"Inside"

 By Matt Duncan

Coastal View News

Lately I’ve found myself wondering what it will be like to do things that I haven’t done—and couldn’t do—since the pandemic began. What will it be like to sit inside a restaurant? Eat in someone else’s house? Go to the movies? I wondered: Will it be awkward? Will I feel anxious? Or will I snap back to normal, business as usual?

 

Last week I went to the movie theater for the first time in over a year. It was not what I expected, though I don’t think COVID-19 can be blamed. My mom and I took my kids—ages eight, five, and three—to see “Space Jam 2” (their choice). After we endured about 30 minutes of its frantic plot and Lebron James’ stiff, phony acting, and once the movie started getting a bit intense for my five-year-old, he announced, “I don’t like this movie.” Seeing as we had the same verdict (though for different reasons), I shuffled him over to the only other kid-friendly movie on offer: “Boss Baby: The Family Business.”

 

I then proceeded to zone out for the next hour and a half as talking babies smashed, hit, chased, screamed, and shot at each other. I tuned in for the touching ending, but the rest is mostly a blur.

 

So after a year of cinematic quarantine, my first trip to the theater yielded no review-generating material.

 

I did, however, then see another movie—a movie kind of about the pandemic, about being stuck inside, which, ironically, hit the theaters for a short run in late July after being on Netflix since May: Bo Burnham’s “Inside.”

 

Burnham started his comedy career at 16 as a Youtube sensation. His trademark is to mix music into his comedy—he writes and performs witty songs on the piano about everything from race to love to gender to social media to mental health.

 

“Inside” takes place inside. During the pandemic. In a single room. Burnham, like everyone else, is stuck inside, and this is his outlet. The movie features lighthearted songs like “FaceTime with My Mom (Tonight)” and “White Woman’s Instagram,” but also darker pieces about depression, politics, and economics.

 

In between, Burnham offers scattered commentary about life in quarantine—about how much it sucks, how frustrating the world is, how annoying people are, and again how much quarantine sucks.

 

Some of the songs in “Inside” are pretty funny. There’s “Bezos I” in which Burnham sarcastically cheers Amazon owner Jeff Bezos to (among other things) the suck the blood of Zuckerberg, Gates, and Buffett. Then there’s “Problematic” in which he (very) self-consciously confesses to all of the (by today’s standards) “problematic” things he’s done in the past. And then there are plenty of other fun songs like “Welcome to the Internet,” “Unpaid Intern,” and “How the World Works.”

 

While the songs of “Inside” are worth the watch, I was less fond of the content in between. O.K., so a rich 30-year-old with no kids to wrangle and no “essential” work to stress over, moans and groans about life in the pandemic. Spare me. Burnham acts as if he bears the weight of the world on his shoulders. Except he doesn’t. At all.

 

Burnham is very self-aware of these dynamics. He constantly brings up his privilege, lack of special insight, and even hypocrisy in ways that on the face of it are self-undermining but are clearly aimed at defusing the criticism, as if noting one’s privilege or hypocrisy makes it vanish, or makes it O.K.

 

I don’t mean to minimize the stress and anxiety that anyone felt during the pandemic—including those who are closer to Burnham’s position. It’s just that, having spent the last year and a half going through it myself, I have limited appetite for listening to someone else whine about it. I suppose some people—maybe even a lot of people—feel that Burnham is giving voice to their own feelings, and they find that cathartic, enjoyable, or something else positive. Fair enough. But there’s a fine line between giving voice to misery and wallowing in it, and I found Burnham’s moping around excessive and annoying.

 

Still, some of the songs are pretty funny. So maybe it’s worth it. Everyone else (especially the critics) seems to think so.