I won’t claim to be the biggest Bo Burnham fan out there; I haven’t watched everything the man has ever done or anything. But with everything I have seen of his (Country Song, Eighth Grade, his performance in Promising Young Woman, his work on Chris Rock’s Tambourine), I’ve always walked away with a sense that this is a dude with talent to burn and a willingness to try different things. And while his latest comedy special might not technically count as a film… well, as I’ll get into, that distinction doesn’t really mean a whole lot, considering the how and why of its creation.
Much like with Rob Savage’s Host, this is the result of trying to express creativity in a confined space with limited access to materials. Basically everything that is shown here, from the lighting to the editing to the crawlingly-slow zoom-ins to (of course) the music and writing, was done by Burnham himself while in isolation. And the effect it leaves is mesmerising to behold. It’s presented as this collage of… well, just about everything Burnham usually does: A bit of music, a bit of comedy, more than a few pisstakes of himself and what he’s even doing making this special in the first place. It all works really damn well, and the way he’s able to create all these different atmospheres within this single room (from biting to self-conscious to lonely to… well, we’ll get to that) honestly makes Eighth Grade look like he was just warming up.
This is set up as a comedy show; something to help alleviate the cabin fever and find the lighter side of this existence we’ve been living in for two goddamn years. Except that’s not really what this is. It’s a lot closer to Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette than any other Netflix special currently in circulation, in that it’s more focused on deconstructing comedy than it is simply conveying it for an audience (albeit a strictly digital one). Don’t get me wrong, I was laughing at several of the bits here, like Welcome To The Internet describing the digital world as this madcap carnival of anything and everything, or the observations of White Woman’s Instagram which can get downright savage, or when he satirises other Internet content like reaction videos, vlogs, and Twitch streaming.
But for far more of it, I wasn’t really laughing that much. Honestly, I spent a fair amount of my time watching this on the verge of tears, if not outright crying. Because like with Eighth Grade, there is something unshakeably relatable about what’s happening on-screen, to the point where this wound up cutting even closer to the bone than even that film did. This is a just-under-90-minute look at a man stuck inside, with only himself for company, and trying anything to occupy his time. It’s a one-sided conversation that exists to try and fill up all the dread-filled air inside that room. It’s Burnham reflecting on his own career, from YouTube to the stage to this very show, acknowledging how much he owes to the Internet and the following he has cultivated through it… but questioning not only the validity of him even having a following, but the worth of what he should do with it.
Time to get a bit more personal now. 2021 has not been a great year for me, both in terms of my writing and just in general. I’ve spent more time off this year than in any other since this blog started. Even when I was getting work done, I always had the same thought in my head. It’s a thought that I’m sure many people who have opted for more creative pursuits have experienced at some point over the past couple years, and it’s one that eventually had me completely burn out for a few months: What do I do now?
I chose a very specific form of entertainment to devote all my time to creating, but with the world going to absolute shit between the bushfires that we started 2020 off with, to a global pandemic, to the varying degrees of “How in the fuck was that supposed to help?!” responses to both crises… I just write about movies I’ve watched recently. What little I have to contribute to the world isn’t going to help anyone get out of hospital, or save their farm from drought, or help explain to a child why their parents won’t wake up. So why bother?
And it is with watching Burnham go through this exact same line of questioning, raging against the injustice of the world, raging against his own confinement, while his mind continues to unravel and just… break under all the strain, that it all sank in for me. Even in recent weeks, after getting back to my sporadically prolific self again, part of me actually felt shame that I spent as much time not writing as I did. Like I was the punchline of some cosmic joke since 2020, the year that this whole shit actually started in, was when I did more work than in any other year previously. And then it just slowed to a crawl, and I was stuck feeling dejected because, with how much the world had changed outside my bedroom window, I didn’t see the point in doing that which I enjoy doing most.
And for as much progress as Burnham had made up to the point of lockdown, where his own social anxiety was becoming less of an occupational hazard… he too doubts whether he can do anything positive for the world at this moment. Making jokes? Singing a few songs? Pushing for social changes, at a time when such pleas are the M.O. for just about every two-faced capitalist brand out there? It all seems so pointless now.
But in that raw, unflinching honesty, where Burnham doesn’t offer any solutions or any real advice, he hits on what might be the most important point one can make at a time like this. At a time when we’ve all spent so long indoors that real face-to-face interaction is becoming a faded memory of better days. And it’s the reason why I’ve been as open as I have been throughout this review in particular: We’re not alone.
It’s a cramped, depressing, lonely existence that we’ve been put through, but there’s still comfort to be taken in knowing that it’s not just us. Hell, the very idea of it not just being us as individuals going through all this is an especially important thing to keep in mind, seeing as a lot of the truly endangering behaviour during this pandemic is rooted in abject selfishness. It’s been hell going through this… but hey. You’re still here. You’ve been facing a global-level event previously only dreamt of by sci-fi authors and cringey YouTube nihilists, and it hasn’t beaten you. Take some comfort in that. It might just see you through to the end of this madness.
Yeah, suffice to say, this really struck a chord with me. Like with Host (or hell, even like with In The Earth), this taps into some pretty confronting shit to do with how much COVID-19 has changed everyday life. It’s funny, sure, and the music has some nice vaporwave vibes to it, but as a reflection of… well, what I’ve spent a lot of this year thinking about, this can stand right alongside Host as an indispensable artefact of this specific time in our history. It’s like a sporadically giddy, mostly depressing, but surprisingly hopeful pat on the back. A reminder that we may be lonely, but we don’t have to go through this alone.
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