![]() ![]() His answer then was to quit, to stop doing live performances and focus on artistic forms with less immediate feedback - acting, directing. His last special, Make Happy, was released five years ago, and in it Burnham ends with an extended song about audience expectation, his desire for attention, the way he needs and resents his audience, the panic attacks that he’d get before performances. That absent audience plagues Burnham throughout Inside. ![]() In the moment, though, he sees only himself. In one of them, with Burnham staring into a mirror as a camera captures his reflection, he’s doing the classic Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror framing, knowing full well that for the audience it will feel as though he’s staring directly at them. In these moments, he’s not playing a YouTube vlogger or a post-modern photographer he’s playing a Renaissance self-portraitist in his studio surrounded by easels and still-life objects. He rubs his forehead, pulls out a measuring tape to verify the distance from his chair to the camera, plunks out a keyboard melody. We see Burnham surrounded by cameras and lighting equipment, often sighing in frustration as he glances at a monitor. There’s so much labor involved in building the scenes and design for each new performance, and in the interstitials, the same tiny room that was just disguised as a rave or a gym or an arthouse projection space is now full of natural light, littered with cords and tripods and detritus. The special is punctuated by small interstitial scenes, footage framed to situate Burnham in the cramped space of this tiny room. In between those high-key character performances, Inside’s self-portraiture sometimes shifts into a much older mode. It’s a joke about a very specific online genre, but Burnham’s painstaking direction also turns it into a self-portrait of self-loathing, like looking into a hall of mirrors and seeing yourself reflected ad infinitum, giving yourself the finger. Sometimes they are stranger and more recursive - at one point, a song about the gig economy shifts abruptly into Burnham doing a reaction video that escalates into a wild and dizzying loop. Sometimes they’re straight-up parody - Burnham briefly becomes a brand consultant, talking up the vital importance of supporting brands in order to support causes. Where Sherman’s work cast her in variations on femininity, many of Burnham’s characters are Internet Types, and his performances play up the mannered, dissociative strangeness of life and art that exists only as fodder for online consumption. He’s a high-energy, horny Instagram vixen he’s a weeping video-game character and he’s also the half-bored player pressing the buttons. Burnham is fascinated by, delighted by the ability to transform himself through different gears of performance. In these moments, Inside is a Cindy Sherman kind of self-portrait, although it’s less about physically transforming himself and more about throwing his performance energy across a wide spectrum of affects and moods. In many of Burnham’s highly produced bits, he turns himself into characters: a thirst trap, a creepy Baz Luhrmann–style carnival barker, a faux-happy songster with a real-talking puppet-hand interlocutor. Inside’s most insistent form, though, is self-portrait. ![]() Shot over many months during 2020, Burnham’s hair and beard grow longer and shaggier with time, turning Inside into something like a captain’s log, with Burnham on a solo voyage through his own pandemic anguish. Sometimes it longs to be a concert sometimes the special veers into the confessional, even journalistic. Once again he’s a vlogger, sitting alone in a quiet room with a closed door, staring into the black void of a camera lens, shooting take after take so the result can be edited into meticulous precision. Filmed almost entirely inside one small room, with a host of cameras and interesting lighting set-ups, Inside also plays with the form that launched Burnham’s career. It’s a piece of cultural criticism focused on the extremely online, often performed by recreating specifically digital forms like an Instagram grid or a Twitch stream. Like most of Burnham’s comedy, it’s a musical production, full of songs about things like sexting and internet culture and Jeff Bezos. Inside, a new Netflix special written, performed, directed, shot, and edited by comedian Bo Burnham, invokes and plays with many forms.
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