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How Bo Burnham’s Netflix special Inside set the bar for quarantine art

Last week, the comedian Bo Burnham released Welcome to the Internet, his first video on his channel in four years and the leading single, of sorts, for Inside, the virtuosic Netflix special he wrote, directed, performed in and edited alone during Covid lockdowns. Filmed solo at his keyboard, just as in the videos which rocketed him to early YouTube fame as a 16-year-old in 2006, Burnham assumes the voice of the internet as that of an ominous carnival barker. He beckons with a familiar cacophony of contextless stimuli – “Here’s a tip for straining pasta / here’s a nine-year-old who died” – as the song’s tempo steadily increases into a frenzy. Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime, he says in the refrain – welcome to an internet brain, when the world outside gets stripped away.

Related: Bo Burnham: Inside review – this is a claustrophobic masterpiece

The label “comedy special” doesn’t really describe Inside, an hour-and-a-half collection of songs, bits, monologues and meta footage of Burnham filming in his attic room whose cohesion splinters and spirals along with his depression over the course of a year. It’s intensely personal, with Burnham – or, at least, his onscreen avatar – growing pale and twitchy as his mental health reaches an “all-time low” heightened by the overwhelm of being a person online. It’s also the only piece of art about lockdown that I’ve actually enjoyed watching, as it captures something near-universal about the enervating, jittery, fractured experience of the last year, in which our digital lives far outpaced our IRL ones, at least for those fortunate enough to stay home.

Numerous screen projects have attempted to grapple with the collective trauma of the past year and arrived half-baked, myopic. But timing aside (Inside was released last month, as many US cities returned to pre-pandemic capacities), Burnham’s special feels, finally, like a compelling, discernible reflection. It’s set the bar for quarantine-processing TV/film, by burrowing deep into one person’s subjective, online-addled experience of 2020 – and, in the process, reflecting some semblance of what this year has done to our brains.

I have been skeptical, at best, of attempts to make sense of life after March 2020 through quick-response art. From the patchy New York Times short-fiction compilation The Decameron Project to Freeform’s unsettlingly clumsy series Love in the Time of Corona to Netflix’s admirable but flat anthology Social Distance, no piece of fiction has been able to make coherence out a time that felt both like a bizarre blip and an indecipherable eternity. Comedy that spiked during last summer’s supercharged online atmosphere has either landed on uneven streamer footing – Sarah Cooper’s Netflix special Everything’s Fine, Instagram Live breakout Ziwe’s eponymous talkshow on Showtime – or fizzled out.

Inside, however, gets as close as I can imagine something can to what last year felt like, at least for the privileged among us able to stay home, by riffing on some of the most popular genres of western internet content (twitch streaming, reaction videos, white women’s self-mythologizing Instagrams) and spelunking along its creator’s internet-fueled neuroses. The title refers to the attic room but also Burnham’s inner anxiety, and the digital funhouse of commerce, socialization and inescapable content that flattens everything, forgets nothing, and only churns faster.

Inside begins in a similar vein to Burnham’s earlier specials what. in 2013 and Make Happy in 2016, with a collection of deceptively well-produced, catchy songs that take aim at broad cultural targets, from moms’ inept FaceTiming to awkward sexting. But the final two-thirds devolve into heightened anxiety and deadening awareness of Burnham’s own online-exacerbated anxiety and amplified neuroses. In one bit, Burnham spoofs a common YouTube trope, reaction videos, with a cruel twist: his reaction to a short song becomes a nesting doll of instant reactions to his prior reactions, Burnham critiquing himself on four levels of performance – as accurate a depiction of my social brain calcified into a constant state of self-revision and anticipation of criticism that I’ve ever seen.

Related: Love in the Time of Corona: the pandemic TV drama none of us wanted

As the former New York Times columnist and attention economy expert Charlie Warzel pointed out in his newsletter Galaxy Brain, Burnham is the perfect messenger for this self-effacing anxiety as an internet-native performer whose fame just barely precedes the proliferation of our lives as both content consumers and semi-public producers online. Burnham’s public growth as a performer is singular; he stopped performing live comedy in 2015, after struggling with on-stage panic attacks, and turned to roles with more moderated feedback – acting, such as in Promising Young Woman, and directing the critically acclaimed drama Eighth Grade, one of the few films to appreciably capture the emotional world of social media for teens. But his internet experience – evidence of one’s cringeworthy growth, easily searchable and terminally on view, is now for many an everyday experience.

So much of the internet is duality that’s hard to square as it is, harder to square under the firehose of, as Burnham sings in Welcome to the Internet, “a little bit of everything, all of time”. Being online can feel at once expansive and claustrophobic, invigorating and deadening, inconceivably consequential and meaningless. It can crack open one’s world and, especially during a year in which most of our interactions were mediated by screens, flatten it into a cheap simulacrum. Inside is chock full of dread and dire exhaustion (“total disassociation, fully out your mind / Googling derealization, hating what you find”, he sings in That Funny Feeling) but not moralism – it’s boring to decry people for using the digital tools available, far more compelling to dig into someone’s anxious stew of feelings about it all.

Inside offers no broad statements, no mention of the pandemic by name, no bromides about coming together, just a trip down the rabbit hole of isolation for one performer during the last year. It’s an anguished, ambivalent journey whose intense self-focus gives viewers license to trace their own emotional splinters from a year inside, and to see more clearly its toll.