The Impotence of Being Earnest

What Bo Burnham's New Netflix Special Says about the Future of Pastoral Care

Content Warning: Adult language and mention of suicide.

On March 1, 2001, I turned 13 years old. That evening we visited my grandparents, who had recently installed a brand-new satellite TV package. To a kid who grew up without basic cable and only three grainy channels of local stations on which my younger sister and I could sometimes (if the wind was just right) pick up Saturday morning cartoons, the crystal-clear definition and seemingly infinite wellspring of entertainment streaming directly to the 26-inch television screen in my grandparents’ living room was a divinely ordained cosmic miracle, a luminous vision of the utopian future.

When we arrived, the latest installment of the new hit reality show Survivor: The Australian Outback was playing in the background. Near the end of the episode, one of the contestants fainted and fell face-first into a campfire, burning himself so badly that he had to be medically evacuated from the island by helicopter. The room suddenly got quiet as the family stopped talking to one another and turned instead to the drama unfolding on the screen. Later, on the way home, I overheard my parents casually talking about the show, and interjected my own unsolicited opinion.

“I’m glad he fell in the fire,” I said, adding defiantly, “That guy deserved it.”

My parents were appalled. “Why would you say that?” my dad scolded. “No one deserves something like that.”

The rebuke took me by surprise. After all, the Survivor contestant belonged to “the other team”. He was one of the “bad guys,” and I was rooting for the “good guys”. My underdeveloped prefrontal cortex failed to grasp the difference between a real, suffering human being and the “character” this person played on TV. Even before 9/11 revealed to us how frighteningly small the world had become, signs of a rapidly shifting social awareness were already beginning to emerge, blurring the lines between real lived experience and narrative manufactured for entertainment.

“Should I Be Joking at a Time Like This?”

In his recent genre-bending Netflix special, Inside, Bo Burnham wrestles with weighty topics familiar to most of us who have spent a good deal of our lives online: the growing potential for miscommunication in a mostly digital landscape; the constant “white noise” of critical commentary in which we are increasingly immersed; and the guilt that arises when our virtual past refuses to stay buried, and what that means for our capacity to learn and grow into emotionally mature and morally responsible adults; all set against the backdrop of a dystopian culture that promises us “a little bit of everything, all of the time”. The most compelling feature of the show, however, is the way Burnham perceptively contrasts sincerity and superficiality, the commodification of social justice by and for corporate interests, and the perverse marketing of “authenticity” for our collective amusement.

Burnham’s contrast between the sincere and the superficial is most visibly apparent in the way he plays with the screen format throughout his 90-minute performance. “White Woman’s Instagram,” for example, is filmed to give the impression that the audience is watching a square-framed Instagram post on their phone. A lampoon of the hackneyed aesthetic sensibility of the demographic named in the song’s title, Burnham pokes fun at the visual tropes commonly found on the popular social media platform:

Latte foam art, tiny pumpkins,
Fuzzy, comfy socks,
A coffee table made out of driftwood,
A bobblehead of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
A needlepoint of a fox…

At the midpoint of the song, however, the camera shot widens to full-screen, and the viewer is struck by a jarring moment of authenticity as Burnham adopts the persona of a woman in grief:

Her favorite photo of her mom—
The caption says:
“I can't believe it,
it's been a decade since you've been gone,
Mama, I miss you,
I miss sitting with you in the front yard,
still figuring out how to keep living without you.
It's got a little better, but it's still hard.
Mama, I got a job I love and my own apartment,
Mama, I got a boyfriend, and I'm crazy about him,
your little girl didn't do too bad,
Mama, I love you, give a hug and kiss to Dad.”

By the time the song reaches its climactic crescendo, the screen has returned to its familiar square-frame artifice, while a harmonizing Burnham triumphantly crows about “a goat-cheese salad,” “incredibly derivative political street art,” and “a dreamcatcher bought from Urban Outfitters.”

Similarly, “Problematic” is styled as an intense workout montage, shot in cinematic letterbox format with dramatic lighting that accentuates the absurdity of public moral performance. Throughout the song, Burnham begs someone else to hold him accountable for his mildly cringeworthy past behavior, like dressing up as Aladdin for Halloween as a teenager. Knowing the protocols of pop moral discourse, he first attempts to take responsibility for himself as a mature adult, acknowledging that his youth offers no excuse for his actions. When he realizes that his Aladdin costume is still in his mother’s attic, he makes up his mind to “burn it,” but then reconsiders the wisdom — or at least the optics — of disposing of the costume in such a way (“Is burning it bad? What should I do with it?”). By the end of “Problematic,” Burnham is still left with the lingering sense that he needs to apologize publicly for…well, something:

And I've been totally awful,
my closet is chock-full of stuff that is vaguely shitty —
All of it was perfectly lawful,
just not very thoughtful at all, and just really shitty.

This kind of ambivalence is woven throughout Burnham’s performance as he repeatedly looks outside himself for moral guidance (“What do I do?” he asks early on. “The world is so…fucked up.”). Burnham knows how his words and actions are likely to be received by others, but having this understanding somehow only makes the problem worse. The result is a human mind spinning out of control in a hall of mirrors, stuck in recursive loops of critical self-awareness:

Honestly, it’s a defense mechanism. I’m so worried that that criticism will be leveled against me that I level it against myself before anyone else can, and I think that “Oh, if I’m self-aware about being a douchebag, it’ll somehow make me less of a douchebag,” but it doesn’t. Self-awareness does not absolve anybody of anything. Am I balding? This is really, really disturbing. I don’t like looking at myself like this, and I want it to stop.

Burnham questions the power of “authenticity” when the rest of the world is drowning in noise — even co-opting sincerity itself for the sake of entertainment. His inner monologue vacillates between debilitating self-doubt (“Oh shit — should I be joking at a time like this?”) and frequent intrusions from a low, mechanically modulated voice representing Burnham’s ego, which finally bursts forth like Venus rising from the sea in the slow-burn vaporwave track, “All Eyes on Me”. His mental health having descended to an “ATL” (“That’s an ‘all-time low,’” he jokes, “not ‘Atlanta’”), Burnham’s manic ego eventually gives in to a depressive nihilism, inviting his audience to join him in a place where “everybody knows everybody”:

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've tried.
Got it? Good. Now get inside.

The heart of this song, which serves as Inside’s tragic climax, contains a dark and bitterly ironic personal revelation: In 2016, after suffering a series of debilitating panic attacks while performing onstage, Burnham retreated from stand-up comedy to focus on improving his mental health, only to reemerge and begin planning a return to the stage in January 2020 (“And then…the funniest thing happened,” Burnham understates, to a murmur of canned laughter from an invisible audience).

Although the past 18 months of lockdowns, protests, and widespread political and social upheaval clearly provide the immediate context for Burnham’s rapidly deteriorating mental health, he never explicitly mentions Covid-19. Yet somehow the omission feels entirely appropriate; the pandemic takes a backseat to the social and economic decay that existed long before public debates over vaccination and masking dominated the news cycle, before the first cases of the virus were ever reported. In this way, Inside touches a painful nerve, drawing attention to a shared wound that predates the pandemic: a profound grief over our inability to save us from ourselves.

“Get your fuckin’ hands up,” Burnham’s ego exhorts the audience. His demand is balanced by a softer second appeal: “Heads down, pray for me.” One is left with the unsettling impression that this is a more sincere request than it first appears.

The Kids Aren’t Alright

Inside retains just enough of a surface layer of playful silliness and gallows humor to warrant its label as a comedy. Beneath this superficial layer, however, runs a deep and sometimes violent emotional undercurrent of anxiety and existential dread that so many people under the age of 40 have come to take for granted as part of our daily lives.

The disturbing world that Burnham inhabits is one that is increasingly fragmented and shamelessly commodified, to the extent that even goodness and authenticity themselves become “products” that are packaged, priced, and mass-marketed for public consumption. For Christians with eyes to see and ears to hear, Inside represents a proverbial canary in the coal mine signifying a coming crisis in pastoral caregiving.

Burnham shares many of the most soul-crushing fears of Millennials and Zoomers: Lost in an exploitative world we didn’t create, but often burdened with a vague sense of guilt for our role in perpetuating it; simultaneously nostalgic for and disillusioned with the past (is it all that surprising that the only movies which seem to do well these days are either sequels, remakes, or the escapist fantasies of superhero blockbusters?); and most disturbingly, possessing a compelling vision of a better future, but lacking the resources and cultural capital to ensure that this positive vision bears any real fruit. Perhaps this is why suicide rates among the 18–34 age bracket climbed a shocking 35% between 2007 and 2017. Among those belonging to Gen Z, suicide is currently the second leading cause of death, having more than doubled in the same ten-year period.

In one especially striking scene, a flippant Bo stares into the camera while trying (poorly) to convince an unseen person not to kill themselves. In the process, however, he inadvertently makes the other’s emotional pain entirely about himself. The scene shifts, and suddenly this footage of Bo is projected onto the white t-shirt of a gaunt and visibly depressed Burnham several months later, who awkwardly checks his phone and stares blankly into the distance while his past self, stumbling through a list of trite platitudes, fails miserably to provide any real balm for his own suffering.

Inside radiates the kind of artistic brilliance that, as Ryan Lindsey has recently put it, is capable of offering a sensitive and alarmingly honest “diagnosis” of our contemporary age. The Church would do well to take this diagnosis extremely seriously — not because it presents an opportunity to attract more people to the Christian religion (this would be to participate in the kind of moral consumerism that Burnham rightly criticizes), but because the mission of the Church is to set people free from every form of bondage, to be Christ’s healing presence in a broken world, and to provide the kind of deep belonging and communal interdependence that mirrors the divine life of the Triune God. 

The sense of hopelessness that pervades Inside reveals a widespread and distressing search for mercy in a graceless world. Spiritual platitudes, no matter how earnest, are a poor defense against a culture of nihilism, and at the moment I’m not so sure that the Church in its current form is up to the challenge. But there is hope. The Gospel is nothing less than the proclamation of deliverance from our past and hope for our future, made possible by the Risen One who by the power of love draws us out of alienation and into a community of belonging. This and this alone will heal us — not better programming, catchier music, edgier pastors, or more informative workshops. The question, then, is whether the Church has the courageous humility to listen and learn from those who feel trapped inside prisons of their own making, to be honest and vulnerable enough to share with them our own broken hearts, as well.