Feedback Friday: 'Bo Burnham: Inside' might be 2021's best movie, if it's a movie (Patreon)

In an effort to streamline the podcast and encourage a little more conversation around some of the feedback letters we receive, we're putting some of them here and responding to them individually. This week, listener Mattie suggests an overlooked outlier in the conversation about the best films of 2021. They write:

Hi, Next Picture Show. My number one film of 2021 is Bo Burnham: Inside, and honestly, there isn’t any close competition.

It seems to me like Inside has been overlooked by film critics in year end, not because it isn’t an incredible piece of filmmaking, but because people have no idea whether to classify it as a film in the first place.

Which is one of the joys of experiencing it! It’s part Youtube vlog, part verite portrayal of life during a global pandemic, part political documentary about the collapse of the American empire, part musical sex romp, and part Lynchian nightmare. It declares itself “content” while delivering some of the most exciting “art” I’ve seen in years.

More than anything else I’ve seen this year, Burnham pushed the medium of the moving image (whether it’s labeled cinema, film, TV, streaming, or content) into new territory with a film that wouldn’t have been technologically possible even a few years ago. Despite the dystopian post-apocalyptic vision of the present that Inside presents, it left me excited for the future of filmmaking.

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Genevieve says:

Having recommended Inside as a Your Next Picture Show pick when it came out, combined with my well-documented contempt for the sanctity of year-end list-making, I feel best equipped to take on this letter. And while I'm tempted to declare that, yes, Inside is definitely a film, just to make Scott's head explode, I can't quite get there, in part due to Burnham himself calling the whole endeavor a "content."

Yes, that's meant self-deprecatingly, but it also speaks to the strange place we're at with these sort of distinctions. If we can declare the television miniseries Twin Peaks: The Return one of the best films of the decade, we have to acknowledge that the lines between film, television, and feature-length content are getting blurrier year after year, and gatekeeping what is and isn’t a film is an increasingly outdated endeavor.

(I can't help thinking of Tasha's new-ish role as Film and Streaming Editor over at Polygon, a title that acknowledges streaming as its own space in the media landscape, one that overlaps greatly with both film and TV, yes, but also provides a new bucket in which to catch all these in-between whatsits.)

All that said, I think there is a more straightforward explanation for what Inside is: a comedy special. Yes, it’s more unconventional and formally ambitious than most of what we’re used to seeing under Netflix’s Comedy Specials banner, but Burnham’s always been an unconventional stand-up. His comedy career was built on a foundation of funny songs and videos uploaded to YouTube, and in that context, Inside feels like a return to “first principles,” as Scott would call it, viewed through the lens of Burnham’s own evolution as both a comedian and filmmaker. (Eighth Grade: definitely a film.) It’s a long-form extrapolation of Burnham’s approach to comedy the same way a more traditional comedy special is an extrapolation of a stand-up’s “tight five.”

Which leads us back around to the heart of the original question: can a truly great auteurist feature-length comedy special be considered a film, for list-making purposes or otherwise? Having recommended Inside as well as other comedy specials for Your Next Picture Show over the years, I’m personally of the mind that they’re at least film-adjacent, and can certainly be discussed and analyzed using tools of film criticism as well as comedy criticism (which is a whole other beast). Very few rise to that level, though, and if nothing else, Inside is valuable for the way it challenges film critics to consider it as such.

On the other hand, the aforementioned blurring of formal boundaries makes annual list-making an increasingly difficult endeavor, especially for those attempting some semblance of completism when assembling theirs, so I understand the impulse to reclassify something like Inside to keep from sliding down that slippery slope — especially when there is already a more obvious, fitting classification of “comedy special” that can populate its own year-end lists. At the same time, I think a willingness to consider Inside a film illustrates an open-mindedness about art and how we talk about it that’s admirable and perhaps even necessary as the plates of culture shift beneath us, and for that, I salute you, Mattie.