INSIDE and the Millennial Experience
I’ve never really been into musical comedy. Usually I find comedic songs to be the result of boring melodies combined with simplistic jokes. That concept can be mildly amusing, but it gets old pretty fast. Bo Burnham is clearly a talented artist, but I haven’t followed his career that closely. I really enjoyed his 2018 directorial debut Eighth Grade, and I loved his performance as Carrie Mulligan’s seemingly harmless love interest in Promising Young Woman, but I’ve never watched his stand-up specials or listened to his comedy albums. It’s just not my thing.
Over the past couple months, several friends have been pushing me to watch Burnham’s latest project Inside. I was hesitant for the reasons detailed above, but I finally relented when my friend invited me to go see a screening at Alamo Drafthouse. The film clearly meant a lot to him, so I decided to give it a shot. I’m really glad I did.
While Inside is consistently funny, calling it a comedy is a bit simplistic and fails to capture what makes it great. The jokes exist to pull the audience into a deeply personal meditation on mental health and quarantine life in 2020. Burnham wrote, shot, and edited the film himself inside his home over the course of a year, and as his hair and beard get longer, you can see him spiral downward into a dark, depressing place under the weight of his loneliness and disillusionment.
Burnham is almost exactly a year younger than me, and his 2020 experience doesn’t look much different from my own. Being a single man trapped alone in my apartment for a year while watching the world crumble around me was not great for my mental health. My relationships suffered, my social skills deteriorated, and I fell deeper and deeper into my own head. As each day passed, it became harder to find happiness through the relationships and activities that had always brought me joy. I even grew a disgusting beard for a few months until my phone stopped recognizing me, and I had to actually type in the fucking passcode.
2020 was filled with depression and hopelessness, both economic and emotional. The pandemic put millions out of a work as the poor got poorer and the rich got richer. The people charged with protecting and serving their communities murdered unarmed Americans in the streets. Millions died from a frighteningly contagious virus. At the beginning of Inside, Burnham sings about these horrible issues plaguing our society and his desire to do something about them while stuck inside with no way to act. By the time we reach the film’s penultimate song titled “All Eyes on Me,” Burnham has become so disillusioned that he utters these lines:
You say the ocean’s rising, like I give a shit
You say the whole world’s ending, honey, it already did
You’re not gonna slow it, heaven knows you tried
Got it? Good, now get inside
At the end of this grueling year, the only thing he has energy for is self-preservation. Not only has he lost focus on the problems he used to care about, he doesn’t even give a fuck whether we solve them. The world is beyond repair, and there’s nothing we can do.
This dynamic is unfortunately a startling reflection of the millennial experience as we slowly emerge from the damage we’ve undergone over the past year and a half. There was so much energy to enact sweeping change throughout the country in the first half of 2020. A year later, that fire is gone. All we can do is lick our wounds and try to build back our mental and emotional health to some fraction of what it once was. A rare opportunity to change the world for the better has passed us by. The oligarchs win again.
With no way to interact with the physical world, the online world has become an even larger part of millennials’ lives than it already was. As meaningful societal change has proven next to impossible, we’re turning to social media discourse to save us, which only serves to alienate people and push them further away.
In one of the film’s funnier songs called “Problematic,” Burnham discusses the odd culture of demanding apologies from strangers online for dumb things they said years ago. He’s very open to examining his past and trying to learn from it, but the song points to the general absurdity of this modern custom and its ineffectiveness in inspiring real change.
At the end of the film, Burnham steps outside and is immediately overcome with fear. He tries to get back inside, but the door is locked. As he struggles with the knob, a laugh track plays and a spotlight shines down on him, simulating the stage environments where he used to perform. Then the camera pans out, and we realize that we’re actually watching a projection on Burnham’s living room wall as he sits and watches with an awkward grin on his face.
He’s not ready to go outside yet. As terrible and unhealthy as his quarantine experience has been, he can’t bear to face the outside world. He’s developed a strange variant of Stockholm syndrome in which the walls around him that used to feel like a constricting prison now feel like the only protection from the unknown. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.
According to Bloomberg News, the number of millennials experiencing depression quadrupled during the second quarter of 2020. There are many possible explanations for this sudden increase: low wages, student debt, long hours, uncertainty, isolation, social media. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified all of these factors, increasing the stress levels on what was already the most anxious generation.
Since I’ve been vaccinated, I’ve gone outside more, and I’ve spent more time with friends. I’ve really enjoyed these experiences, and they’ve given my mental health a much needed boost. However, my capacity for social interaction isn’t close to what it once was, and as an introvert, it wasn’t that big to begin with.
The other night, I was at a bar with some friends I hadn’t seen in over sixteen months, and they asked if I wanted to go with them to the bar next door. It was only 9:30 PM, but I decided to go home. While undoubtedly a good decision for my liver, it wasn’t something I would have done two years ago. My limit for social interaction had been surpassed at about the three-hour mark, and I was done for the night.
I’ll probably never be the same person I was before the pandemic. I hope that my ability and capacity for social interaction will return to their previous levels, but maybe they never will. The past year has molded our generation into interior creatures who prefer the safety of the online world to the fear and uncertainty of the physical. Rather than seeking real experiences outside, we just want to stay home and watch Netflix.
A positive side effect of this mentality is that a lot of millennials are watching Inside and using it as a way to process their quarantine experience. The screening I attended at Alamo Drafthouse was sold out, and I was clearly the only person there who hadn’t seen it at least three times. The crowd was laughing in anticipation of punch lines and cheering at the start of their favorite scenes. It was incredibly refreshing to see a group of millennials returning to society to work through their issues and enjoy a communal experience in the real world.
Last July I was in a pretty dark place dealing with quarantine depression, and the movie that helped me process it was another dark comedy called Palm Springs. That film was made prior to the pandemic and clearly wasn’t meant to discuss life in quarantine, but its concept — being trapped living the same day over and over so many times that you reach the point of pure nihilism — was exactly what I was going through. I’m really glad that film came along at the right time to help me better understand and cope with my situation.
Seeing Inside a year later had a similar effect on me, and I’m thrilled to see so many millennials finding it and going through their own individual versions of therapy. This is the kind of art we need right now to help us better understand ourselves and become better people going forward. We may have missed a prime opportunity to change the world, but we have to put in the work now to be ready for the next one.
Michael Dixon is a mild mannered accountant by day and a mild mannered movie watcher by night. He will not do your taxes for you. He lives in Austin, Texas with his lovely television and collection of fine whiskies. Follow him on Twitter @mDixon00 and check out his podcast here. You can’t purchase his book anywhere because it doesn’t exist.
