Inside Inside's Inside: The Architecture of Bo Burnham's Inside.

Some spoilers for Inside. Highly recommend seeing it prior to reading this.

“I hope this special can, maybe, do for you what it’s done for me these last couple months. Which is, to distract me from wanting to put a bullet into my head with a gun.”

This is how Bo Burnham introduces the concept of his one room somber comedy special. While clearly joking at this early junction of his creative process, it foreshadows the mental toll this process takes on its creator. Bo’s manic metaphor about his descent into madness is enforced by the pure white insane asylum-esque room in which the special takes place.

The room itself is roughly 12’x30’ with a glossy wide plank floor (I’m terrible with wood grain so I’m not even going to guess the species), large wood base painted white, gypsum board walls painted off-white, and hard gypsum board ceiling painted white. Light fixtures are almost exclusively recessed can lights. All of the accent pieces are white, the ceiling fan is grey, and the wall mounted VRF also white. The back of the room features a small kitchen with a badly finished quarter circle opening. On the surface this room is extremely basic. It is the perfect canvas for spraying rays of light, or casting long shadows, or projecting a perfect wooded background to accompany your sad folk song.

However, upon closer inspection all of the imperfections are unnerving. The can lights are too close to the wall. The windows are on a single side of the room. The door is far to short to feel comfortable for the 6’ 5” Bo Burnham. The vaulted ceiling comes not to a point, but to a thick ridge beam. The VRF is placed oddly close to the dropped soffit (not to mention it should be far closer to the windows). I honestly have no idea what the true function of the building is, but a brushed nickel commercial door hardware? Something’s up Bo…

One room movies feature deep context clues in the built environment and other characters engaging beyond the focus. While Bo MUST film in a single room due to the pandemic, he uses both mystery and context to their full effect. The medium forces me to analyze (over analyze?) every single detail of the room trying to find meaning. I can’t say how many times I focused on the crack in the door, and whether the light beaming through was an intentional taunt of Outside or just a badly installed door.

Throughout the special its clear that Bo is slowly losing his hard won mental health due to the isolation of the pandemic lockdown. How can a white room express this feeling? With some incredible lighting techniques that completely allow the viewer to traverse their own imaginations. Trying to escape the mundanity of lockdown is a shared human experience that Inside perfectly interprets and mimics.

The metaphor is a function of the emotion of the lockdown and the room being a nothing allows us to apply any emotion we want to it. The room continues to get more and more depressing as the special advances in large part due to Bo’s own mental deterioration. At one point he is making a humorous yet heartfelt plea for the audience not to take our own lives only to then project this plea onto his own shirt, realizing he is speaking as much to himself as he is to us. As dark as this scene is, many of us can relate to the sadness brought on by isolation, and this only continues to get darker after this scene. Eventually Bo struggles to even repeat a monologue about how long he has been making the special only to get frustrated, break down, and give up. Finally, when Bo gets out of the Inside room, his panic attack returns as he struggles to get back Inside and away from the audience.

I love this special. It might be because I’m a tall, blonde, liberal white guy and somehow I can relate to Bo. Or it might be because this special perfectly reflects the manic emotions of the pandemic lockdowns. When we look back, I believe that this will be the greatest piece of pandemic related art that will ever be created, and the weird little room it was shot in was a perfect supporting role.