Dissect - Dissecting INSIDE by Bo Burnham (Part 1)

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

We begin our 7 part analysis of the music, skits, and themes of Bo Burnham's INSIDE, a music comedy special that captures what it feels like to be alive in the 21st Century. Today's episode explains how INSIDE's opening scene connects directly to Bo's previous comedy special, before examining the opening song "Content." Follow @dissectpodcast on TIkTok, Instagram, & Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine there's no heaven. The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in China continue. Yes what this. Coronavirus. Easy if you try. Infected hundreds in China has now reached the United States. Imagine all the people. To piggyback off of what Matt said, if you guys are struggling working from home,

there's a lot to do right now for the company. I can't taste anything. Oh my God. I can't believe what people are doing inside. Shills are empty. And stay the fuck at home. And put in place the first federally mandated quarantine in over 50 years. Hi, TikTok.

I'm currently in the jungle in Mexico somewhere. And I don't speak Spanish and I'm on a horse and I got drunk and I don't know how I got here. We need justice for George Floyd. We all witness his murder in broad daylight. We're broken and we're disgusted. We cannot normalize this. I can't breathe. The worst president in America has ever had.

It allowed them to produce a single sound. China ate your lunch show. Urgent message to stay home. Imagine all the people. We can moistly. And we're going to the capital. The lies on his head. Let's walk down Pennsylvania.

Have you seen two pretty base? God's bless. From Spotify, this is Dissect. Long-form musical analysis broken into short, digestible episodes. Welcome to Part 1 of our seven-part series on Inside, a music comedy special shot and performed by Bo Burnham over the course of a very unusual year. I'm your host, Kolkusha. Bo Burnham's Inside begins with a chilling dissonance heard over a solid black screen.

Fating up from black, we find ourselves inside a dark room as big as a studio apartment. what is in reality the small guest house in Beau's backyard. Our eyes are drawn to a sharp sliver of daylight piercing through a crack in the door that leads outside. In the center of the room is an empty chair facing us, facing the camera. To the right of the chair is a keyboard. This static image is held for exactly 30 seconds. The music then trails off somewhat abruptly as the outside door suddenly swings open. A jarring pool of bright and natural light momentarily fills the room before Bo Burnham emerges as a silhouette,

backlit by the daylight behind him. He steps inside and shuts the door. The screen goes black and we hear the opening moments of the song, Content. The performance has begun. The opening moments of Inside are not unlike the experience of being in the audience at a theater, waiting for the performer to take the stage. But due to the extended quarantines caused by a global pandemic, Bo's stage is now inside his home.

Opening Inside with Bo's stepping inside thus feels like a subtle acknowledgement of the shared experience of 2020, when we are all shut inside. Beyond this, a stage inside one's home also feels like an appropriate setting for a film that in part examines our relationship with technology and the internet in the 21st century, where historically performances were reserved to the confines of dedicated spaces such as theaters, now everywhere is a potential stage and everyone is a potential audience member. Even our most intimate private spaces like our homes or bedrooms have become stages,

the homogenization of our internal and external worlds. While the cultural symbolism of this opening shot feels significant, it's equally significant to Bo's personal life. To understand why, we have to take a brief but incredibly necessary look back at Bo's origins as a comedian and his increasingly fraught relationship with performance. Recorded in 2006 when Bo was 16 years old, this is My Whole Family, an original song in which Bo comedically describes how his whole family suspects his whole family suspects. he's gay. Technically, my whole family is Bo's first public work, though that was hardly his intention at the time. He'd been writing comedy songs and wanted to share them with his brother who was away at

college, so he recorded a video of himself performing the song inside his bedroom and uploaded it to a new video sharing website he'd heard about called YouTube. Without any effort on Bo's part, the video was shared on a humor website called break.com, and from there, my whole family blew up, jumping from 9,000 views to over a million, which was astronomical back then. In the months after, Bo uploaded more of his comedy songs, incidentally growing his online audience, becoming one of the world's first YouTube stars. You make me laugh, you'll my better have, though you weigh twice as much. 350 pounds of love, you must have fell from up above, and killed the town's people below.

You had a crush and you let it show when I want to pleasure you. I need an expedition crew With all those trips to KFC You eat out more than me Recorded in the same bedroom in his family's Massachusetts home These early videos and songs were all similar to my whole family Very much influenced by the kind of

intentionally shocking comedic tendencies of family guy Bo had songs about overweight women, high school parties Even poking fun at Helen Keller While his online material was amassing views Even early on Bo noticed a disconnect between his life on and offline. It didn't really change my life. Like, my actual life stayed the same.

Like, I had these crazy numbers going up online. But, like, I don't know. There's, like, a world right now where, like, if you go viral or something, you're like on Ellen and, like, you're on, you mean, like, you're on Instagram and all these other things. There wasn't that.

There was no Twitter. There's no Instagram. So I kind of just hit my videos. There's no way to contact me. People were just kind of liking it. I just was hoping at that time to, I knew I wanted to somehow transfer. to doing it on stage.

You know, I didn't want to make a career out of making videos. Not because I looked down on it. It was just like, I liked performing. And I started performing, and when I would perform the songs that were already online, live, they would get like tepid laughter. And then when I performed songs that no one had ever heard live, people would react for the first time. So then I was like, okay, this is what I want to do.

I want to build a show and start writing to perform live. So that's what was really nice is that having that little built-in audience made it so I could go to, you know, sell 100 tickets in, you know, every city. Momentum continued to build as Bo moved from performing inside his bedroom to performing in the outside world. In his senior year of high school, Hollywood agent Douglas Edley, who also represented Dave Chappelle at the time, offered to represent Bo. By 2008, at age 17, he became the youngest person to record a performance for Comedy Central. He also signed a four-record deal with Comedy Central Records, debuting his first full-length album in March of 2009.

the self-titled Bo Burnham. I'm Bo yo, I'm the greatest rapper ever and I'll whether you're whether, whether you think of clever or not, thinking better you're not, don't need a sweater, I'm hot, I'm a real G-Sotty, they can really find your G-Spot. Whoa, yeah. Hey, what the fuck's a G-Spot? After graduating high school, Bo was accepted at Harvard, Brown, and NYU, but he decided instead to tour his new album, which included performances on late-night

with Jimmy Fallon, Conan, and others. All right. Thank you so much. What an honor. My ex-girlfriend had a really weird fetish. She used to like to dress up as herself and then act like a raging bitch all the time. In 2010, Bo released his first full-length comedy special Words, Words, Words. While the show was still song-based, Words Words, Words Showed Early Signs that Bo was interested in more than just shocking punchlines. Well, still just 19 years old. It had been nearly four years since uploading my whole family, and he was starting to take stock of his experience. He turned his critical lens onto himself and began to question the underlying motivations of his performances. I must be psychotic. I must be demented to think that I'm worthy of all this attention, of all of this money you worked really hard for. I slept in late while you worked at the drug store.

My drug's attention, I am an addict, but I get paid to indulge in my habit. It's all an illusion. I'm wearing makeup. I'm wearing makeup, makeup, makeup, mega, mega. Art is a dead. So people think you're funny. How do we get those people's money? Bo's critical examination of himself, as well as the general dynamic

between performer and audience, only deepened with his next comedy special 2013's What. Regarding the show's title and concept, Beau said, quote, "'Comedy is very strange to me, and I don't fully understand its purpose or function, hence the title what.

And furthermore, I am very confused on how comedy relates to me, and how it helps or hurts me, and how the audience relates to me. Are they my friends, my customers, something in between? It's all very strange, and the show wasn't meant to give answers to the audience as much as it was meant to let the audience in on those questions, if that makes sense, unquote. He's isolated himself over the last five years in pursuit of comedy, and, in doing so, has lost touch with reality. You're an asshole, though.

You hear me? You think you know better. me. You think you know better than everybody. You will die alone and you will deserve it. But in the meantime, you might as well tell those silly jokes of yours. See if that helps. Bo's increasing anxiety about performance climax during the opening night of the What Tour when he experienced a panic attack on stage. It was the first of 12 panic attacks he would have on the tour. And it was like a theater like 3,000 people had a panic attack. It was really bad.

Then went to New York, had three shows, had a panic attack in the middle show. And then I had a panic attack on the train to D.C. the next day, which was another show. And I had like, this was like the first week of a tour that was like 45 shows and 50 days. And that was when I was like, yeah, like this is bad and I can never do this again. That was the worst time of my... I've had a pretty fortunate life. That was definitely one of the hardest, yeah, stretches of my life. While these panic attacks were new,

Bo's anxiety actually began at a young age. He would often experience extreme stomach aches that would land him in the hospital. It wasn't until later in life he realized these stomach aches were actually symptoms of anxiety. The panic attacks during the What Tour forced Bo to confront his anxiety, and his early self-diagnosis

was that fame, consumer culture, and other people's perception of him was the problem. This sentiment can be heard in the closing moments of the What Show, where Bo impersonates a Hollywood agent, a groupie, and someone from his high school. Eventually, these three voices merged together as one, surrounding Bo and a cacophony of audio-closterphobia. Hey! Hey!

You're not going to hit the girl, that's sexist. Mr. Bha-Bow. Mr. Bowe. We think you've changed, bro. We know best. You suck. We think you've changed, bro. We know best.

You suck. We think we know you. We think we know you. We think we know you. We think we know you. We think we know you. We think we know you. After the What tour ended, Bo took 2014 off from performing.

But by early 2015, he was back at it with Make Happy, a new show that in part addresses Beau's performance anxiety. While What attempted to put the onus of this anxiety on others, make happy is much more introspective. And it turned out, performance itself wasn't making Bo happy. So it was the thing. You know, it was my enemy up there. What was the fear of my own anxiety and my own panic?

And I could pretend like, oh, the thing about, and the thing my head was the thing I hate about comedy is the culture is so bullshit and everything's crap and comedy sucks and I'm the cool kid. You know what I mean? And the truth was I was terrifying. Bo addresses his performance anxiety most directly in Make Happy's finale. Before the last song, he brings up the house lights, sits at the front of the stage, and tells the audience directly what the show is about.

It's about performing. I try to make my show about other things, but it always ends up becoming about performing. I started performing very young as a teenager, you know, professionally, and as a comedian, where you're supposed to do, supposed to talk about what you know, and what I knew always was performing. So to talk about traffic or, you know, laundry felt incredibly disingenuous, but I worried that making a show about performing would be too meta, it wouldn't be relatable to people that aren't performers, but what I found

is that I don't think anyone isn't, you know, and I feel like I was born in 1990 and I was sort of raised in America when it was a cult of self-expression, and I was just taught, you know, express myself and have things to say, and everyone will care about them. And I think everyone was taught that, and most of us found out no one gives a shit what we think. So we flocked to performers by the thousands, because we're the few that have found an audience, and then I'm supposed to get up here and say,

follow your dreams, as if this is a meritocracy. It is not, okay? I had a privileged life, and I got lucky, and I'm unhappy. They say it's like the me generation. It's not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated. It's self-conscious. That's what it is.

It's conscious of self. Social media, it's just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform. So the market said here, perform everything to each other all the time for no reason. It's prison. It's horrific. It is performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member? I know very little about anything.

But what I do know is that if you can live your life without a... audience you should do it both followed this dialogue with the show's final song he tells the audience that he recently saw Kanye West perform on the Yeez's tour and how during the song Runaway the instrumental would break down to just piano chords and Kanye who with autotune on his voice would talk directly to the audience and a lengthy stream of consciousness I saw the the Jesus tour which is incredible incredible live show where he comes out in a jeweled mask and performs the entire first hour and a half of the concert without you letting

him see his face, which is just so smart and incredible and brave and bold. But he would do this thing every night where he would stop for 15 minutes and auto-tune rant about like Adidas and geopolitics. It was like very, you know, and you can see them all online. There was an amazing one at the United Center in Chicago where he was talking about the fact that they didn't let Michael Jordan buy the Bulls. And the chorus that he kept doing was, we should have net. ever ever let MJ play for the wizards.

It's like over and over again talking about Michael Jordan should play for the wizards. We should have never ever let MJ play for the wizards. And we couldn't stop, but we would stop. M. Tate playing for the wizard. Why did that happen? But I watched that thinking like, you know, what even if the sort of scope and paradigm of the value system he's talking in doesn't.

match up to me. He's speaking his truth, you know. So I thought, well, what if I spoke my truth? Cannot see my shit? New York. Can not say my shit? I got lots of shit to say. I got lots of shit to say. Titled Can't Handle This, Kanye rant, Beau interpolates the chords of Kanye's runaway to recreate what he witnessed at the Yeezistur. The first half of the song is a comedic rant about the size of Pringlecans and oversized Chipotle burritos, as if those were his problems. But in the second half of the song, Bo does actually speak his truth. I can sit here and pretend like my biggest problems are Pringle cans and burritos. The truth is my biggest problems. You, I want to please you, but I want to stay true to myself.

I want to give you the night out that you deserve. But I want to say what I think and not care what you think about it A part of me loves you Part of me hates you Part of me needs you Part of me fears you I don't think that I can handle this right now Handle this right now

I don't think that I can handle this right now The this and can't handle this refer to the very thing Beau was doing at that moment, performing in front of an audience. And so after finishing the Make Happy tour, he quit performing. Just like the title of the song he was singing over, he ran away. Taking his own advice, he gave the audience every night, that if you can live your life without an audience, you should. But I felt like I need to re-chose my life.

I'm not just because I fell into something when I was 16 years old, doesn't mean it's what I have to do for the rest of my life. And like, what if this hadn't happened? What if I didn't have this success? and I'm 25 or 4 at the time, what would I do if I didn't have to, because that's, and you really see that on YouTube with some people where it's like,

they're literally playing the character of themselves that they invented when they were 14 and they're 30 now or something. I mean, but that's across genres. I mean, across mediums, but going like, I need to re-chose my life. At the end of the Make Happy special, we get a glimpse of what direction Beau's new life might take,

at least symbolically, as the audience gives him a standard, ovation after can't handle this, Bo walks off stage. There's a sudden but seamless quick cut to Bo now walking into the very same room we see at the beginning of inside. He sits down at a piano, turns to the camera, and says, Oh good, it's just us. Bo has brought us inside, and he performs one last song in this intimate, dimly lit space, an epilogue of sorts. So if you know or ever knew how to be happy on a scale from one to two now, are you happy? Are you happy? These are you happy?

You're everything you hated. Are you happy? Hey look ma, I made it. Are you happy? These are Beau's very last words in the special. And his answer to his own question was pretty self-evident. He was not happy.

So after finishing the song, Bo walks out the very same door he walked into at the beginning of inside. He crosses his backyard grass toward his back patio, where he's greeted by his girlfriend holding their small dog Bruce like a baby. Bo gives Bruce a kiss and together they all walk into the house and the special lens. At the end of Make Happy, he seemed to signal that Bo was leaving the stage to focus on family, himself, and his well-being. And in the ensuing years, Bo turned to creative endeavors behind the

camera. He directed two comedy specials for Gerard Carmichael and Chris Rock respectively. He also reworked a film script he'd written called Eighth Grade, which he directed and released in 2018 to great critical acclaim. The film is about a young girl expressing. herself on a YouTube channel nobody watches while attempting to navigate the anxiety-ridden dynamics of middle school. The film was partly inspired by Bo's experience on the Make Happy tour. As I started to experience panic, my way to cope with it was to talk about it on stage.

And, you know, me talking about it on stage was in the context of what I was doing, which was performing for, you know, audiences at that point, you know, a thousand people or so. And I started doing my stand-up and thought, no one is going to relate to this unless they're a C-list, D-list, you know, celebrity comedian that performs for audiences. And I would, and then I did my shows and talked about this stuff. And, you know, 15-year-old girls would come up to me after the show and say, I feel exactly like you do. Exactly what you're talking about is what I'm going through.

And I'm going, what are you talking about? You're not on tour. You're not performing, you know, and I realized that I had sort of, through talking about performance anxiety, I had sort of, I had sort of, sort of unknowingly backed into a, I think, a shared generational experience of me and the people younger than me. And it was sort of the realization of my career, which is that the stresses I feel as a sort of, again, D-list celebrity have been democratized to an entire generation. And now everyone feels like they're being watched. Everyone feels like there's a proper noun version of their self that they have to maintain and curate and perform. Here, Bo says something really

important, that the realization of his career was that his performance-related anxiety is shared by an entire generation, that he was not alone, that his story was not only his, it was ours. And so we return to the opening scene of Inside, understanding now the personal symbolic significance of Bo walking in the same door he walked out of at the end of Make Happy. After five years away from the stage, Bo, the performer, is back. Only now, because of the circumstances of 2020, his audience is a camera, and a his stage as his bedroom, a true full-circle moment for the kid who got his start performing songs in his bedroom. In fact, the way the empty chair and piano is positioned

and framed in the opening scene of Inside is remarkably similar to the positioning of the chair and piano in his very first video, My Whole Family, a video that will actually make an appearance later in the film. And so at this point, with Bo now back on stage for the first time in five years, we are only left with questions, why now, how will he handle performing again, and perhaps most importantly, what does he have to say? That's right after the break. Welcome back to dissect. Before the break, we took a brief look at Beau's history with performance,

discovering the personal significance of Beau stepping back on stage. It's with this history in mind that we dive into inside's first track, content. Content begins with a repeating low E played on a synthesizer before a simple drum loop picks up behind it. We see Bo's center screen seated in the chair that was just empty next to the keyboard. The room is dark and Bo is lit by a small stationary light on his right side, illuminating a headlamp wrapped around his forehead. He's looking down and away from the camera and brings a microphone up to his face as he begins

to sing contents opening lines. If you would have told me a year ago that I'd be locked inside of my home, I would have told you a year ago, interesting, now leave me alone. Without explicitly saying it, Bo addresses the quarantine orders of the pandemic, establishing the circumstances under which the special was created. Bo's response to someone hypothetically telling him he'd be locked in his home is a little strange. He tells the person to go away, perhaps because pre-pandemic, anyone describing the reality of what 2020 became would sound ridiculous and unbelievable.

But understanding Bo's personal journey and his retreat from the spotlight after Make Happy, Bo might actually be disinterested by this information because a year ago, he had already isolated himself from the world. Staying inside wouldn't be a change for him. And even telling this person to leave him alone displays his disinterest in engaging with others. Bo continues content singing, Sorry that I looked like a mess, I booked a haircut, but it got rescheduled.

At the time of Insides' release, it was a relatable punchline, recalling when barbershops and hair salons were shut down during the pandemic. By the time we hear this line, the camera has zoomed out enough to see what Bo is wearing, a white t-shirt and white gym shorts.

His hair is long and he has a full beard. He's a long way from the clean-shaven crew-cut bow of Make Happy. With the next line, Bo throws a bit of a curveball singing Robert's been a little depressed. Once again, recalling the conditions of 2020, it's a relatable sentiment,

as so many of us struggled through the year. It might also suggest another reason why Bo looks unkempt, as depression can sometimes lead to poor hygiene. Beyond this, it's hard to know this early into the film why exactly Bo would be depressed, and if it has anything to do other than the general state of the world. And Bo doesn't elaborate. It seems he's more planting a thematic seed at this point.

He then follows with what feels like an attempt at improving his mental health, singing, and so today I'm just going to try just getting up, sitting down, going back to work. Might not help, but still it couldn't hurt. Establishing a structure can help with depression, and it appears that Bo is going to attempt to use work in a daily routine as an attempt to feel better. There's a kind of going through the motions undertone to the phrasing of these lines. It doesn't feel inspired, but more a way to survive. With the next lines, Bo makes clear what kind of work he's referring to.

Bo continues singing, I'm sitting down, writing jokes, singing silly songs, I'm sorry I was gone. We understand now that going back to work means Bo is creating comedy songs and sketches all of his past specials, while Sorry I Was Gone is a direct acknowledgement of his hiatus from performing.

Then with a crescendo of vocal harmonies and added musical layers, Bo flips on the headlamp he's been wearing and points it to the ceiling, directly onto a rotating disco ball, which sends a tornado of swirling light fragments around the room. He sings, but look, I made you some content. Daddy made you your favorite open wide. The phrasing is obviously comedic, a playoff what you say to a child spooning them their favorite dinner. But referring to his own special as content does raise some interesting questions.

What is the difference between content and art? Where exactly is that line drawn? Is all art content but not all content art? Or all artist content creators but not all content creators artists? and as a comedian songwriter who began on YouTube, who is still making songs in his bedroom, who is uploading this special to be consumed on the internet, where does Beau fall in all of this? The way the word is used today, content is closely associated with the internet and social media. But if art is presented alongside content on the internet, for example, on Netflix, is there a difference?

If the answer in theory is yes, how does the distinction between the two change our consumption of it? How does sitting down and watching inside differ from sitting down and watching a video on YouTube, or spending an hour and a half on TikTok? How much of the onus is put on us, the consumers of content, the observers of art, to make that distinction? Bo then closes out the song by singing, Here comes the content, it's a beautiful day to stay inside. Of course, the play here is on the common phrase, it's a beautiful day to go outside. This, along with Bo's stage being his bedroom, establishes one of Inside's running themes, the blurring of our inside and outside worlds.

Traditionally, inside is a place of privacy, those places we are not seen, while outside is traditionally where we engage and interact with the world. But the digital dynamics of the modern world have changed that. We're increasingly interacting with the world while indoors through internet-connected screens. We have increasingly invited the world into our homes and interior lives. We take work meetings at our living room. We share intimate details on social media.

The internet and the way we've chosen to use it has blurred the lines. We are perhaps moving toward reality in which there is no distinction between inside and outside at all. The internet's hitting puberty kind of almost. The internet was like sort of fun and it was just like playing with trucks and

toys and now all of a sudden it's becoming self-aware in the same way a person does and it's inviting an emotional life into itself. I never really thought of it that way but I think that's true as well. It's the volume and the bandwidth that terrifies me, not the character of it. And I actually think the character erodes because of the bandwidth, because of the speed, because we're moving at a speed

and a volume that we're just not emotionally suited for. We're trying to actualize and streamline our social lives. It makes no sense. We can streamline clean energy. That's great. You want to streamline tech and think, fine. You want to streamline how we view ourselves and how we view our friends and how we communicate with each other.

You can't do that. We're applying like a crazy capitalist logic to a, our social interior life, to like our souls. I mean, it's very weird. Oh, you, oh, it took 10 minutes to get to work. Now it takes two minutes because we made this really cool car. Okay, that's fine. That's great. You talk to 10 people 10 years ago? Now you can talk to a thousand. Oh, wait, wait, no, no, that doesn't stop to, like, that doesn't, we don't need to, we don't need to streamline that. We don't need to actualize that part of ourselves, I don't think. I mean, I don't know. It's weird.

Content usures us inside and establishes the necessary context of the film. Content is our table of contents. We understand that Bo has been stuck inside both before and during the pandemic, and that he's returning to comedy or work to ward off depression. There's also some interesting implications in the title itself. Aside from its modern use as internet-related material for consumption, the word content can also be right as content, as in happy or satisfied. This reading recalls Beau's fraught history with performance, and we wonder as he returns to performing whether he will make happy, if he will finally become content with the process, or will he struggle with it like he has in the past?

The idea of content as it relates to satisfaction also recalls something like Karl Marx's famous quote, religion is the opium of the masses. Only today, with a religious devotion declining rapidly from generation to generation, the phrase that feels much more apt is something like, content is the opium of the masses. If we stretched a definition of content as it relates to this opening song and film, we could also think about contents as the things that are held in something, that which is held inside a container. In this way, Bo is the contents held inside. Now, before we move on from this opening track, I have to point out a striking similarity between content and the 1984 song

I Want to Break Free by Queen. Both are in the same key, E major. Both feature the same repeated eighth notes in the main synth, and they're very close to the same tempo, with content being just a few BPMs faster. Here's the two back-to-back. We know that Bo has a history of interpolating and recontextualizing existing songs. At the end of Maycappy, he repurposed Kanye's live rendition of Runaway, likely used in part because the title foreshadowed exactly what he was going to do,

run away from performance. And given the direct connection between the end of Maycappy and the beginning of Inside, Bo could be doing something similar here with Queen, as the title I Want to Break Free feels like an appropriate sentiment for someone stuck inside. Even one of the verses of Break Free feels incredibly relevant to Bo's fraught relationship with performance and his need of an audience. As Freddie Mercury sings, but life still goes on, I can't get used to living without you by my side. I don't want to live alone. God knows got to make it on my own. So baby, can't you see, I've got to break free.

During the closing moments of content, Beau suddenly points the headlamp directly into the camera, triggering a quick cut to a new scene. We see a static image of the room, now fully lit, cluttered with an array of music and lighting equipment. The word inside appears in large letters across the screen before cutting to a title card that reads, written, edited, shot, and directed by Bo Burnham. This continues to establish the context around the creation of the film. It's important for the audience to understand that Bo is creating this work alone, not as a brag, but for thematic reasons that will become clear as the film progresses. Given the opening song's title, Content, we also recognize that Bo is utilizing the typical process of a content creator.

It's very common for a YouTuber, influencer, or even someone just posting on social media, to execute the entire content creation process by themselves, often in their bedroom or home. This idea will also become more relevant as the film goes on, as Beau seems to be examining the disassociative effects of this process, where a creator's life becomes synonymous with their content, where they watch themselves make the thing they're making, and then, after uploading, watch their audience, watch them. Finally, as it's my personal belief that Inside is in part art about content,

we should recognize how the film feels like an accumulation of the many skill sets that Beau has developed throughout his artistic career. He is comedic songwriter, as he was for his early YouTube videos and comedy specials. He is storyteller and director, as he was for his film eighth grade. his actor as he was in the 2020 film Promising Young Woman. This, in addition to a whole laundry list of other unlisted roles required to make this film by himself, stage designer, lighting specialist, sent a photographer, score composer, music producer, and probably a lot more.

Regarding the specific limitation of having just one room to film an entire special, we can point to something Beau said about directing comedy specials for Drod Carmichael and Chris Rock as an example of Bo's creative history in forming inside. But, like, working on my specials, directing specials, yeah, that definitely prepare me as a filmmaker, for sure. There's a sort of preciousness to filming stand-up specials, and, you know, you have to make one look really good and one room be able to be filmed for an hour. So you learn how to, and you learn in stand-of specials you are just serving the comedian on screen. So you really learn, like, how to serve the person on camera. Camera test.

As Inside continues, we see a montage of both setting up various lighting and camera equipment, firmly establishing that insight is, in part, about the creative process, and more specifically, about the process of making the very thing we are now watching. There's actually a word for this, poyomenon, which is, quote, a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation, sometimes the creation of the story itself. According to Alistair Fowler, who coined the term, the poyomenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality,

the limits of narrative truth. I think this framework does apply to Inside, as the film progresses and Bo's mental health deteriorates, will begin to question more and more whether or not what we're seeing is truth or fiction, or perhaps some dramatized space in between. And part of what we'll discover is that Inside seems to be drawing our attention to the fact that we're moving toward a world in which we are all in a way living poymina, that our lives entangle with social media and soon things like the Metaverse find us increasingly out of body. You'd have Bo Burnham, but then you have Bo Burnham in the world. You have a brand. You are your own publicist. You walk through your experiences, but you also

float behind yourself, like a camera, following yourself through your own experiences. You're sort of out of body all the time. You're disassociated. You're in a situation, but you're already thinking of how that situation is going to be perceived when presented to the world digitally. You're anticipating the backlash to that perception, maybe even before you've even had the experience. It's that weird sort of hall of mirrors, strange meta thing that, you know, makes you not want to leave the house, makes you not want to ever open your mouth. And it makes you not embodied, not in yourself, not in your moment, which is very similar to anxiety, which is just, you know, objectifying yourself, objectifying your own experience. It's weird. And I feel like to be a 13-year-old kid and feel

that way. Yeah. I feel like you have a brand and a narrative and that you're in a movie every thing you do is a quantity to be sold and presented and thought about and attended to, even after the fact. Yeah. Plan a moment to reminisce on that moment. It's crazy, you know, weird. Throughout the montage of Beau testing equipment, we see his hair and beard get progressively longer from shot to shot, foreshadowing the long, arduous journey that was the making

of this special and the toll it took on Bow mentally and physically. Midway through this montage, a new recurring shot is introduced. center frame we are confronted with the face of Bo's camera, as if we the viewing audience are being recorded. In terms of inside being a poyamanan, this shot seems to be drawing our attention to the fact that throughout this film, this is Bo's vantage point. A reminder that the audience he actually is performing to is not us, but a camera. It's somewhat similar to Bo turning up the house lights at the end of Make Happy, to destroy some of the artifice that separates him, the performer, with us, the audience, instead of allowing us to completely escape into an alternate reality,

which is actually the goal of most entertainment, Beau is instead deliberately drawing attention to the recorded, constructed reality of the film, as that's in part what the film is examining, the dynamic of performer and audience, and the camera's critical position as the center of that dynamic. As the shot progresses, the camera slowly zooms in on itself toward its large circular lens, an ominous solid black sphere. It zooms so far into itself that the black of the lens overtakes the entire,

screen. Quite literally, we have been brought inside the camera. Because this shot was created by placing the camera in front of a mirror, we perhaps ought to think about this all-black screen as a black mirror, a phrase coined by Charlie Brooker, creator of the Technology Center dystopian TV series Black Mirror. Brooker told the Guardian, quote, any TV, any LCD, any iPhone, any iPad, something like that. If you just stare at it, it looks like a black mirror. There's something cold and horrifying about that, unquote. Bo keeps the full black screen up for 10 whole seconds, more than enough time to see our image reflected in it. It's an incredible effect, especially because it's created by zooming all the way inside a camera's lens.

And what we see there, in the soul of the camera, is us. Along with this visual metaphor, Bo also seems to be drawing our attention to the ubiquity of the camera in modern life. Based on interviews where he speaks on this topic directly, it seems he feels this ubiquity has completely changed the dynamics of our everyday lives over the past decade. and that we ought to be thinking a little bit more critically about the effects of such a sudden dramatic cultural shift. When talking about his favorite TV show, the original British version of the office, both spoke about its examination of the ways in which cameras alter our behavior. The British office is probably the most formative actual thing for me in some ways, even though it's a TV show. I know people overstate that, but I watch that once a year.

And that's probably, that probably had like the biggest effect on even eighth grade was that movie, just that that style of performance that sort of the thing that's gotten lost I think in all the adaptations of the British office and all of its forms in America like and not just the office but every form is just like

yeah just the particular relationship of people to the way a camera changes a room right really specifically the way a camera changes people which is like that to me is like one of the central questions that we have to and the more we've forgotten about cameras

in rooms, the more we need to examine that question, the more normalized they've become. There is something like psychically violating and insane about being in front of a camera. It's just like the eye of God and the devil staring at you, like immortalizing you and taking your soul. It is just like, it's just naked. As the screen goes black by the enveloping camera lens, we reach the end of what feels like the introduction of inside, bookended by solid black screens. Like many great stories, In these opening few minutes, Bo establishes the story's protagonist and setting, while also foreshadowing some of the film's overarching themes and symbols.

For those coming into the film with an understanding of Bo's background, he suffuses details that provide clear narrative continuity from Make Happy to Inside. And so now that we're inside, now that we know who the story is about and where it takes place, the next question we as an audience are going to ask is, what does this character want? What do they desire? And how do they plan on getting it? In another seamless transition, the black screen of the camera lens transitions to the black dark of the room, and Beau, seated center frame in front of his piano, flips on a huge spotlight

that shines down on him, as if he's performing on a traditional stage. The world is changing, the planet's heat, what the fuck is going on? This is comedy, a song that will establish Beau's desire and how he plans to achieve it. A song will examine note by note, frame by frame, next time on Dysect. This episode of Dysect was written and produced by me. If you enjoyed today's episode, please tell a friend about the new series or share on social media. It really helps. Additional analysis by Camden Ostrander.

The series intro was designed and scored by So Wiley. Audio editing by Kevin Pooler. Theme music by Bureaucratic. All right, thanks everyone. Talk to you next week.