I think Inside does make it clear that Burnham knows this is all an unhealthy coping mechanism. He's trying to capture and present a very specific time period and state of mind, but there's a lot in the special that makes it clear that Burnham, the artist making a movie, doesn't really agree with Burnham, the main character from Inside.
Like at the very end of the special, he finally goes outside, but the door locks behind him. He claws and pounds at the door, trying desperately to crawl his way back into isolation - as dark and cramped and lonely as it was, it's easier than dealing with the spotlight and the crowd jeering at him. The final shot is Burnham watching this same scene in his editing software, laughing at his own foolish antics - Burnham telling us that he's not the character he's playing here.
Or there's the song Look Who's Inside Again:
"Well, well
Look who's inside again
Went out to look for a reason to hide again
Well, well
Buddy, you found it"
Even in songs like "White Woman's Instagram," when recounting the scenes of happy dogs and pumpkin patches, he asks, "Is this heaven?" He then paints a legitimately touching portrait of a young woman healthily dealing with the terrible grief of her mother's early death, but still finding joy in living her life to her fullest - the exact opposite of Burnham (the character), who has everything and hates all of it (in 30 he even makes a joke about how he feels pathetic for spending time with his own mom as a grown man). The butt of the joke isn't really the woman who owns the Instagram account, it's the cretin who sees a happy, emotionally healthy person as a figure worthy of derision.
I think you're missing the layers of meta irony that's at the heart of inside. The thing you're critiquing about inside isn't an oversight but the point of it. It's not pro doomer culture, it's a criticism of the doomer culture acting as the doomer culture in an apparent paradox.
Consider the bit about healing the world with comedy, the joke is that if he's successful with his work he does help heal the world with comedy and the world does need direction from a white guy like him. And yet he has to act dismissively towards the concept because his audience can't handle the possibility that it might be the case. If he were to take his project seriously not as a joke it would come off pretentious, but by making it a joke we're forced to consider the possibility and dismiss it at the same time that it's doing the thing that he's acting dismissive of. The rest of the work also operates on similar paradoxes.
Nailed it. The theme of him existing outside of himself and watching and critiquing himself is evvvvvvverywhere in that special (and a lot of his other work)
Could it be a bit of both/and? The meta aspect portrays a person who is both experiencing and observing the experience with critique and disgust (but make it funny.) Like most things we encounter, we can rarely meet them beyond our own context.
Inside was indeed a work of art, made by an extremely smart and emotionally intelligent man that had his finger on the pulse of culture. Despair in a world of suffering isn’t exactly a take so much as a result of disillusionment. The “what we were promised” narrative is grief on full display in a society that has intentionally or unintentionally kept us from the exploration of our pain. The need for it to be acknowledged has created a pressure cooker warping our perception of reality. Wounds need treatment, care and attention.
It can feel overwhelming to think about all the unacknowledged pain- where would we even start? This piece does a great job at balancing the scales of appreciation and detachment. Being someone who connected with Inside I’m grateful because I believe that piece of art was a brilliantly crafted intervention for Bo and all of us. But the question remains, and I think about it daily- how do we get back outside, individually and together?
This was an interesting read, especially the analysis on "doomerism" being both the cause and a symptom of the suffering. Ironically, the reality that live goes on after the apocalypse can be even more anxiety inducing—that even after everything comes crashing down I'll still have to suffer and go to work on Monday.
However, one gripe I have is the discussion of the left-leaning fearmongering. I think the way that you describe it is a bit hyperbolic, you even point out how insane it sounds after writing it out. I'm not saying there isn't a subsection of the left that acts like or believes this, but it's certainly a vocal minority and almost a right-wing caricature of progressives. Even your analysis nearly falls into the same pitfall your discussing, of being over critical without offering any relief. I guess what I'm getting at is that there are certainly people offering up real solutions for our situation without attacking both those who believe the situation is dire and those who aren't quite with it, they just get drowned out by the more emotionally charged stuff that gets more engagement.
Nonetheless, I still think you made some very interesting points and I thoroughly enjoyed reading your essay. Thanks for writing it.
Agreed. It was an interesting read and makes some valid points, but I wonder just how many people are using "doomerism" as a coping mechanism like any other form of dark humor.
Yep. You pretty much nailed how I feel. This was a well written and thought-provoking piece, but there are a few jumps here and there that I feel mistake Burnam’s point. For instance, the sentiment “don’t worry, it’ll be over soon”, isn’t someone wishing for the end of the world, it is someone who knows what we’re heading towards and attempting to meet it on your own terms. We can try to stop it but we have very few options left. It’s a laugh to keep from crying response. he doesn’t equate Logan Paul and climate catastrophe, the juxtaposition is intentional. Something so petty like singling out a big dumb bro vs. the collapse of our environment are VASTLY different in scope but also deeply related.
Love the analysis of Bo and the internet age and how frustratingly ineffective leftist activism has become lately. I do genuinely think you're not taking the massive right wing pivot in us policy seriously enough tho. We can't “both sides” our way out of the budding fascist regime, and people aren't wrong to feel scared about it
People have been calling Trump and co. fascist ten million times a day since 2015. It doesn't work. You can't "both sides" your way to victory, but you have to build a stable coalition, which has not happened. Unnecessary cultural alienation is a key reason for this.
The left has struggled to build a good response to MAGA, but calling Trump and co. fascists is fully accurate and it was fully accurate on day one. They're malignant liars and they only won because they were the accelerationist option.
And I'll reiterate what I already said. The left does need to actively remind everyone that they have better policy positions, and in order to do that they need to rally around common goals and community building. They need to build third spaces.
We can do that and at the same time continue to call a spade a spade. I belong to the "anti leopards eating people's faces" party, and as people continue to be victimized by the Trump administration they should be welcomed into the leftist fold, which I'm not seeing enough of. But that doesn't mean we're gonna stop calling the guy responsible a fascist, because that's what he is.
It's good to critique the practical problems with leftist despair and praying-for-the-apocalypse politics, I think that's really unproductive. The Revolution is just the Rapture in disguise.
However I don't think it's a bad thing that headlines rn are “24/7 Trump/Musk outrage”. We should be outraged. It's genuinely really bad. They want to lock up or deport a fifth of the country and beat up the third of the country that wants to stop them.
JP is one of my faves. He's smart, and more importantly he's really thoughtful. This is just the thought that I want to add to the conversation.
Fun fact: there is no hope. On The Happiness Lab podcast, Harvard psychologist Prof. Dan Gilbert talks about how one, when one communicates about climate change, must necessarily choose between instilling hope and telling the truth, because one can't do both.
It's a great episode, check it out: "Why our Brains Don’t Fear Climate Change Enough"
If there's really no hope, then stop pretending to give up and really give up. You were always going to die anyways, and so was everyone else. Your country was always going to fade, and your universe was always going to freeze over and pass into night.
Buy a gun and join a self-sufficient commune, or make peace with your death and live in a way you won't regret, but don't say that there's no hope and then stay locked pathologically in that state because you want to make other people hopeless.
A fantastic read. One insight I find genuinely unique was the last one: people don’t want their mental heath validated, they want it cured.
Now, in their defense, no political movement will cure your mental health: validation is important and is about as far as vague politics can do for any given individual. But there’s something to be said about ‘your problems are valid!’ when paired with ‘your problems are unsolvable!’
There's some good points here, but I don't know if I accept the premise that young men going right is entirely (or even mostly) based on the doomer rhetoric of the most chronically online sliver of the left, because that kind of implies all the converts are just as chronically online, which seems an unreasonably high number.
Like, think of all the characters in Black Box of Doom who were like "this shit’s viral! EVERYONE is following this" and "EVERYONE" was what? A six- or seven-digit number of mostly reddit users? Which is a lot, sure, but also barely a blip compared to the population of the US.
Maybe I'm wrong as I haven't deeply studied the relevant stats, but that's the same "EVERYONE" I'm picturing when I hear "EVERYONE is getting pushed right because EVERYONE on the left is an obnoxious bummer."
Too online college educated liberals controlled the commanding heights of the culture for the better part of a decade. Very few people were on Twitter, but a lot of people watched TV shows made by people who cared a lot about what twitter lefties thought.
What an observation. I can certainly see what you're talking about. I'm not sure if I totally agree, but I definitely understand. Thanks for thinking so deeply on this subject. Mrs Coffey and I love ALL of your books.
There's this trope that "everyone puts a falsely positive version of their life on social media" and every time I see that claim, I'm like, are we in different bubbles, or are you repeating a platitude without thinking about whether it matches your experience?
Cause yeah, what i see is much more people putting up a "lowlights reel" (often clearly signalled as humour, but still portraying themselves as hapless or w/e)
to be fair, at the time.., I was hearing about dead people filling up sidewalks in NY. And even roomates in total covid isolation, still reinfecting each other. So there was a whole lot of "is this going to last forever" thoughts. iirc there was no vaccine when inside was released (when i watched it, i sure wasnt)
> First off: if you haven’t seen the award-winning 2021 Bo Burnham Netflix special Inside, you absolutely should watch that instead of reading this or whatever other bullshit I put out this month.
Does this mean you're putting out more "b/s" this month? Please?
Yeah, the best criticism of "Inside" is how incomplete and empty it feels at the end. If the project had some kind of actionable message at the end, I don't think your criticisms would feel particularly salient. But it sets itself up for some Big Punchline About Society and then just... ends.
My introduction to "Inside" was "Bo Burnham v. Jeff Bezos", a monster of a video essay that tries to make sense of Burnham's oeuvre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvYcunuF3Eo. This video does a better job of making the case for Burnham's art than even Burnham himself, which led me to expect a far more cohesive body of work than I got. But CJ the X comes to the same conclusion, which is that the project is ultimately a nihilistic one. It doesn't actually ~offer~ anything. They then try to imagine what a less nihilistic conclusion would even look like.
I became quite interested in CJ the X's general project after the video. They became determined to create a "solution" to "Inside" and fill the void left at the end with something that actually feels real. They've gone through a lot of ideas: a book club, a social media app, an interactive lecturing tour... I'm still not sure if I completely understand what they're going for, but it always makes me think when I come across it on the Internet. I think this interview articulates their current-ish thinking pretty well:
Thanks for the thoughtful read, Jason. I haven't watched <em>Inside</em>, though I've seen and heard enough about it over the years to know it would negatively impact my mental health because the struggle is real. It seems to me that the patriarchy is largely responsible for all the world's ills, though capitalism gives it a run for its money. Not sure what the answer is, but I try to carve out happiness where I can.
I think Inside does make it clear that Burnham knows this is all an unhealthy coping mechanism. He's trying to capture and present a very specific time period and state of mind, but there's a lot in the special that makes it clear that Burnham, the artist making a movie, doesn't really agree with Burnham, the main character from Inside.
Like at the very end of the special, he finally goes outside, but the door locks behind him. He claws and pounds at the door, trying desperately to crawl his way back into isolation - as dark and cramped and lonely as it was, it's easier than dealing with the spotlight and the crowd jeering at him. The final shot is Burnham watching this same scene in his editing software, laughing at his own foolish antics - Burnham telling us that he's not the character he's playing here.
Or there's the song Look Who's Inside Again:
"Well, well
Look who's inside again
Went out to look for a reason to hide again
Well, well
Buddy, you found it"
Even in songs like "White Woman's Instagram," when recounting the scenes of happy dogs and pumpkin patches, he asks, "Is this heaven?" He then paints a legitimately touching portrait of a young woman healthily dealing with the terrible grief of her mother's early death, but still finding joy in living her life to her fullest - the exact opposite of Burnham (the character), who has everything and hates all of it (in 30 he even makes a joke about how he feels pathetic for spending time with his own mom as a grown man). The butt of the joke isn't really the woman who owns the Instagram account, it's the cretin who sees a happy, emotionally healthy person as a figure worthy of derision.
Perfectly said!
I think you're missing the layers of meta irony that's at the heart of inside. The thing you're critiquing about inside isn't an oversight but the point of it. It's not pro doomer culture, it's a criticism of the doomer culture acting as the doomer culture in an apparent paradox.
Consider the bit about healing the world with comedy, the joke is that if he's successful with his work he does help heal the world with comedy and the world does need direction from a white guy like him. And yet he has to act dismissively towards the concept because his audience can't handle the possibility that it might be the case. If he were to take his project seriously not as a joke it would come off pretentious, but by making it a joke we're forced to consider the possibility and dismiss it at the same time that it's doing the thing that he's acting dismissive of. The rest of the work also operates on similar paradoxes.
Nailed it. The theme of him existing outside of himself and watching and critiquing himself is evvvvvvverywhere in that special (and a lot of his other work)
Could it be a bit of both/and? The meta aspect portrays a person who is both experiencing and observing the experience with critique and disgust (but make it funny.) Like most things we encounter, we can rarely meet them beyond our own context.
Inside was indeed a work of art, made by an extremely smart and emotionally intelligent man that had his finger on the pulse of culture. Despair in a world of suffering isn’t exactly a take so much as a result of disillusionment. The “what we were promised” narrative is grief on full display in a society that has intentionally or unintentionally kept us from the exploration of our pain. The need for it to be acknowledged has created a pressure cooker warping our perception of reality. Wounds need treatment, care and attention.
It can feel overwhelming to think about all the unacknowledged pain- where would we even start? This piece does a great job at balancing the scales of appreciation and detachment. Being someone who connected with Inside I’m grateful because I believe that piece of art was a brilliantly crafted intervention for Bo and all of us. But the question remains, and I think about it daily- how do we get back outside, individually and together?
I agree! The last line of one of the raps on my album is "I've got that funny feelin' Bo Burnham's gonna live" and this post is what I mean by it.
This is so spot on omg
Was just gonna send this to you Lidija!
I think I’m gonna have to write a follow-up hahah. Synchronicity!! Thanks for thinking of me ⭐️
This was an interesting read, especially the analysis on "doomerism" being both the cause and a symptom of the suffering. Ironically, the reality that live goes on after the apocalypse can be even more anxiety inducing—that even after everything comes crashing down I'll still have to suffer and go to work on Monday.
However, one gripe I have is the discussion of the left-leaning fearmongering. I think the way that you describe it is a bit hyperbolic, you even point out how insane it sounds after writing it out. I'm not saying there isn't a subsection of the left that acts like or believes this, but it's certainly a vocal minority and almost a right-wing caricature of progressives. Even your analysis nearly falls into the same pitfall your discussing, of being over critical without offering any relief. I guess what I'm getting at is that there are certainly people offering up real solutions for our situation without attacking both those who believe the situation is dire and those who aren't quite with it, they just get drowned out by the more emotionally charged stuff that gets more engagement.
Nonetheless, I still think you made some very interesting points and I thoroughly enjoyed reading your essay. Thanks for writing it.
Agreed. It was an interesting read and makes some valid points, but I wonder just how many people are using "doomerism" as a coping mechanism like any other form of dark humor.
I had the same thought.
Yep. You pretty much nailed how I feel. This was a well written and thought-provoking piece, but there are a few jumps here and there that I feel mistake Burnam’s point. For instance, the sentiment “don’t worry, it’ll be over soon”, isn’t someone wishing for the end of the world, it is someone who knows what we’re heading towards and attempting to meet it on your own terms. We can try to stop it but we have very few options left. It’s a laugh to keep from crying response. he doesn’t equate Logan Paul and climate catastrophe, the juxtaposition is intentional. Something so petty like singling out a big dumb bro vs. the collapse of our environment are VASTLY different in scope but also deeply related.
Love the analysis of Bo and the internet age and how frustratingly ineffective leftist activism has become lately. I do genuinely think you're not taking the massive right wing pivot in us policy seriously enough tho. We can't “both sides” our way out of the budding fascist regime, and people aren't wrong to feel scared about it
People have been calling Trump and co. fascist ten million times a day since 2015. It doesn't work. You can't "both sides" your way to victory, but you have to build a stable coalition, which has not happened. Unnecessary cultural alienation is a key reason for this.
The left has struggled to build a good response to MAGA, but calling Trump and co. fascists is fully accurate and it was fully accurate on day one. They're malignant liars and they only won because they were the accelerationist option.
Okay, well I would reiterate what I already wrote. It's not working at all. You have to find a different strategy.
And I'll reiterate what I already said. The left does need to actively remind everyone that they have better policy positions, and in order to do that they need to rally around common goals and community building. They need to build third spaces.
We can do that and at the same time continue to call a spade a spade. I belong to the "anti leopards eating people's faces" party, and as people continue to be victimized by the Trump administration they should be welcomed into the leftist fold, which I'm not seeing enough of. But that doesn't mean we're gonna stop calling the guy responsible a fascist, because that's what he is.
what does both-sides have to do with the united states ratcheting further right?
It's good to critique the practical problems with leftist despair and praying-for-the-apocalypse politics, I think that's really unproductive. The Revolution is just the Rapture in disguise.
However I don't think it's a bad thing that headlines rn are “24/7 Trump/Musk outrage”. We should be outraged. It's genuinely really bad. They want to lock up or deport a fifth of the country and beat up the third of the country that wants to stop them.
JP is one of my faves. He's smart, and more importantly he's really thoughtful. This is just the thought that I want to add to the conversation.
Fun fact: there is no hope. On The Happiness Lab podcast, Harvard psychologist Prof. Dan Gilbert talks about how one, when one communicates about climate change, must necessarily choose between instilling hope and telling the truth, because one can't do both.
It's a great episode, check it out: "Why our Brains Don’t Fear Climate Change Enough"
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/why-our-brains-dont-fear-climate-change-enough
If there's really no hope, then stop pretending to give up and really give up. You were always going to die anyways, and so was everyone else. Your country was always going to fade, and your universe was always going to freeze over and pass into night.
Buy a gun and join a self-sufficient commune, or make peace with your death and live in a way you won't regret, but don't say that there's no hope and then stay locked pathologically in that state because you want to make other people hopeless.
A fantastic read. One insight I find genuinely unique was the last one: people don’t want their mental heath validated, they want it cured.
Now, in their defense, no political movement will cure your mental health: validation is important and is about as far as vague politics can do for any given individual. But there’s something to be said about ‘your problems are valid!’ when paired with ‘your problems are unsolvable!’
There's some good points here, but I don't know if I accept the premise that young men going right is entirely (or even mostly) based on the doomer rhetoric of the most chronically online sliver of the left, because that kind of implies all the converts are just as chronically online, which seems an unreasonably high number.
Like, think of all the characters in Black Box of Doom who were like "this shit’s viral! EVERYONE is following this" and "EVERYONE" was what? A six- or seven-digit number of mostly reddit users? Which is a lot, sure, but also barely a blip compared to the population of the US.
Maybe I'm wrong as I haven't deeply studied the relevant stats, but that's the same "EVERYONE" I'm picturing when I hear "EVERYONE is getting pushed right because EVERYONE on the left is an obnoxious bummer."
Too online college educated liberals controlled the commanding heights of the culture for the better part of a decade. Very few people were on Twitter, but a lot of people watched TV shows made by people who cared a lot about what twitter lefties thought.
this isn’t remotely true and it’s crazy how often this gets regurgitated.
What an observation. I can certainly see what you're talking about. I'm not sure if I totally agree, but I definitely understand. Thanks for thinking so deeply on this subject. Mrs Coffey and I love ALL of your books.
"What an INTERESTING observation,"
this is all spittin truth. Inside sparked absolute revulsion in me
I admit I've never watched Inside, and based on this article, I think I would hate it.
There's this trope that "everyone puts a falsely positive version of their life on social media" and every time I see that claim, I'm like, are we in different bubbles, or are you repeating a platitude without thinking about whether it matches your experience?
Cause yeah, what i see is much more people putting up a "lowlights reel" (often clearly signalled as humour, but still portraying themselves as hapless or w/e)
to be fair, at the time.., I was hearing about dead people filling up sidewalks in NY. And even roomates in total covid isolation, still reinfecting each other. So there was a whole lot of "is this going to last forever" thoughts. iirc there was no vaccine when inside was released (when i watched it, i sure wasnt)
> First off: if you haven’t seen the award-winning 2021 Bo Burnham Netflix special Inside, you absolutely should watch that instead of reading this or whatever other bullshit I put out this month.
Does this mean you're putting out more "b/s" this month? Please?
Yeah, the best criticism of "Inside" is how incomplete and empty it feels at the end. If the project had some kind of actionable message at the end, I don't think your criticisms would feel particularly salient. But it sets itself up for some Big Punchline About Society and then just... ends.
My introduction to "Inside" was "Bo Burnham v. Jeff Bezos", a monster of a video essay that tries to make sense of Burnham's oeuvre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvYcunuF3Eo. This video does a better job of making the case for Burnham's art than even Burnham himself, which led me to expect a far more cohesive body of work than I got. But CJ the X comes to the same conclusion, which is that the project is ultimately a nihilistic one. It doesn't actually ~offer~ anything. They then try to imagine what a less nihilistic conclusion would even look like.
I became quite interested in CJ the X's general project after the video. They became determined to create a "solution" to "Inside" and fill the void left at the end with something that actually feels real. They've gone through a lot of ideas: a book club, a social media app, an interactive lecturing tour... I'm still not sure if I completely understand what they're going for, but it always makes me think when I come across it on the Internet. I think this interview articulates their current-ish thinking pretty well:
https://readonly.cargo.site/cj-the-x-is-yearning-for-a-better-internet
Anyway, this comment has just devolved into me shilling CJ the X, but I suppose there are worse things to shill :P
" If ...there were only two seats left ....... they would leave me behind and give Bo the extra seat in case he wanted to stretch out."
This is excellent
Im still laughing and picturing you waving the shuttle goodbye with Bos head peering out the window, not even to look at you.
Terrific article
Love your writing.
Thanks for the thoughtful read, Jason. I haven't watched <em>Inside</em>, though I've seen and heard enough about it over the years to know it would negatively impact my mental health because the struggle is real. It seems to me that the patriarchy is largely responsible for all the world's ills, though capitalism gives it a run for its money. Not sure what the answer is, but I try to carve out happiness where I can.