Dissect - Dissecting INSIDE (Part 3)

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Our song by song, scene by scene analysis of Bo Burnham's INSIDE continues with "How The World Works" and "White Woman's Instagram." Follow @dissectpodcast on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Spotify, this is Dysect, long-form musical analysis broken into short digestible episodes. This is part three of our seven-part series on Inside, a musical comedy special shot and performed by Bo Burnham over the course of a very unusual year. I'm your host, Cole Kushner. Last time I Dissect, we examine Inside's I Want song Comedy, where Bo establishes his desire to help the world and his fear that the comedy special he's choosing to make won't help. The song then transformed into a full-blown satire, as Bo plays a white savior who centers himself and his, his work as the solution to the enormous global problems we are currently facing. We also looked at FaceTime with my mom, where technology becomes a frustrating barrier in Bo's communication with his mother. Finally, we saw an interlude scene in which Bo

sits down in his laptop for another day of work on the special we're currently watching. In the lower right corner of the screen, there's a split-second flash of Bo playing a Twitch Dreamer, foreshadowing the disassociation process that will consume the second half of the special. After this brief interlude scene, there's a hard cut to Bo's sitting at the piano. He's in the spotlight once again, and a projector colors the walls behind him solid orange. He smiles widely and begins performing Inside's next song, the subject of the first half of our episode today, How the World Works. Hey kids, today we're going to learn about the world. The world that's around us is pretty amazing, but how does it work? It must be complicated.

The secret is the world can only work. Everything works together. A bee drinks from a flower. How the world works is a children's song satire that begins with Bo alone on piano, addressing an imaginary adolescent audience. By framing the song as a foundational learning exercise executed through media a Sesame Street, Beau might be alluding to our learning shifting from the classroom to the media, and the new ways our children are learning about the world,

which they are doing increasingly through their phones. The entire first verse is a rosy, optimistic sing-along typical of these types of education, educational kid songs. It focuses on the harmony of nature, the interdependence amongst all living creatures. He begins by singing, The World That's Around Us is pretty amazing, but how does it work? It must be complicated. The secret is, the world can only work when everything works together. He goes on to give a few examples of this, how bees feed from flowers but also give them pollen, and how squirrels eat seeds but also spread them around, which is essential to propagation. The song's pre-chorus continues this thread as Beau emphasizes how every

creature from the biggest elephant to the littlest fly are essential to the natural order and harmony of the world. He then launches into the song's chorus. And every single cricket, every fish in the sea gives what they can and gets what they need. That is how the world works. That is how the world works. From a to zebra to the worms in the dirt, that's how it works. On its surface, the opening few minutes of how the world works could pretty easily pass as an actual children's song, ready made for a performance on Sesame Street. And while we're going to talk about this opening portion of the song in more detail, we can only do so after hearing from Bo's sock puppet, whose perspective reveals more about the function of Bo's character. Hey, everyone, look who stopped by to say hello.

It's Socco. Hey! Where you been, Socco? I've been where I always am when you're not wearing me. on your hand, in a frightening liminal space between states of being. Not quite dead, not quite alive. It's similar to a constant state of sleep paralysis. Sacco, we were just talking about the world and how it works. Boy, that sounds complicated. Do you have anything you'd want to teach us about the world? I wouldn't say anything that you probably haven't already said yourself. I don't know about that, Sacco.

How about you give it a try? Continuing to play into the songs, adolescent framework, Bo introduces a sock puppet on his hand. This might be a nod to a bit by one of of Bo Burnham's favorite comics, Dutch absurdist Hans Tewan. Here's Bo talking about Tewan back in 2011 on the Green Room. What's his name? Hans Tawin. Can you do a little bit of this thing? He's a Dutch absurdist. One of the things he does is he brings out a sock puppet, which is a black sock. See already, I don't like them. Yeah, no. All right, all right, it's a white sock. And then And he just sings a song and feeds the sock of baby Ruth and just crunches in the baby Ruth the entire time. Bo Sock is named Socco, which given his socialist political views that will be revealed in a moment,

is likely his name Soco is a pun, as Sock, spelled SOC, is a nickname for a socialist. When Bo asked Soco where he's been, he describes being not quite alive, not quite dead. an in-between state similar to sleep paralysis, a condition in which you are awake but can't move or talk. This seems to nod to physicist Erwin Schrodinger's thought experiment about quantum mechanics, known as Schrodinger's cat. To help illustrate the counterintuitive nature of subatomic particles and something called the superposition principle, Schrodinger gave an example of a cat being placed in a box with a radioactive substance that has a 50% chance of killing it. Until we open the box to observe whether or not the cat is dead, the cat is in a sense both dead

and alive at the same time. Hence, a puppet's existence when not on someone's hand, when not being observed, is akin to the cat inside the box, not quite dead, not quite alive. Bo continues to tell Sacco that they were just talking about the world and how it works, to which Sacco responds, that sounds complicated. Ironically, Bo himself said this very thing to begin the song when he sung, How does it work? It must be complicated. This irony is intentional, because when Bo asked Sacco if you'd like to teach us anything about the world, Sacco responds, I wouldn't say anything that you probably haven't already said yourself. Bo seems to be cheekily playing with the perform relationship between master and puppet. A puppet doesn't have original thoughts. Whatever it says is a reflection

of its master, the one in control of the whole charade. This concept will have larger implications as we get deeper into the song. But first, let's hear what Sacco has to say about the world and how it works. All right. The simple narrative taught in every history class. Classes demonstrably false and pedagogically classist. Don't you know the world is built with blood and genocide and exploitation? The global network of capital essentially functions to separate the worker from the means of production. And the FBI killed Martin Luther King, private properties and him... Sacco goes hard from the start, singing, The Simple Narrative taught in every history class

is demonstrably false and pedagogically classist. Sacco immediately exposes the structural function of Beau's verse first-first as the exact type of simple, reductive narrative spood-fed to our children. With pedagogy referring to the theory and practice of teaching, Sacco's pedagogically classist refers to the fact that curriculum is always determined and taught by the class with the most wealth, power, and industrial control. Bo might be nodding to Brazilian educator Paulo Frere's book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which argues that education is never neutral.

that it serves to perpetuate oppressive systems established by the ruling class. It calls the current system a banking model of education, where one superior individual recites facts and ideas, and the inferior class passively listens and memorizes said facts and ideas, thus dehumanizing students. In this model, students lack the freedom to question the teachers or how the world works. They are seen as empty vessels trained to simply accept and regurgitate what they are told. This adds an additional layer to Beau's opening verse,

as it was delivered by a member of the white ruling class in America, a class largely responsible for creating our country's education curriculum and thus controls what historical information is included, what is excluded, and how that information is presented. Bo's character, blissfully naive as he is, is simply regurgitating what he was taught as a child, and as a member of the privileged ruling class, his experience would likely have him truly believing this reductive worldview,

ignorant or able to easily ignore the darker workings of the world. This highlights the fact that those that, benefit or perpetuate oppressive systems aren't always aware of they're doing so, a perhaps intentional result of our biased model of education. Sacco continues singing, Don't you know, the world is built with blood and genocide and exploitation?

Of course, these dark realities are what's missing from Bo's reductive view of the world's workings. History contains no shortage of war, slavery, and the attemptant execution of entire people groups, and any complete examination of a country's history is likely to reveal some version of this bloody tricester. But as philosopher Walter Benjamin said, quote, empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time. And so the ruling class often neglects to teach a thorough history

or justifies their atrocities under marketing campaigns like America's manifest destiny, which was used to justify genocide against Native Americans. Saco then continues, the global network of capital essentially functions to separate the worker from the means of production. Here Sacco states one of Karl Marx's central critiques of political economy. In the socialist view, capitalism essentially separates people into two classes, the working class, those that make the goods, and the capitalist, those who own the means of production, like the land, factories, and raw materials used to make products. Rather than a system that benefits everyone equally,

this separation allows the capitalist class to benefit at the expense of the working class, who sell their labor at a fixed price to the capitalist. Despite the workers' labor being equally important to the production of products, and thus the wealth those products accrue, the vast majority of profits go to the few capitalists who own the means of production. In a socialist view, the capitalist gain is always the worker's loss, and the separation of the workers from the means of production prohibits a worker from receiving the true value of their labor.

Sago then caps off his verse by singing, and the FBI killed Martin Luther King. While today our nation largely celebrates the work of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. We often overlooked the fact that King was viewed as a threat by the FBI up until he was assassinated in 1968. Under a program called Cointel Pro, which was a series of covert and illegal operations

aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic American political organizations, the FBI actively worked a discredit King and his work, initially painting him as a communist. They started by wiretapping his phones, and when they discovered King was having extramarital affairs, they secretly taped him in his hotel rooms and paid informants to spy on him. They then used this an attempt to blackmail him,

sending King some of their tapes along with an anonymous letter that suggested if he didn't kill himself, they would publicly expose his infidelities. After King's assassination, it was the FBI that was assigned to investigate his death. Hmm. James Earl Ray confessed to shooting King and suggested that he was merely a player in a larger plot to kill King and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Three days later, he recanted his statement, saying it was forced, but was never granted a retrial.

For decades, King's immediate family has maintained their belief that King's murder was part of a larger plan involving government officials. 25 years after King's assassination, Lloyd Jowers, who owned the restaurant below James Earl Ray's Memphis Hotel Room, stated that he'd been part of a conspiracy to kill King, along with Memphis police officers, a mafia member, and others. In 1999, King's family sued Jowers for a symbolic $100 in a civil case. By unanimous verdict, the jury awarded the money to the King family,

deciding that King's assassination had likely been a result of a conspiracy that involved Jowers as well as, quote, others, including governmental agencies, unquote. After the trial, King's wife Coretta said, quote, the jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that in addition to Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the mafia, local, state, and federal government agencies were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband, unquote. While we're just scratching the surface here, within the context of Sacco's verse, the example of Martin Luther King Jr. serves to expose the hypocrisy of America and its selective

memory of our history. Today our curriculum paints King as an American hero, and rightly so, but it most often forgets to mention what Sacco reveals, that our own government saw him as a real threat and actively worked to slander, discredit, and threaten him, and was possibly even involved in his murder. It's an example of the idea that education is never neutral, that it serves to perpetuate a narrative established by the ruling class. Private properties inherently theft, and neoliberal fascists are destroying the left, and every politician, every cop on the street protects the interests of the pedophilic corporate elite. Sacco begins his pre-chorus singing, Private Properties inherently theft.

This is a nod to anarchist Pierre Joseph Prudeau, who famously declared Property as Theft in his 1840 book, What is Property? Prudeau's critique applied specifically to land ownership, that one could essentially play finders-keepers with the earth, arbitrarily claim public land for themselves, essentially stealing it from the rest of society for personal profit. While Karl Marx took issue with the specific phrasing of property as theft, the idea of private property is a central critique of Marxist thought. Allowing one person or party to

own the means of production, i.e. land or factories built on that land, allows them to exploit the labor of the working class and reap the mass benefits of the goods produced on that property in perpetuity. To the critics of Mark's desire to get rid of private property, Marx responded, quote, You are horrified at our attending to do away with private property, but in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population. Its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths, unquote. In other words, most land today is already owned, putting the vast majority of people at an enormous disadvantage, leading to extreme disparities in land ownership and wealth.

For example, in America, white people own more than 98% of U.S. land, and the five largest landowners, all white, own more rural land than all of black America combined. Sacco continues his pre-chorus, and neoliberal fascists are destroyed. drawing the left. Neoliberalism is a model of free market capitalism that favors greatly reduced government spending, deregulation, globalization, free trade, and privatization. Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has been associated with the trickle-down economic policies of President Ronald Reagan, and has been criticized for limiting social services, overly empowering corporations, and exacerbating economic inequality. Sacco pairs neoliberalism with fascism, which emphasizes extreme nationalism and

militarism, using violence and imprisonment to enforce national policy. Thus, it seems that Saco feels the left in America are being destroyed by politicians who favor neoliberal capitalism and enforce that system through fascist means. Rather than a true left party in America with socialist values that actually benefit and prioritize the working class, we essentially have two parties with marginal differences that propagate the same neoliberal system that inherently benefits the elite. Whether it's George Bush or Barack Obama, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, it's more or less business as usual in the United States of America. It's likely that someone with Sacco's views would argue that the only way to truly

solve the mass inequities in America is a full-blown revolution, a complete transformation of its corrupt neoliberal capitalist system that inherently benefits the few at the expense of the many, a system built on the exploitation of labor from its working class. Sacco then ends his pre-chorus pointing to what he views as fascist tactics used to uphold this system, singing, and every politician, every cop on the street protects the interests of the pedophilic corporate elite. While we're largely taught that police serve and protect the people,

Sacco asserts the belief that the police were created by the elite to protect the system that benefits them. People who hold this belief often cite the history of the police, noting how they did not exist until the late 19th century when the wealthy elite felt threatened by an increasing working-class population, a population that can potentially join forces and overthrow them. Specifically in the United States, before police forces, there is a system of elected constables and sheriffs in the north and slave patrols in the south. Due to the large influx of immigrant rage workers, the wealthy elite eventually hired thousands of armed men

to establish order or police new working class cities. As class conflict increased, there are more and more strikes and riots. In Chicago alone, there are major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. Each time, the police attack strikers with extreme violence, and increasing the establish themselves as a force meant to protect civilized society from the disorder of the working class. Those who hold beliefs like Sacco pointed this history to showcase how the police did not begin to protect individual citizens, but rather to protect the elite against potential uprisings that threaten a system based on property theft. In other words, the police were created to protect criminals from having their crimes returned, an ideology of order that still exists today.

Sacco's addition of pedophilic corporate elite likely nods to the recent public exposure of Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire pedophile and convicted sex offender who was arrested in 2019 for sex trafficking and died while in custody. Epstein had personal relationships with many high-profile politicians and wealthy elite, and has been speculated by many that some of these individuals took part in Epstein's sexual abuse of minors. Sacco continues by reciting the song's chorus, which in the context of his verse takes on an entirely different meaning. That is how the world works. Genocide the natives say you got to it first.

That's how it works. With ironic backing harmonies by Beau's character, Sacco performs the song's chorus with one important change. Rather than the line from A to zebra to the worms in the dirt, Sacco sings, Genocide the Natives say you got to it first. Here Sacco uses genocide as a verb, referring to the mass murder and displacement of Native Americans

when Europeans colonized North America. The many deadly tactics colonizers used to remove natives from their homelands was infamously rationalized as manifest destiny, the belief that the expansion of the United States was divinely ordained and inevitable. This made-up false narrative again exemplifies Sacco's point about history favoring the ruling class, which is alluded to in the line, say you got to at first, calling attention to the fact that colonizers credited themselves for the discovery of the land as if people weren't already living there.

It also calls back to Sacco's earlier critique of private property, highlighting the worst outcome of land being seen as something to be owned, genocide and war. As historian Jeffrey Osler wrote in his book, Surviving Genocide, quote, In order to have a land of opportunity required space to expand, early American senses of freedom fundamentally depended upon the taking of native lands, which almost inevitably would lead to the taking of native lives, unquote.

Osler argues U.S. leaders always on, understood this, yet obscured their true aims with a series of self-serving narratives built around the ideal of civilization. In the beginning, civilized society was viewed as a gift colonizers were giving to indigenous populations, and later, defending civilization was used to justify killing them. Here we find thematic threads back to the origins of police, and they're used as a force to protect order, to protect those who live civilized lives, as opposed to the unruly disorder of immigrants, or the savage, uncivilized ways of Indians. It also calls back to Sacco's point about the fascist tactics used to instill and enforce

America's way of life and its values. As how the world works continues, Bo and Sacco have a very revealing dialogue. That's pretty intense. No shit. What can I do to help? Read a book or something, I don't know. Just don't burden me with the responsibility of educating you. It's incredibly exhausting.

I'm sorry, Sacco. I was just trying to become a better person. Why do you rich fucking white people insist on seeing every sociopolitical conflict through the myopic lens of your own self-actualization? This isn't about you. So either get with it or get out of the fucking way. Watch your mouth, buddy. In response to Sacco's verse, Bo asks,

What can I do to help? While perhaps an innocent enough question on its surface, Sacco expresses frustration with being burdened to educate a privileged person about the system he enjoys the benefits from. Rather than take the time to learn, research, consider his own complicity, be uncomfortable, and work to find solutions, Beau, privileged as he is, looks to be handed an easy solution that requires no personal effort on his part. This mindset ties back to the banking system of education in which we are treated as empty vessels to be filled, and thus it's no surprise when Bo expects to be spoon-fed answers.

And the irony is, by absolving his own responsibility to educate himself, he's essentially outsourcing the labor of that education to the oppressed, to the Sacco's of the world already burn in with the ill effects of the system, thus perpetuating the very exploitative system causing the oppression. The real motive behind Bo's question reveals itself when he follows by saying, I'm sorry Sacco, I was just trying to become a better person. To which Sacco responds, why do you rich fucking white people insist on seeing every sociopolitical conflict through the myopic lens of your own self-actualization? This isn't about you. So either get with it or get out of the fucking way.

Sacco here calls out the tendency of some to center themselves in the plight of the disenfranchised, which calls back to Beau's white savior character and comedy, and the performative activism done by those who can't be motivated by anything other than self-interest. The specific wording of self-actualization might be a reference to one of the most well-known uses of the term in what's known as Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is a five-tier model of human needs visualized in the shape of a pyramid. The base of the pyramid, the widest level, is our most basic needs, food, water, and shelter. The second level is safety. The third level is belonging and relationship needs. The fourth level is

respect and esteem needs. And finally, the fifth level, the tip-top of the pyramid, is self-actualization, which is the realization of a person's potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences. Maslow described this level as the desire to accomplish everything one can, to become the absolute most that one can be. The central idea of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is that one cannot move up the pyramid without having fulfilled the needs of each stage that comes before it. For example, without meeting our basic needs like food and water,

we cannot fulfill the next stage of needs, safety. Without food, water, and safety, we can't fulfill our need for belonging and relationships, and so on. And with self-actualization being the top of the pyramid, we cannot obtain self-actualization without having the rest of the pyramid fulfilled. And this is why Bo might be intentionally using the phrase self-actualization to reference this hierarchy, because it further displays the entitlement of the ruling class who sees sociopolitical conflicts through the myopic or short-sided lens of their own self-actualization.

The benefits of the system have helped them obtain all those other needs, so they have the privilege of actually worrying about things like self-actualization. On the other hand, the system keeps Soco stuck on the lower stages of the pyramid, perpetually working to fulfill the more basic needs and never being able to. advance up. Thus he becomes frustrated when Bo, who's at the top trying to self-actualize, is looking down and viewing problems below simply as a means to self-actualize to become, quote-unquote, a better person. As Bo and Sacco continue their conversation, another layer of Bo's character reveals itself.

Or get out of the fucking way. Watch your mouth, buddy. Remember who's on whose hand here. But that's what I've... Have you not been fucking listening? We are in... All right, all right. Wait, wait, wait, no, please! I don't want to go back! I can't go back. Please. Please. I'm sorry. Are you going to behave yourself?

Yes. Yes. What? Yes, sir. Look at me. Yes, sir. That's better. Responding to Saco's pushback,

Botele Sacco to watch his mouth and remember whose hand he's on, exemplifying the very power dynamics at the heart of of Sacco's critique. It displays how Bo actually learned nothing from Sacco, further evidence that his attempt to help was hollow and self-serving. Sacco retorts again, saying, have you not been fucking listening? We're entrenched, and it's at this point Bo cuts Sacco off by beginning to pull him off his hand. Sacco then screams for a beau to stop, pleading that he doesn't want to go back. Back here refers to that liminal state of being not quite dead, not quite alive that he described earlier. Threatened by Bo's willingness to use his power to destroy him, Soco apologizes.

Bo demands that Soco behave himself and then demands to be called Sir. Sacco obliges mournfully. Turns out, Bo is the neoliberal fascist destroying the left. He feigns empathy and concern for the plight of the disenfranchise, offers to help, and even teaches children about the necessity of harmony, working together, and the importance of even the littlest fly. Even Beau's own line from his first verse, everyone gives what they can and gets what they need, is a nod to the Marxist axiom from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. Yet even though his entire verse expresses fundamentally socialist principles, and even though he might think he actually believes in them,

when push comes to shove, as soon as he feels slightly uncomfortable or potentially threatened, Beau uses militant force to censor, snuff out descendants a la Martin Luther King, and maintain the established order that ultimately benefits him. And because Bo owns the means of production protected by a militant police force, Sacco is reliant on Bo for his livelihood and is ultimately forced to surrender. The interaction between Bo and Sacco thus dramatizes the exact kind of authoritarian suppression Sacco sang about. The surface-level harmony of America is reliant on the forced suppression

and coercion of the working class and poor minorities, which makes the final chorus with Bo and Sacco singing in harmony all the more tragic. That is how the world That is how the world works. I hope you learned your lesson. I did and it hurt. That's how it works. Despite Sacco's compliance, as soon as Bo and Sacco end their duet,

Beau rips Sacco off his hand anyway. If it isn't obvious by now, this is the reason a sock puppet is used to voice Sacco. As Sacco only has a voice as long as Bo allows it. And just like a sock that wears from use and is discarded, when the song is over, when our exploited worker Sacco's job is done, he's tossed aside, back to that liminal state of non-existence, never thought of again.

The tragedy of how the world works is that the interaction between Bo and Sacco was shaping up to be a conversation. It could have been an example of Paulo Frere's antidote to the banking model of education, which is a collaborative educational process where the learner takes part in the creation of knowledge. Of course, the irony is that Sacco is defeated at the end. The conversation was only allowed to go so far, even when platformed by a neoliberal who openly claims to care about equality. And this to me is one of the more interesting aspects of how the world works. The actual Bo Burnham constructing this song could have made his character an easier

target, a right winger wearing a red hat, for example. Instead, he chose someone more like himself, a white American liberal who generally supports the idea of equality and democratic politicians who claim the same. What Boe seems to be doing is forcing those of us who somewhat identify with Bo's character, likely himself included, to truly examine the authenticity of our own belief system and how it holds up under real scrutiny. Are we only claiming equality because it feels and looks good? Are we self-examining how much we are personally participating in and benefiting from an oppressive of system? Or are we simply placing all the blame on the other side of the aisle because that's easier and dodges our own complicity? How much are we personally willing to sacrifice to achieve

equality? How much discomfort and disruption are we willing to tolerate if push really comes to shove? This threat of self-examination extends back to comedy and Beau's own critique and satirization of the very special he's making. As he said there, despite the world's issues, he's doing the thing that he'll get paid and praised for. He's not excluding himself from being a participant in the system Sacco just criticized. And this is where things get really heady, because when we view how the world works through the myopic lens of Bo's self-actualization, we realize that Bo Burnham is literally both Sacco and Bo. But the song is self-examination just as much as it is satire and social critique. As Reddit user Little Hab on Mars pointed out,

Bo Burnham is both puppet and master, capitalist and worker, master and slave, the liberal idealist and the Marxist materialist. Sacco and Bo even rhyme, perhaps to reflect this. And when Bo suppresses Sacco, he's suppressing a part of himself because he relies on the system to make a living and be the center of attention. And if he honestly engages with the way the world actually works, he would have to give up his way of life. And as he admitted on comedy, he's not willing to do that. And this is where a lot of us are, both the oppressed and the oppressor. We're all born into a system where our choices result in the exploitation of someone's labor, either in our own country or, more commonly now, outsource somewhere else because it's cheaper and frankly easier to ignore.

But we also need to work within this system to survive. And while many of us in America live more privileged lives due to our race, gender, or class, most of us are also in the business of selling our labor to a larger corporation, who owns the means of production and reap the majority of the benefits and wealth our labor creates. This reveals the double meaning of work in the song's title, a reference to both how the world's system works and how the exploitation of work or labor is vital to that system. To quote, Reddit user highbrow alcoholic, our need to make choices within the system to be able to survive day to day gives the system the illusion of legitimacy, progressively worsening others' lives, and kills us all both individually and collectively

year to year. Our involuntary omnipresent system is a global economic addiction, from which we seemingly can't break out, because we have no safe space or spare time. outside of it in which we could recover. There's literally nothing outside the system to reject the system for, because the system literally denies you the life gaming resources you need unless you engage with it. So to keep a roof over our heads, we're coerced to play the game, and exploit just as we are exploited, even while we're revolted at the exploitation in general. How the world works illustrates this dichotomy. Boberum is our short-term needs, as we can see explored through the rest of inside. Each of us individually desperate to find short-trial.

term strength amidst chaos. Soco is our long-term concerns, each of us getting used and noticing that over time we're deteriorating, unquote. And that kids is how the world works. Now a word from our corporate sponsors. Hello, my name is Bo Burnham, and I am a former comedian turned social brand consultant. It's a very exciting time to be a brand. It's also a bit of a scary time because Expect a lot more from their brands than they did in the past. During this incredibly necessary and overdue social reckoning that we're having in our culture, it is no longer acceptable for brands to stay out of the conversation. Consumers want to know, are you willing to use your brand awareness to affect positive social change, which will create more brand awareness?

Inside continues with a sketch mocking a promotional video for a social brand consulting firm. With his long-haired pulled tightly back and his shirt unbuttoned just a little too far down, Bo plays the douchy consultant working with brands on how to navigate marketing campaigns during times of social unrest. It's a branding video for a branding firm working with brands on their brand campaigns, an appropriately ironic concept following how the world works. There's a perform seriousness to Bo's sales pitch, who once again is playing into the White Savior, trope, an expert here to lead the charge in solving race relations. Of course, the irony of marketing campaigns centered around a brand's supposed commitment to a cause is that it still functions as

positive advertising and PR for that brand. The question isn't what are you selling or what service are you providing? The question is, what do you stand for? Who are you? Bagel Bites? All these big companies, they're so scared of all this social change. And I come in and I'm And I put their fears to rest. You know, I tell them, just be honest. Tell your customers that J.P. Morgan is against racism in theory. Bo continues to expose the ridiculousness of brands personifying themselves by asking, What do you stand for?

Who are you, Bagel Bites? Coming off the heels of how the world works and its exposure of the capitalistic system based on the exploitation of labor to the benefit of large corporations, the idea of one of these larger corporations committing themselves to social change is extremely ironic and inherently hypocritical. For example, bagel bites is owned by Kraft Hines, the fifth largest food and beverage company in the world with over $26 billion in annual sales. When viewed through the worldview of Sacco, corporations like these are by their very nature a fundamental part of the problem, and any real commitment to social change would include

a sweeping upheaval over their exploitative business model. A more extreme example of this is a company like J.P. Morrigan, which both sides after Bagelbytes. J.P. Morgan is the largest bank in the United States with nearly $4 trillion in total assets. The United States banking industry as a whole has a troubled history with systemic racism and bias, dating back to the U.S. slave trade and extending into things like redlining practices that denied loans and insurance to residents of certain areas based on their race or ethnicity. For example, in 2005, J.P. Morgan admitted to being involved in the U.S. slave trade. Between 1831 and 1865, its subsidiaries accepted around 303.

13,000 slaves as collateral and ended up owning over a thousand slaves. More recently, J.P. Morgan has had multiple complaints of racial discrimination alleged against them. Ironically, today when you search something like J.P. Morgan and racism, the search results are dominated by articles about J.P. Morgan's fight against racial bias in the banking industry, an intentional, positive marketing strategy headed by someone like Beau's character to combat the company's troubled history with the very subject of the search. During this part of the sketch, careful listeners will realize that the instrumental music behind Bo is actually a reprise or reworking of the song Comedy. For comparison's sake, here's an excerpt of comedy.

And now the music behind social brand consultant. This reworking of comedy into a corporate, inspirational, patriotic score intended to make Bo's character feel important and powerful is extremely clever. Just like in comedy, we have another white savior here to heal the world, centering himself in the brands he works with, which ultimately benefits him in the brands he works with. There's no sugar-coding it. The world is fucked up, and you've got a choice as a brand. You can hide and bury your head in the sand and hope it fixes itself, or you can roll up your sleeves and get to work and sell Butterfingers. Bo here fittingly ends the skip by saying,

and get to work. It's likely an intentional callback to how the world works, and its motif of work as both the operational workings of our current systems and how the exploitation of work or labor is essential to those systems. Despite what they want us to believe with their marketing campaigns, the real work of Bo the consultant and the brands he works for is not healing the world. It's to sell butterfingers.

It's to make money. And when your primary function as a corporation is to make money, operations are almost exclusively guided by that aim, morals be damned, leading to things like the exploitation of labor, the exploitation of the environment, and the exploitation of trendy social movements through marketing campaigns

that seek to capitalize on these movements for positive PR and brand awareness. While criticism of larger corporations seems just, I do think it's important that in the age of the internet and social media, we consider our own individual complicity in this branding critique. During the press tour of his 2018 film 8th grade, something Bo would bring up time and again as the convergence of the brand and the individual. Do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah. Playing your life like a board game. Which used to be careerist, you know what I mean? Like, I think career was treated like that for a while. I mean, of course, you're going to strategize about your life and your family and your taxes and all this stuff. But like now it's literally every social interaction, every opinion you had is now like this, I don't know, 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. a narrative and that you're in a movie. Everything 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. The inherent self-curation of social media has a lot of us thinking about ourselves as a brand to be managed, a carefully crafted presentation that deeply considers how we're perceived by others and makes decisions accordingly. This modern overlap of brand and individual can result in behavior very similar to those empty corporate brand campaigns around social issues. For example, in our last episode, we talked about influencers using

Black Lives Matter protests as a backdrop to capitalize on the attention the movement was receiving and raised their own brand awareness. And this confluence of the curated individual and brand makes for a perfect thematic transition from the social brand consultant skit to Inside's next song, White Woman's Instagram. Instagram White Woman's Instagram is of course a satire of a stereotypical white woman's Instagram page.

The song's lyrics are structured like a social media feed, describing a single, curated, cliche image before it scrolls on to another unrelated but equally curated and cliche image. And the visuals match the images, except the white woman is of course played by the long-haired bearded Beau Burnham. Well, I don't

think a line-by-line analysis of this song is needed. As a whole, White Woman's Instagram ties nicely into insides developing motif of the internet and social media, and subtly points to how these new tools have transformed our view of the world and how we view ourselves within. While social media purports to be a space where we can express ourselves and connect with others, we've quickly realized that these spaces are not that simple. The perfectly manicured Instagram feed calls to mind the damaging effects of social comparison. The fact that our actual lives and appearance cannot compete

with the perceived perfection of someone's digital life in appearance. Recent studies are finding that technology-based social comparison and feedback-seeking are associated with increased depressive symptoms, body issues, and feelings of isolation, particularly among young women. One study by the University College London found that girls experienced depression at a much higher rate than boys, and is closely linked to the greater time they spend on social media. The same study also found that as many as three-quarters of 14-year-old girls who suffer from depression also have low self-esteem, or unhappy with how they look, and sleep for seven hours or less each night. With this context in mind, we might wonder why Bo is satirizing something with such

severe consequences. It's a question some asked after Insight's release. For one, I think you have to view White Woman's Instagram within the context of inside as a whole, which as we'll see ends up being a pretty poignant critique of the damaging collateral effects of the internet on our mental health. In the same way a curated Instagram posts might seem harmless in the moment but is potentially harmful in the long run, white women's Instagram only seems lighthearted in the moment. but it's inherently a part of what fuels the collective dread and dissociation experienced by the film's end.

Also, careful viewers of white woman's Instagram will notice something visually symbolic during the song's bridge. While the majority of the video uses a square aspect ratio to mimic the original square image of Instagram photos, the aspect ratio widens to full frame during the song's bridge, where Bo also widens his lyrical scope, revealing the human being behind the target of his satirization. Her favorite photo of her mom The caption says, I can't believe it. It's been a decade since you've been gone.

Mama, I miss you. I miss sitting with you in the front yard. Still figuring out how to keep living without you. It's got a little better, but it's still hard. Mama, I got a job. My boyfriend, and I'm crazy about him. Your little girl didn't do it. Too bad, Mama, I love you, give a hug and kiss too.

Bo here invites us to empathize with the basic white woman character using the universally shared human experience of a mother's death, symbolically widening the frame to accommodate this more complete picture. It's as if to remind us that there's still a human being behind that curated feed, a human being that feels sorrow and pain like we all do. The constraints of social media don't always allow us to see the entire picture of who someone is. In interviews, Bo would often use the example of a parent's death to illustrate that while we all have specific experiences,

we simultaneously have a shared human experience that connects us all. I don't want the belief to be that we can never understand each other. We just, you know, there of course are certain circumstances and life experiences that cannot be understood, and we need to listen to each other. And specific groups need to step back and listen to other groups. But of course there's a shared humanity that we can all talk about, right? right? Like, you know what I mean? Like we all have parents that are like dying. We all, you know, we're all trying to love each other. We're all like hearts in chests and brains and heads.

Tellingly, just as the aspect ratio widens to full frame during the song's bridge, it immediately begins to narrow again, returning to the square ratio precisely when Beau returns to describing the single frame Instagram photos. This shift back to the more limited view perhaps symbolizes the inherently restricting nature of social media, and how it's impossible to be fully human on the internet. Instead, we're only able to show a piece of ourselves, and we're incentivized to only show our best pieces. We perform. We Photoshop our own lives in order to construct a highlight reel of who we are. This temptation to show our best side can lead to the commodification of our experiences, a point we heard Beau make in an earlier interview. Rather than living authentic

experiences and then sharing a piece of that experience online, we've started to reverse. We've started to reverse engineer this process. We start with what would make a great post and work backwards from there. We curate a moment so much that we actually devoid ourselves of living that moment. We begin to think of ourselves as a brand manager and compete in the attention and approval economy alongside other brands, both individual and corporate. And to tie this back to themes explored and how the world works, it's the big tech companies that reap the benefits of our competition, harvesting our attention and streamlining our social lives in order to collect data to sell to other companies

who use that data to serve us targeted advertising in order to sell us stuff. This is the self-consuming nature of capitalism. Our lives, our attention, our relationships have been commodified like any other good or service. And this just happened and fast. What I think showed up with social media more than the internet. I mean, the internet really just,

it wasn't the internet showing up because the internet was just like the information superhighway and who gives a shit. It was really social media, I do think, which was some form of, and I didn't have this. The internet, when it was me, it was like, oh, YouTube, post something you do there, as opposed to what the internet is now and YouTube and all these things. Live there, be there. What the internet is now for kids, Twitter and Instagram, what do you think, what do you look like? What do you think?

What do you look like? Those are base, weird, deep questions that are being asked of kids. And the thing that's happening, and these decisions that are being made by a bunch of men in Silicon Valley that have absolutely no. on average social skills are making decisions about entire generation's neurochemistry by updating an app and raising their hand in a room. Our social lives did not need to be actualized. They did not need to be made more efficient. And we're applying, like, capitalist logic to our relationships with each other,

with ourselves. It's fucking insane. It really, really is. And it's going completely unchecked. And the decisions are being made by people who have no idea what the actual repercussions of it are, or even the particular. participants are doing. So, but again, the internet, I mean, the movie is not trying to portray that judgment.

Right. What is happening, you know? And what's happening is not like selfie, you know, which is like how the generation is described, like self-involved when it's like, self-involvement is bad. You know where self-involved people in solitary confinement? Like that's self-consciousness. I'd love to think about something else. I'd love to be killing a field.

Okay. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry crying. I got very blindsided. Clearly, these issues are something both thinks and cares about very deeply. The latter point he made about being self-involved in solitary confinement is particularly relevant to inside's exploration of media, social media, and content creation, which is now most often created alone in front of a screen.

And we actually see a pretty vivid visual depiction of this concept to recognize. after White Woman's Instagram. When the song ends, it immediately cuts to a shot of bow in the dark, sitting in front of his laptop watching White Woman's Instagram. He stares intently into the screen, clearly analyzing the video, likely reviewing the piece during the editing process. Like he said in content, he's back to work, an idea that has gained complexity after the exploration of work and how the world works. The immediacy of this lonely working scene coming directly after White Woman's Instagram, continues to establish that Inside is just as much about the process of making Inside

as it is about the songs and videos presented in Inside. It is a performance, the construction of a performance, and a display of the psychological effects of performance all at once. And to this point, the contrast between the bright, colorful, curated imagery of White Woman's Instagram, against this much darker, isolated view of Bow, seems to illustrate the contrast of our lives we present on social media, against our actual lives and reality. It also begs the question,

is Bo all that different from the women he's satirizing? Isn't he essentially undergoing the same process of creating curated content to present to the world while behind the scenes his reality looks much different? This thread of self-examination running concurrently with his examination of the world around him has persisted from the very start of Inside, where Bo began self-satirizing his need

to be the center of attention and heal the world with comedy. After all, Inside at its core, is an examination of performance and all its iterations, from the stage to social media, from corporate brands to individual influencers, from what we present to the world to what we present to ourselves. Now, a closer examination of this seemingly simple scene of Beau reviewing his work in the dark reveals a few key details.

First, we notice that his reflection can clearly be seen in the large whiteboard on the left side of the screen. If you turn the brightness of your screen all the way up, you can kind of make out a bunch of writing on the whiteboard. Reddit users have since screenshoted and enhanced this image until the writing is legible, and it reveals Beau's rough storyboard outline for the entire narrative structure of inside. We can see the names of the skits and songs in order, and sometimes these are denoted with their intended function in red ink.

Most visible and perhaps most revealing is the song comedy. The word is divided in half with two underlines. One line is under C-O-M, and the other line is under E-D-Y. The first half, Calm, is denoted as setup, and EDIY is denoted as Call to Adventure. Like we suspected in our analysis of this song, the first half of comedy was Bo's version of an I Want song that sets up his desire and fear, typical of a musical narrative. In the second half, God made Bo's call to adventure to heal the world with his comedy, with this very special he's making.

This whiteboard confirms the narrative intention of Inside, that Bo has set out to create more than a traditional comedy special, that it actually has an intended story arc a traditional film structure. But the interesting thing about the whiteboard is that we can see Beau's reflection in it as he stares into his laptop screen. The contents of the whiteboard reflect and visualize his thoughts as he sits alone, analyzing his own work in the dark. Bo's mirrored reflection is also more foreshadowing of his slow dissociation over the course of inside. Recall that in the previous scene of Bo sitting alone in front of his laptop just before how the world works,

we saw a split-second splice of Bo as a Twitch streamer, which we interpreted as an early sign of his dissociation. Now we once again see Bo alone and isolated in front of his laptop, his reflection in the whiteboard suddenly implying that Bo is becoming disconnected from himself while creating content, analyzing himself, judging himself, alone in front of a screen. And Bo makes this even more apparent with the next scene. In a slow dissolve, the whiteboard night scene begins to be overlaid with the next scene,

which is a bow sitting alone on his stool in the center of the room. There's daylight now and we hear sounds of chirping birds, implying that it's morning time. This transition from night to day implies time has passed. At first we might think he's been up all night working. But we also notice in the morning scene that the room is much messier than it was in the previous scene, cluing us in on the fact that much more time has passed than just one night. It's these subtle details that visually conveys bow's slow deterioration.

As his disassociation intensifies, it appears he's beginning to lose his sense of time, that days and nights are beginning to blur together like someone's spending time in solitary confinement. And because the dissolve between the night shot into the day shot is intentionally slow, for a few seconds we can actually see both scenes simultaneously, laid over each other, which creates one of the cooler effects in the entire special. On the left and right sides of the screen, we see Bo on his laptop at night. On the right is the real bow, and on the left, is his reflection in the whiteboard. In the center of the screen, in between these two bows,

is bow on the stool in the new morning scene. And he's looking to the left, which mirrors exactly his reflection in the whiteboard, creating a reflection of a reflection. And if this wasn't cool enough, the image of bow on his laptop on the right side of the screen is now superimposed on top of a large mirror on the wall that appears in the new morning scene, implying yet another reflection. The overall effect of all these reflections of Boe is similar to a hall of mirrors, an idea that Bo has spoken about as an ominous side effect of our constructed digital presentations of self. You 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 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 makes you not want to leave the house, makes you not want to ever open your mouth. And speaking of never wanting to open your mouth, Inside continues with a hard cut to a brief stand-up routine. Can anyone shut the fuck up. Can anyone, any, any, any, any single one, can anyone?

Can anyone, can anyone, shut the fuck up? Alone on a stool in the spotlight, Beau rhetorically asked an imaginary audience if any of us can shut the fuck up. And actually, I'm going to do just that. And we'll discuss this skit and a lot more of inside. Next time I'll 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. Audio editing by Kevin Pooler. Theme music by Bureaucratic. All right, thanks everyone. Talk to you next week.