He’s tall and I’m short, and I don’t sing quite so well, but otherwise there was an unnerving amount of myself to see in Bo Burnham’s chronicle of his year indoors. I too spent most of the last year in a box room surrounded by tech kit. I too took the opportunity to grow a dubious beard that didn’t suit me. And I too used the lockdown period to shepherd a big long meandering video project through to its conclusion. I even, unknowingly, made a sock puppet.
It wasn’t the most difficult pandemic experience, and in many ways it’s the preferable one — the ability to seclude oneself, to work from home, to live in a box like that, is a privilege not everyone shares. But that doesn’t mean it’s fun, or a natural state of being. I don’t live in as grandiose a house as I’m sure the international celebrity Bo Burnham does, but I spent the year of lockdown being able to work in one room, relax in another, and sleep in a third — this too is a privilege. I was able, as Burnham surely was, to go for walks in the local area — another privilege by no means universal.
But these advantages don’t — or rather didn’t — free me, or presumably Burnham. They mitigate. They are things everyone ought to have access to even if not everyone does. But they don’t free you from the weight of boxing up your life, of not seeing your friends and loved ones, of attaching a risk assessment to every human interaction.
Unlike Bo Burnham, my video project didn’t start during the pandemic. My video project started in 2017 when I was writing up my PhD thesis. Again, I had very good fortune in being able to do a PhD and very good fortune in being able to see it through to its conclusion. But that conclusion was a miserable experience. Finishing a thesis (for me, I guess) was working twelve hours a day for weeks on end in near-complete seclusion, chasing a goal that ultimately becomes only relevant to you. I put my personal belongings in storage and moved back to the university; I imagined packing up elements of myself and putting them in storage too. Hobbies, interests, friends — all in cardboard boxes and up on a shelf.
It took a long time to unpack everything again. Some things may never have come back, forgotten deep in a mental storage locker. And some new things learned in that time have proven difficult to shake. But for COVID, and lockdown, this prepared me — somewhat. Putting things back in boxes, and getting them out again when safe. Taking solace in online relationships when interacting in person was unavailable. And taking the opportunity to finish my video project.
All of which is to say, I found ‘Inside’ far too familiar to comfortably assess. Burnham’s ticks, Burnham’s fixations — shots of his head on a pillow, shots of himself in his pants — Burnham’s packaging of unfinished thoughts, unfinished gags, unfunny songs representing his choking inability to find solace in creativity. These all have an intensely personal response in a way that would make saying “Oh the internet song was funny” seem beyond facile.
Following Stewart Lee, who Burnham occasionally channels in this: ‘Was it funny?’ ‘No, but I agreed the hell out of it.’
