Would you like to see the news or any famous women's feet?
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2021.
#40 : Bo Burnham: Inside
It’s hard to know what was more impressive about Inside: the fact that Bo Burnham wrote, performed, directed and edited the whole thing by himself, the fact that it was simultaneously funny, inventive and gut-wrenchingly sad, or the fact that he was only 29 when he made it. Future generations will see Inside as the definitive document of the Covid lockdown.
I've seen this twice already and really enjoyed it - but I'd struggle to say exactly what it is or why I enjoyed it. Which I guess is a pretty odd state of affairs - and now I'm going to have try to explain it. ("Why start now?" I hear you cry). So I'm going to watch it again...
Well. It's basically mostly "just" a series a songs which are in some way related to vague concepts such as comedy, lockdown, confidence, privilege, aging and several other things. And most of it is filmed in one room over the course of just over a year and spans several haircuts and facial hair combinations. So what's so impressive about that then?
Well, it's all very clever - sometimes clever in its simplicity and sometimes clever in its willingness to show its cleverness, particularly in "How The World Works" and "Welcome To The Internet". And sometimes it's just funny - "White Woman's Instagram" just makes me laugh. It doesn't always work and I didn't always understand it, but that wasn't really a problem - something else came along in a couple of minutes.
It's also had a LOAD of work gone into it - there are so many separate cuts across the thing it's dizzying and some of those cuts would have required a load of set-up and they last for a couple of seconds. And there's a bunch of technical equipment as well - as you often see.
There's some discussion on the internet (hard to imagine, I know) as to whether it really reflects his mental state during lockdown - on some of the songs he looks completely worn down and it's not hard to imagine that he was having a tricky time of it. However, he's also a very talented dude so I'm pretty sure he could convince me of anything - so who knows really? He really is super talented - he wrote and directed Eighth Grade and is also no slouch as an actor (see Promising Young Woman).
I can see that a lot of people will watch the first X minutes of this, scratch their heads at it and turn it off, but I really liked it - it's dazzlingly ambitious, beautiful to look at and makes you both think and feel. Which, from someone who turned 30 during the making of this, is a pretty impressive achievement.
So - have I described it at all? Not really - maybe some of these quotes will help (spoiler alert - they won't)
- Hiya. Welcome to whatever the hell this is.
- Daddy made you some content!
- The simple narrative taught in every history class is demonstrably false and pedagogically classist.
- Maybe allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit - you know, maybe that was a bad call.
- If you start to smell burning toast, you're having a stroke - or overcooking your toast.
- Is it just me or should pirates take better care of their fucking maps?
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