‘Inside’ on Netflix and what fiction really means
Just because something is “real,” doesn’t mean it’s “true.”
I pondered this after being mightily impressed by comedian Bo Burnham’s new Netflix special, “Inside.” Burnham wrote, staged, and filmed 90 minutes of vignettes, sketches and musical numbers that add up to a sharp and funny commentary on what it’s like to “live” online, all filmed in a guest house cluttered with equipment.
Seeking out what others thought, I grew concerned that what some folks seem to most appreciate was Burnham’s dedication to the project, namely that he would lock himself in a cluttered guest house for a year alone to work on a special for Netflix.
The implication was that the authenticity and “reality” of the situation is what made Burnham’s art so meaningful.
I had the opposite reaction. Burnham hasn’t done interviews about the special, but I feel confident that highly successful comedian and filmmaker Bo Burnham maintained access to his much larger home and relationship partner of many years during the pandemic months. What we see in the special is a creative work meant to represent Burnham’s vision, not a literal rendering of a filmed experience.
This fact should disappoint nobody because lived experience should have no particular primacy when it comes to how we judge creations that aspire to art. Internet influencer Olivia Jade — she of the college admissions scandal — filming herself making a smoothie isn’t superior to Bo Burnham just because she really made and drank that smoothie.
The line between reality and fiction has been a source of recent exploration in the so-called autofiction genre, exemplified by writers such as Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard. The reader is meant to assume that what we’re reading happened as it’s rendered in the book, but is also fiction, nonetheless. This grounding in “reality” is meant to give the work more authority and authenticity, apparently.
One of my favorite books from last year, “No One is Talking About This” by Patricia Lockwood, has been classified as autofiction. Like Burnham’s special, it is also an exploration of what it is like to consume a firehose of “content” while also trying to live an authentic, meaningful life.
In the song, “Welcome to the Internet,” Burnham sings:
Could I interest you in everything / All of the time? / A little bit of everything / All of the time. / Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime / Anything and everything / All of the time.
The first half of “No One is Talking About This” covers Lockwood’s life as both a creator and consumer of anything and everything all of the time. The second half is a wrenching story of a family tragedy that Lockwood transforms into great beauty.
This transformation of content into art is Burnham’s subject as well. It is clear that he would like to shake up his audience with some truths about the world, but he is also aware that he is a comedian who became famous for singing risqué novelty songs in his bedroom and putting them on YouTube.
To insist that whatever is included in our fictional narratives must have happened is to miss out on the best part of art. “Inside” is an illusion. The tragedy that gripped Lockwood’s family happened for real, but it took a singular writer to transform it into such a powerful reading experience. No one should be disappointed if the exact events deviate from what we read or view, which is to say, I hope Bo Burnham spent the pandemic with the person he loved, rather than alone.
Good artists make stuff up, even when some of it really happened.
Especially if it really happened.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”