Inside- Inside
We all expected that during lockdown last year artists would be away and busy with work. It was an opportunity to focus on the self and individuals' craft. You didn’t even need to identify as a creative in order to gain the time to hone new skills and work on your own creativity. Bo Burnham’s new show Inside demonstrated the power of an individual's creativity whilst also showing the highs and lows for artists to be isolated.
Firstly, there is so much I could talk about from this Netflix special so I shall just try and keep it short. Ten minutes into watching and I knew it was something that I felt inspired to write about. Burnham’s work takes you on a journey that is humorous whilst also political. Remaining self-aware as always, Burnham likes to dissect the notion of whether we need humour in this day and age, even if it doesn't always seem appropriate. Sometimes a show doesn’t need to be a grandiose expression, characters don’t need to represent x, y and z. Burnham performs different shades of self to discuss various political contexts while also reminding us to laugh and not take ourselves so seriously.
This is juxtaposed with scenes of Burnham struggling as an artist and with himself. I can see how creatives can relate to his work, I saw a reflection of myself in the fears of finishing a project particularly over lockdown as you wonder what it is that you will do next. Scenes of Burnham sitting silently took me back to my own days during lockdown I’d put my pen down and feel at a lost, whilst we all expected artists to create deep, profound and meaningful work that was a pressure we put on ourselves as a community and that's difficult when your inspiration is limited to your own four walls. But we cannot forget that whilst we may be creative we are simply trying to exist within this world that we are in and that is challenging enough, I think sometimes we can forget that creatives are people as well as characters, we don’t have to be ‘on’ all the time to be valid.
Music has always been a thing of liberation for me, the musical numbers in this show are scarily relatable, hilarious and at the same time Burnham is able to use these numbers to discuss ideas that I myself may have been too scared to talk about. The political undertones of the time sit beneath the work and this becomes a subtle backing track for the whole performance. The song ‘Welcome to the internet’ strikes a chord with the common issue of the internet being a great place to find anything and everything but that in itself can also quickly become a negative. The double edge sword of the internet becomes another running theme of this show, referenced many times throughout Inside and in saying that, I am fully aware that in writing this blog post I am feeding the hungry content beast that is the internet.
When trying to analyse Inside with other people, we were unable to really define what this ‘Netflix special’ really is, identifying it as simply a ‘special’ doesn’t seem to do it justice. In my opinion, Burnham created a beautiful piece of theatre, is it more of an opera or is it an art house film? Acknowledging Bo Burnham's theatrical roots and classic stand up comedy inspirations, I would say that Burnham created a really powerful piece of art, informed by the age old tradition of using comedy to make serious topics more digestible, which was arguably the signature style of the late George Carlin (one of Burnham’s biggest influences). It’s clear to me that Inside uses Burnham’s experience as a creative as well as the human condition woven through elements that create a genre bending show and perhaps due to the nature of its creation, Inside is accessible for most people to recognise the complex messages throughout.
By Eibhlis O'Malley, co-written by Joe McCallum