Well… Well… Look who’s inside again…

I’ll get this part out of the way first, and talk about how Inside has changed my life and my perspective on creating art.

Film was never particularly special to me. I even worked at a movie theater for a time, and the most I thought of involving myself would be to one day write a score to a film, but even so, my focus was on video games if I wanted to pursue writing scores for media. That all changed when I watched Inside.

I was absolutely floored to see what could be accomplished by just one person who simply took the time to create something beautiful and unique, with equipment that any normal person could get their hands on. It made the prospect of filmmaking tangible and exciting for me in a way I hadn’t experienced since I really got serious about music when I was in eighth grade.

The cinematography with the lights and makeshift aesthetic was like crack for my eyes. His versatility and the use of a single setting for the entire special was superb, and my perspective on what could be achieved by a single person was transformed. I’m sure he has some form of consultation along the way, but Inside is rightfully his.

I associated Bo with his live performances and to see his transition into film beautifully with Eighth Grade, and then Inside, something clicked for me, and my intrigue and passion for film was born.

But what is it about this special that makes it so incredible?

The first part that can’t be ignored is the context in which it was released. The special was released just as the world began to open up again after the pandemic, and life during this time was still very fresh in the public consciousness, and a special depicting a single character trying to cling to his sanity and entertain himself during is a feeling that we all related to during the pandemic. We see moments of great and overwhelming stride and vigor as depicted in “Bezos I” and moments of profound melancholy like in “That Funny Feeling” and we, the audience are laughing all the while. It was a special time that Bo had managed to capture, and I’m sure we’ll see other adaptations of that time period in the years to come, but I don’t think any will be able to match the authenticity of the special.

But the ingenious timing aside, I believe one of the things that makes Inside just that more incredible is how timeless it is despite how unique the circumstances were at the time of releasing it.

This isn’t a new talking point at all, but I think that this special acts as a window into what has been described as the “Epidemic of Loneliness”

Though the pandemic is long over, and people are back to their normal lives, inflation from that time notwithstanding, people are more isolated than ever, and I have a feeling that many of us who even do interact with other people on a regular basis are struggling to connect deeply with most, if not all of those people.

The special has a profound cynicism prevalent throughout the whole special. Particularly in the songs “That is How the World Works” and I even feel like the song “Sexting” is pretty cynical at its core. He even says it outright:

“Maybe flattening the entire subjective human experience into a lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody except a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley… Maybe that’s um… not good.”

It would have been really interesting to see what Bo would have come up with in the special if the ascension of AI had started, but this was just before ChatGPT had started to take off, but I think that plays even more into the timeless appeal of the special. Perhaps this is just the first trumpet of the apocalypse of human interaction and connection.

To wrap this up, I do think that this is, and will continue to be the defining artistic masterpiece of the 2020’s. Film is at quite a miserable slump now, but a few gems do poke through such as 2022’s The Whale. I believe that this decade is really going to be defined by the independent filmmakers, because Hollywood seems to be in a very risk-averse phase, and so independent filmmakers are like Bo here are where new waters are being explored.

I love Inside. It’s been out for almost 3 years now on Netflix, but it has stuck with me all the while. Outtakes and all. I still scour the internet for what Bo is doing next, but he has remained very elusive since the release of Inside, and more power to him for that.