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posts from @pastellexists tagged #Inside (2021)

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thoughts post probably my third rewatch of Bo Burnham's Make Happy

Bo Burnham: Make Happy Review

“Thank you.
Goodnight.
I hope you’re happy.”

I’m not a Bo Burnham stan or anything, but it frustrates me how when Inside came out, everyone rightly saw it as one of the first great pieces of Pandemic Art. Everyone loved it, and everyone loved it so much that the internet does what it always does and turned it into a subject of mockery so that it wouldn’t, collectively, for a moment too long, have to be earnest.
Perhaps in a few months, liking Burnham’s work will be acceptable again if done with enough irony and detachment. Maybe in a few years we will again be able to love it honestly.
Make Happy is in my eyes a sort of proto-Inside. They both deal with artifice, with the nature of performance and social media. They both have a penultimate song that summarizes the core message and themes of the work where Burnham is bathed in blue light and his voice is significantly altered.
While I don’t think it’s as good as Inside, I think it’s pretty great. And the straightforward effectiveness of his speech about social media and performance is so well done, it’s almost a guiding document for me in some ways.

I wrote this at like 3am so it's mostly a rant about the internet's chronic sarcastic detachment with regards to Inside (2021) rather than the thing I was actually watching. I would like to add that I think there's some really cheap stuff in here that routinely doesn't land. The bit where he tricks the audience into saying the n-word isn't really funny at all and I don't know why he thought that was a good idea. People go after the bit where the song calls him a faggot a lot. Which is fair, I guess, but like. I think it's kinda funny. It makes me chuckle. I'm gay, I've been called a faggot as a slur and a threat, I'm cool with it. Whatever. So yeah, I like Bo Burnham's work, generally. I don't think it's cringe or whatever.

 
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