reflection

It's taken me so long to write this because I'm still mulling. I'm writing it anyway because I've lost faith I'll hear a microwave's *ding* and my thoughts will strut out of me, graceful and perfect.

For my 19th birthday, I flew to Boston to see Bo perform what. at the Wilbur Theatre. For the 15 years that he's floated his work out into the world, I've been craning to see it. It would be very easy but too simple for me to only laud him for this special, for me to write, "I'm happy to take whatever he'll give me" in 1,122 words. Truthfully, it feels nourishing to absorb Inside because my identity is tied in some small way to the impression Bo Burnham has left on the internet; similarly, people at the furthest reaches of my social circles send me bird videos or Legend of Zelda memes because I've broadcast these as markers of my personality. In a year that's been hellish, yes, I was very, very happy to see Inside, in the way I'm happy to eat lasagna.

Bo Burnham is one of the famous white men who's been warning us about famous white men; before his unsettling role in Promising Young Women (alongside other heartthrobs from the O.C., New Girl, and Veronica Mars), he was using his platform to highlight the exploitative nature of entertainment. Elevated and beautifully-lit during his shows, he'd quip about parasocial relationship, implore us not to think we have a shot at accurately humanizing him. Unfortunately for fans with attachment issues, this is honey. Making smart, vulnerable, personal work while begging your audience not to over-invest, over-identify, to instead think critically about their consumption and how their deepest feelings of resonance equate largely to brand loyalty... it's a mess. And we love a hot mess. A lot of the time, less thoughtfully or critically than we should.

This is all to say, I think the internet blowing up about Inside is similar to the grace I had for my crushes in high school. I deified them, cried over them, reached to understand and care for them because I wanted to be near their cultural capital. They had something, a glint that I thought was some unique aspect of their personhood, but that was often actually just the result of internalized sexism. I loved the special, but I absolutely understand the criticism that it was nothing new, that it was overhyped, that it's taking up more space than it ought to. It's always been the case that despite criticizing fame, the spotlight, the exorbitant cost of entertainment, Bo Burnham continues to step into this space, spend this money, and can rely on an enormous, adoring, eager audience. I imagine some part of him would be much happier performing in fringe festivals, but it's much too late now. He's been ferried to his current status level by fangirls like I was (now I am a fanwoman), and being unable to separate that out from organic merit must be a tough pill to swallow. But I'm sure he'll be okay.

While Bo is coasting unintentionally or otherwise on imbalanced updrafts, I usually trust that media reverberating this deeply also has a very powerful little kernel in it. Punchy songs about sexting and white women on Instagram faded into the background for me; he does 'catchy' and 'fun' very well, but the meat of the special in my mind is, sorry, the suffering, the complexity, the extremely skillful way he condenses and activates dynamics that are typically internal and almost entirely invisible (i.e: the Russian doll reaction video bit is the most obvious example, but this offering up of inner monologue is folded into the entire thing like a fucking puff pastry). This skill is what I most admire about his work. He is a clown, swinging between flippant chattiness and distraught silence; soft, spongey hope and hardened, vibrating hatred; and as he either slowly traces the steps or leaps between polarities he demonstrates the breadth of a psyche, the paradoxical, dialectic mess that's in my head, too.

I cannot say this special will be as valuable for everyone as it is for me because that would be absolutely bonkers, and because I know how closely I felt to almost all of what he included (though I won't be thirty for a year and a half). When Bo sang, "Is anybody out there, or am I all alone?" I cracked and cried for the rest of the special. In part because it felt like watching my friend, my crush, my colleague come apart at the seams, but also because he was drawing my own feelings of isolation out from under my liver or wherever they were hiding, clenched and dormant, and the cold air was bracing. Comedians can have so much power: Hannah Gadsby wields hers transparently. If you don't believe me (and even if you do, actually) make sure you watch both Nanette and Douglas. It was both comforting and deeply, deeply concerning to see that Bo and I are fretting wildly about more or less the same things, struggling in more or less the same way. It's harder to chalk the intensity of my anxiety up to individual mental health issues when it's so thoroughly, artfully demonstrated over the course of an hour and twenty-seven minutes.

I was left heavy when the Netflix logo and its resounding *bong bong* played on the monitor, and after I held my head in my hands, I went to tidy the house. In expressive arts therapy, 'aesthetic response' is a way of responding to something that's just been shared. Typically it involves the person who's just shared, or their work, or the imaginary world they've created through their sharing. I didn't realize until my house was mostly clean that I'd been engaged in aesthetic response, that what I most wanted was to quietly and gently coil his strewn cables, crack a window, boil some water for tea. Clear the air, warm the chest cavity, be with. It is not lost on me that these are things I also want.

I'm sure this isn't all of it, and rewatching what. a few days ago tipped me off to the fact that I have a lot of writing in me about Bo Burnham and Jungian psychology and clown. But, I think if you'd asked me my thoughts on the special and I said all this, I'd feel satisfied, so. I'll end it here. Thank you for reading. If you have thoughts and want to discuss, please know that I want to talk with you and that I'm tired a lot, but I want to find a time to do that. Big hugs.