That Funny Feeling: Inside Bo Burnham's 'Inside' (2021)

(Image credit: Slate.com)

Ever since its release on Netflix, I spent a lot of time thinking about Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021).

Inside is one of those films that defy the prying power of reviewers and critics. Not because it’s a perfect film, but because it feels so personal to the creator that no critical interpretations would have done it any justice.

Reviewing Inside would be akin to reviewing someone’s diary. It feels as if they weren’t made for the eyes of the public.

Yet Inside is made for public consumption.

Burnham knew that his work would not be shielded from public scrutiny. In fact, that makes it the central theme of the film.

On the surface, Inside is a story framed around Burnham’s internal conflict over whether he should keep hiding from the outside world or remain inside his own mind. The pandemic and subsequent lockdown measures provided an extraordinary frame for an allegory of Burnham’s social anxiety.

Inside circumvents the creator-audience dichotomy by leaning into the increasingly blurred distinction between the private and public sphere. Burnham is not trying to keep up the persona, nor is he trying to shed it. He constantly moves between his usual comedy schtick and a meta-analysis of his own condition as a creator.

He breaks the fourth wall, addressing the audience personally, effectively reducing the distance between himself and the audience to an uncomfortable degree. The result is a sense of being perpetually stuck in the uncanny valley – uncertain of what is real and what isn’t.

I decided not to review the show as a whole for that reason.

I can provide the surface observations laid out above, but to analyze the various songs about Burnham’s relationship with social media and his own mental illness seem presumptuous. I would be presuming to know what this whole thing is really about.

But in reality, no one would be able to crack the code.

We could probably present our interpretations of each song. But we'd still face the problem of not being able to distinguish what that Burnham decided to show us is real and what is just his show persona.

We'd still be stuck in the uncanny valley.

Still, there are two songs that really stuck with me: That Funny Feeling and All Eyes on Me.

Through my own repeated consumption, both of these songs seem to have transcended the film. I’ve listened to them many times. And like most songs, they soon became more about who I am and how I feel than what it means. I stop trying to interpret its meaning from Burnham’s perspective. To talk about the songs is to express my feelings toward them, like describing a Rorschach painting. It is not an attempt to review or interpret it.

The first song – That Funny Feeling – is played on an acoustic guitar and is beautifully vague in its presentation. The verse features Burnham singing about life in lockdown as well as the things that are happening around the world. The chorus breaks into a repetition of a simple but emotionally effective line: “There it is again, that funny feeling, that funny feeling…”

As lockdown measures continue to worsen in my country, and as the political situations became more unstable, I find myself returning to this song. The song allowed me to mark moments when I get “that funny feeling”. It is almost a way of recognizing one’s state of mind.

But what is that funny feeling exactly?

Since the verse contrasts the mundanity of everyday life with serious ongoings in the world, it lays bare the odd relationship between the individuals and the world around them. One of the most hard-hitting lines in the song goes “The whole world at your fingertip, the ocean at your door…”

As individuals are given a door to the rest of the world, the world itself is facing mass extinction. We are given the knowledge and awareness of the world, but we cannot change its fate.

The line “In honor of the revolution, it’s half off at The Gap” is equally hard-hitting. For me, it evokes the feeling that all struggles, political or social, can be made commercial. At the end of the day, a revolution ends up becoming a sales day.

That funny feeling for me refers to a sense of impending doom coupled with a feeling of helplessness, of being trapped in a position where one can do nothing. Sometimes, it’s the funny feeling of seeing the world goes to shit while one is forced into lockdown rather than going out there to make things. Other times, often when I can go out and do things, it’s about the fact that my actions are perpetually meaningless to the larger course of history.

The second song is a companion piece to That Funny Feeling. It’s called All Eyes On Me.

This song relies on repetition and visual elements of the show. For most of this song, we are treated to a zoom-in of Burnham’s eyes. At the beginning of the song, he beckons us to “come in” and keep our eyes on him. There’s an uncomfortable forced mutual voyeurism that arises at this moment. Burnham is watching me and I am forced to watch him. He’s forcing the audience to stare into his eyes, something which cannot happen in a usual comedy routine.

By doing this, he completely recasts the image of a comedy routine. Rather than an enjoyable gathering, it became a scary, almost depressing collision of two individuals, staring at each other in animosity. The animosity comes from the fact that Burnham feels invaded by having to show his personal space. My animosity comes from the fact that he is addressing me personally, usually a rare and uncommon occurrence in a stand-up routine. The deep tone applied to his voice and the blue colouring of the screen created an even more eerie atmosphere. In the end, he asks me to “get the fuck up”. I can’t help but feel invaded.

But all these are to an extent, paratextual. What do I get out of the content of the song itself?

Instead of reading it as a commentary on the creator-audience relationship, I began to see Burnham more as a representation of what I see on the internet – the traumatic imageries, the bad news and the constant ringing of twitter’s news feed.

They have invaded my personal space. I cannot escape from them. There is no living without bad news. You can no longer be out of date. Doing so would indicate a lack of awareness.

But hyper-awareness, for me, has often led to burn-outs. It often made me hopeless, unable to do anything. Through social media, the bad news infiltrated my mind, occupied my private space, to the point that even staying ‘inside’ is no longer safe. One line in the song points this out.

“…you said the ocean’s rising, like I give a shit. You said the whole world’s ending – honey it already did…”

At the end of the film, Burnham is caught naked in a violent splash of the blinding spotlight. “We have you surrounded”, a voice bellowed from the outside.

All this time, I felt I was watching a story of a man having to overcome his anxiety of going outside, and perhaps that is the story from Bo’s perspective. But with these two songs, I can’t help but project my own condition on it. This is a story of someone trying to hide from the horrors of the world, only to be infected by that funny feeling of perpetual helplessness and only to see his safe space invaded by the constant flow of information in social media.

We may never understand what Burnham is trying to express personally in making this film. But the intimate scale of the film had forced me to project my own experience on it. The core of the story – the breakdown of the public and private sphere – is probably more relevant now than ever. So, for me at least, Inside is not only a film about the pandemic, the lockdown, or social media. It’s about how the in the modern era, everyone can vicariously experience public suffering in an individualized term. It’s about a new world that gives everyone the opportunity to contribute to social changes while also depriving them of the personal space to hide from them.

They have me surrounded and there is no escape. All eyes are on me.