by Amber Trotter, Psy.D.

A REVIEW OF BO BURNHAM: INSIDE

It’s quite a time to be a therapist. Alarming statistics about mental illness have exploded a pre-existing collective conversation. Characterizing increased mental illness as a silver lining feels like a bit of a stretch, but if the COVID crisis makes a lasting impact on how seriously we take mental health, I’ll count it as a win. Long-standing silence is being broken: people suffering from mental illness are speaking in vulnerable, eloquent, comedic, and impactful ways. Bo Burnham, in a Netflix special titled Inside provides an excellent example. Despite the theatricality and singing (I notoriously detest musicals), I was impressed and moved by Burnham’s performance.

Burnham’s raw portrayal of depression and suicidality—painful to watch at times—escalates over the course of a year of confinement in his home. At first he tries to maintain diligently working and working out, but quickly loses the ability to make the best of it. After clarifying that he’s not going to kill himself, he says, “if I could kill myself for, like, a year, I’d do it today.”

COVID lockdown highlighted the systemic, collective nature of mental health and illness: isolation, and the paltry substitute of the virtual for embodied human relationships, is a prominent theme in Burnham’s special. The psychosis of infinite regression to self-reference reaches epic proportions, with Burnham commenting on his own comments and LARPing with himself. Meanwhile, “Face Timing with My Mom” leaves Burnham lonely and exasperated (“my mother’s covering her camera with her thumb”) and sexting leaves him utterly hollow (“another night on my own, yea, stuck in my home, yea, one hand on my dick and one hand on my phone, yea”). It is apparent that we, the audience, are watching him, and it’s advancing his career, but not his mental health.

Another central message is the horrible, trapped, shameful feeling of knowing there are massive social and ecological problems, and that there is next to nothing you can personally do about it. In a song titled “That is How the World Works,” Burnham quips: “the simple narrative taught in every history class is demonstrably false,” and “private property is inherently theft and neoliberal fascists are destroying the left.” From the climate to the economy, he wonders how we go on living, pointing to the futility and superficiality of our private little wins and losses in the midst of all this. In one song, “Healing the World with Comedy,” he tries to find a way to make a lot of money and remain the center of attention while doing something “good for the world.” In another, he pretends to be a “social brand consultant,” asking: “will you support Wheat Thins in the fight against Lyme’s disease?” and proclaiming that “JP Morgan stands against racism—in theory.” 

Burnham doesn’t mention the pandemic once. I take this to mean that while it would be nice if his distress were just about COVID, it’s obviously not. COVID merely exacerbated existing social breakdown. 

Burnham is under no illusion that capitalism or technology will solve these massive socioeconomic and ecological problems, even if we make capitalism or technology more responsible. Lying on his floor, depressed and semiconscious, surrounded by a disarray of digital paraphernalia, Burnham comments: “I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been thinking recently that maybe allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit, you know, maybe that was, uh, a bad call—maybe the flattening of the entire human subjective experience into an exchange that benefits nobody except for a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley, maybe that, as a way of life, uh, maybe that’s, uh, not good.” Gross inequity is a frequent motif, with one song flippantly praising Jeffrey Bezos for winning at our deadly contemporary economic game.

Arguably, Burnham is heavy on problem descriptions and light on solution propositions. What feels refreshingly clear, however, is Burnham’s resounding rejection of various hegemonic proposed solutions—particularly social entrepreneurship and digital activism. His indictment of capitalism (however disguised or modified) and of the Internet (however wonderful) mark Inside as subversive. The narcissistic, moralizing inanity of social media is a favorite target. “Is this Heaven, or is it just a White woman’s Instagram?” was one of my favorite routines. The paralyzing, crazy-making onslaught of digital reality is the subject of another of the special’s best songs, “Welcome to the Internet.” Burnham sings, “could I interest you in everything all of the time? … Here’s a tip for straining pasta, here’s a nine-year-old who died... show us pictures of your children, tell us every thought you think... here’s a healthy breakfast option, you should kill your mom, here’s why women never fuck you, here’s how you can build a bomb... A giftshop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall.” The whole world is at our fingertips, yet we remain trapped. We are aware of all problems at all times and have no idea how to effectively respond. Information minus agency equals a particular sort of hell: Inside points to the limits of insight and information in the treatment of mental illness, both personal and societal. Insight is of course an invaluable first step toward substantive change, and we should celebrate collective progress in recognizing and discussing psychosocial problems. Insight alone is insufficient, however; Burnham has insight for days, and it helps him little. 

It is the patients’ job to express suffering. Burnham joins a chorus of people doing this effectively and publicly. It is the therapists’ job to respond to suffering in useful ways, and I think a potential role for therapists in the present moment involves discussing and facilitating solutions. Pieces like Inside invite us, as professionals, to respond. In a world working actively against mental health, we might help shift conversation towards the tonic value of mourning, connection, agency, and creativity. 

In one of the special’s stranger bits, Burnham talks about how awful he’s been, even though he hasn’t, confessing sins he hasn’t committed. While he is arguably mocking a cultural moment of privileged White people self-flagellating for attention, he also captures something about the import of grief and penance involved in bearing witness to the damage all around. Sadness permeates the production.

Inside also makes clear that massive systemic problems will have to be solved collectively, through live connection and political will. Burnham’s “Healing the World with Comedy” is facetious, satirizing the helpless, desperate feeling of wanting to be an agent of change in a society without functional leftist politics. But it also demonstrates Burnham’s heroic, creative effort to do something nonetheless. Burnham finds ways of expressing his suffering in full and free ways. He maintains the capacity to play. 

I’m with Burnham. It’s hard to know how to respond to the extreme and complex nature of contemporary problems. Perhaps the most important thing is to acknowledge that and to start somewhere.