtime. The structure he used in Make Happy is incredibly similar to the structure he uses here: there’s a song humorously satirising his role as a straight white man in an increasingly diverse society/industry, there’s a point about how his shows are a series of disconnected bits, there are gags and songs specifically about cultural changes and sellouts that he has passionate feelings about, and it all all eventually culminates in an ending stretch where comedy seems to disappear and the performance becomes an extension of Bo’s own battles with mental health. I’d seen this before. It was the structure that helped me years ago, but it wasn’t the same. It felt like I’d grown up, and he’d remained static as a comedian, content on reworking the same material with a new shine on it. I didn’t laugh very often, and I didn’t completely buy his self-destructive self-examinations, especially considering that he didn’t explore his own wealth or privilege beyond a surface-level acknowledgement of his own whiteness. I found the inclusion of his own botched takes throughout the special ill-conceived, believing that they instead amplified the artifice of his project instead of creating a sense of reality. These moments don’t add to the thesis of the production ,and while I understand that showing the construction is important to the deconstruction, there’s simply too many of them, and they aren’t always backed up by the rest of the material. Generally, instead of using performance to amplify something real, Inside felt like Bo Burnham was expressing occasional honest and emotional thoughts in order to add gravitas to a project that didn’t really get to the core of who he was as an artist or a person. By the end, I felt like I’d not learned anything or gained anything. I just assumed that it was over for me. The phase of Bo Burnham in my life had come and gone completely, the work that was profound as a 14 year old now felt benign and false as an adult.
Then I wanted to die again. It’s funny how that works. There was a moment where I just snapped. After over a year of intense frustration, emotional suppression, physical and emotional loneliness, multiple friends passing away at young ages and the possibility that I’ll never see my hospitalised girlfriend ever again, I lost it and engaged in a meltdown like it was 2016 all over again. I can still feel the bruises on my face. I wanted to hurt myself more. That’s the thing about meltdowns that are so damaging; the pain is never enough compared to the horrors raging inside my mind. I wanted to hit myself until I couldn’t see. There was a point where I was struggling so much that I felt like it was my time, that there was not a chance it could get better, not after this year and not with the possibility of endless grief around the corner. I came close to hurting myself worse than I did, came closer than I have in years. With tears running down my face and loneliness seeming to oppress every facet of my existence, I put the special on again. And it turns out that I’ve changed less than I thought.
I don’t think Inside is perfect. Most of my criticisms still read to me as valid and I think that in general, it’s a step down from his previous work as a comedian and as an exploration of depression. As bad as this might sound, I think his personal involvement in the fabric of the work somewhat detracts from the potential power he could have pulled out of the material. Instead of distancing himself and filtering it explicitly through a planned sketch or an emotionally bombastic closing song like in Make Happy, it becomes a series of very open and expressive monologues linked together by jokes that are clearly being told by a man who is struggling. It’s definitely a realistic and bitterly funny exploration of the time in a depressive episode where you just don’t give a fuck about how anyone views you or what’s going on in the world. Inside’s greatest struggle as a creative endeavour, however, is that it constantly oscillates between truly examining every neurosis and aspect of privilege that Bo Burnham has, or using the show as a conduit for him to outright explore his frustrations and bitterness towards the world. It tries to be both and ends up coming across as half-finished on both attempts, which is a big reason why I bounced off of it on the first watch. I found the satirisations to be incomplete and the personal elements to not reveal enough about himself beyond the introspection that he wants the audience to see. That is all true to an extent now; it is fundamentally flawed in my eyes and it’s hard for me to actively recommend, but I finally understand what he was going for.
The most heartbreaking revelation about myself that’s come from the last year is that hopelessness doesn’t bother me anymore. I used to be adamantly opposed to unjustified nihilism, trying desperately to have an optimistic and hopeful outlook on the world for my own mental state and for the sake of the others around me. But after everything that’s happened, I feel hopeless. It really does feel like nothing will ever be right again. I can distract myself from these thoughts for a while but they always catch up, the sun always sets and I am forced to reconcile with the nature of my situation. I have found more comfort in art about the world burning than I have with the comforting romantic comedies that I used to pivot towards during times of great depression. I hope that as time passes, I’ll be able to re-embed myself with that sense of natural optimism and the burning desire to help those I love however I can, but for now, there’s nothing more I can do but scream, cry and connect with others who understand how it feels. For all of my problems with Inside, nothing in the last year has captured how fucking tired nihilism makes you quite like this special. This is a project that is a vessel for Burnham to challenge his legitimate and petty grievances with the world, a space where his time is unlimited alongside his resentment. He filters everything through his lens of contempt. His songs expose the inherent capitalistic nature of mass-produced art and the fundamental racism that the United States is established upon on one end, while venting about Instagram, Twitch streamers, and the basic mundanity of FaceTiming a parent. There is little focus because it is a frantic pool of despair for Burnham to wallow within, taking the same bitter solace in complaining about basic irritants as he does outlining all the things in the world that cause him great existential suffering. It is an approach that can feel underdeveloped, particularly in the pettier songs and gags that make him seem older than his 30 years, but it’s one that can be understood when you’ve felt that insidious amount of annoyance and anger in your bloodstream. When I watched Inside, I was so mad at everyone and everything, festering alone in my bed. I was mad at random things I saw on Twitter, mad about my football club’s administrative failures, mad that I might not get to kiss my girlfriend on the forehead before either of us die, mad that there was nothing I could do to change anything, and I wanted to fucking scream until my vocal cords tore. It was a horrible way to feel. It’s refreshing to know you’re not the only person to feel as torn up about everything. Similarly, my appreciation for the more honest elements of the piece were further amplified by this mindset. I believed the tiredness and the pain causing him to pivot away from jokes and towards rambling introspection. It all seemed to make sense. When it was over, instead of being relieved that the 90 minutes had passed, I was thankful that I’d had my time with it.
I don’t know if there’s anything else to say. Unlike with Make Happy, Inside isn’t a work to cling onto in order to save your soul and alter your path. It’s not a work that uses its artifice to much benefit and it certainly doesn’t explore the complete picture of its subject, but I’m very grateful that I got more one late night memory out of an artist that I might not be alive without. There will never be a time where I have a clear thought on Inside. It’s not the kind of special that will allow that clarity within me. If it gets to the point where my life seems to get better, there is a significant chance that I’ll reject it again, or if I get further depressed, it’ll be easier to target it for profiting off of the Netflix regime while professing emotional integrity and a canonical opposition to brands’ manipulation of consumers. Maybe it’ll only work for me on that one night. I’m not even convinced I’d like it now if I decided to watch it for the third time. But in the moment I needed it, it was there, and that’s all I can ever really ask for. I hope the future me that reads this feels the way I did when I read my old essays about Make Happy: a combination of heartbreak over what I felt then and a pure feeling of indescribable joy that things had gotten better since. I really hope that can happen.