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urn:nbn:it:unica-28297
Carmen Bonasera
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Between
Media studies
Estrangement, Performativity, and Empathy in Bo Burnham's <em>Inside</em> (2021)
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2022-05-31
2021-10-31
2022-05-31
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93-116
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Carmen Bonasera
2022/05/31
10.13125/2039-6597/4982
93
Ca' Foscari University of Venice
2039-6597
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Media studies
116
urn:nbn:it:unica-28297
Estrangement, Performativity, and Empathy in Bo Burnham's <em>Inside</em> (2021)
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/4982/5116
12
           Estrangement, Performativity,
           and Empathy in Bo Burnham’s
                   Inside (2021)

                                Carmen Bonasera

Abstract
      This paper aims at a critical analysis of comedian Bo Burnham’s Netflix
special Inside (2021) – a show filmed during the Covid-19 lockdown period –
in terms of defamiliarization techniques, and especially through the lens of
the Brechtian notion of Verfremdung. By resuming the main theories of es-
trangement, comparing Shklovsky’s ostranenie to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt,
and transposing them into the context of contemporary cinematic texts, the
analysis foregrounds instances of the V-effect in Inside, namely the ironic
exposure of the automatisms of contemporary society, the attention drawn
towards performativity, and the goal of encouraging viewers to adopt a
critical frame of mind. Despite the emotional detachment that Verfremdung
conventionally pursues, this essay explores the complex interplay between
estrangement and affective responses in the audience’s engagement with the
comedy special.

Keywords
   Bo Burnham; Verfremdung; Defamiliarization; Empathy; Performativity;
Media studies




Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/4982
Carmen Bonasera, Estrangement, Performativity, and Empathy in Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)




 Estrangement, Performativity, and
Empathy in Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)

                                 Carmen Bonasera



                  A strange year, viewed from Inside
      Since March 2020, one of the most pervasive concerns in the social and
cultural debate has been the question of how to decipher what happened
to humanity during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongo-
ing attempts to adjust to a radically changed global scenario. As ordinary
people were striving to adapt to the so-called ‘new normal’, numerous art-
ists attempted to process the collective trauma of the 2020 lockdown, either
seeking comfort in rediscovering works from the tradition that could make
sense of the feeling of isolation, or through original creative works of fiction
and non-fiction1. Nevertheless, especially with regards to visual arts and
the media, no project has been as successful and ‘strangely’ relatable as the
award-winning comedy special Inside, released on the Netflix platform on
30th May 2021, to the point that enthusiastic reviewers have considered it
as «the pandemic’s wildest gift to comedy» (Logan 2021), as «captur[ing]
our Zeitgeist perfectly» (Klein 2021), and as ultimately «set[ting] the bar
for quarantine art» (Horton 2021).
       Inside is, in many ways, an odd entertainment product. It is not a typ-
ical stand-up comedy show, because it is not a recorded live performance
on a stage; rather, it is a work of creative non-fiction about the making of a
comedy special; in a sense, it could be understood as a poioumenon – a type
of postmodern meta-work in which «the central strand of the action pur-
ports to be the work’s own composition [...] to explore the boundaries of
fiction and reality – the limits of narrative truth» (Fowler 1987: 372). Inside
was written, directed, performed, filmed, and edited by US comedian Bo


     1
       Popular examples include Zadie Smith’s essay collection Intimations, and
the collective online reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient
Mariner commissioned by the University of Plymouth.


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Burnham2 alone, without any crew or audience. Filming and editing are
said to have taken place in the same single-room apartment, over the course
of a year during Covid-19 lockdowns. Moreover, the label ‘comedy special’
does not really grasp the nature and format of this experimental product
that incorporates a variety of artforms, including skilfully choreographed
musical bits, stand-up comedy monologues, and metacommentary, to the
extent that it was even dubbed as «a claustrophobic masterpiece [...] a com-
edy Gesamtkunstwerk» (Logan 2021).
      Inside portrays a year in the life of a thirty-year-old comedian strug-
gling to assemble a show in order to make use of the amount of free time
offered by the Covid-19 lockdown started in early 2020 and as a means of
«healing the world with comedy» – as Burnham ironically claims to be his
mission. Nevertheless, it rapidly becomes clear that the title has a double
meaning: being confined inside a room unable to exit, and inside one’s own
troubled mind. The ninety-minute show is a vertiginous collection of care-
fully constructed musical tableaux, comedy sketches, sharp monologues
on the vanity of mundane Internet life, and meta footage of Burnham film-
ing in his studio apartment, with increasingly impressive montage, sound,
and lighting effects. After an opening series of numbers that mainly target
the society’s over-reliance on the Internet and day-to-day life in lockdown,
the logic of the narrative progressively loses its cohesion and spirals into
a whirling depressive rabbit hole. Halfway through the show, Burnham
turns thirty, and his mental health seems to dramatically decline, while the
tone of his commentary shifts to a bleaker shade of confessionalism and
the sketches jump frantically from silent grievance to manic performances,
mirroring his feelings of disassociation.
      Although in a bizarre and unsettling way, Burnham’s special encom-
passes the spectrum of feelings that the experience of lockdown brought
about at a global level, at least for the generation of millennials that his
comedy typically addresses: loneliness, frustration, forced introspection,
attempts to seek comfort in vacuous virtual exchanges with other people.
As much as the experiences depicted felt familiar and relatable to viewers,
the erratic style of this work of art – with its confessional moments inter-


    2
       Robert Pickering “Bo” Burnham (b. 1990) is a Massachusetts-born stand-
up comedian, musician, actor, and filmmaker. He began his career in the early
2000s as a YouTuber and became a widely successful stand-up comedian until
2016, when he took a hiatus for mental health reasons and pursued a career in
filmmaking.


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Carmen Bonasera, Estrangement, Performativity, and Empathy in Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)



rupted by the comedian who foregrounds the active creation of his perfor-
mance – suggests that perhaps for the entertainer the only way to make
sense of this unprecedented experience was to ‘make it strange.’
      This rather tempting wordplay serves the purposes of a broader reflec-
tion into the nature and the boundaries of the work of art in the 21st centu-
ry. In particular, the present essay aims at extending the conceptualization
of estrangement – as intended by two influential but divergent trends,
embodied by formalist theorist Victor Shklovsky and by epic theatre theo-
rist and playwright Bertolt Brecht – to the domain of contemporary media
artforms. To this aim, the essay explores the effects that multiple strategies
of defamiliarization have on contemporary audiences. Especially drawing
on the Brechtian concept of Verfremdungseffekt (V-effect) and on the debate
over its affective impact on the audience, I argue that a number of features
foregrounded in Inside exemplify a contemporary take on the V-effect, rais-
ing not only critical questions, but also paving the way for potential iden-
tification and empathy with the character’s situation.
      Despite the popularity of defamiliarization in literary and aesthetic
studies, few attempts have been made to investigate its interplay with af-
fective dynamics3. Most contributions have taken into consideration Shk-
lovsky’s theory with regards to literary texts, while Brechtian Verfremdung
has long been viewed as opposed to (and opposing) emotional engagement
and empathy; very few studies have tried to overcome this dichotomy4.
While maintaining that defamiliarization in film is not a stable concept,
as it entails not only critical detachment, but also an openness to affective
reactions, I propose to engage in the analysis of Inside as a contemporary
multimedia space for the interplay of estrangement and affect.




     3
        Notable contributions mainly involve empirical approaches; cf., e.g., Mi-
all - Kuiken 1994, Bohrn et al. 2012, Caracciolo 2014, and Koopman - Hakemulder
2015.
      4
        Cf. Douglas Robinson’s (2008) proposal of a ‘somatics’ of literature to by-
pass the opposition between estrangement and empathy, and Carl Plantinga’s
(2018) reappraisal of Brecht’s theories for an ethics of immersion and engage-
ment in film.


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    Ostranenie and Verfremdung from Theory to Practice

              A Starting Point: Shklovsky’s Ostranenie
       Disguised under several labels that pertain to different cultural and
critical traditions, the notion of estrangement has inhabited the field of
aesthetic studies for over a century since Victor Shklovsky’s pioneering
writings on ostranenie (‘making strange’) in “Art as Technique” (1917). As
is well known, Shklovsky’s early theory considered the function of art as
lying not in the mimetic representation of narrative content, but rather in
the defamiliarization of both its subject and of the artistic devices. Devi-
ating from conventional forms of representation, ostranenie is regarded as
the instrument through which art is able to «recover the sensation of life;
[...] to make one feel things, to make the stone stony» (Shklovsky 1965: 12).
By making things strange, i.e., by not calling a thing or event by its name
but describing it «as if [we] were seeing it for the first time, [...] as if it were
happening for the first time» (ibid.: 13), art is able to de-automatize the
perception of the work. Consequently, readers whose perception was dis-
rupted are encouraged to develop a more sophisticated sense of awareness
of the represented object, as well as of the artistic device itself.
       During the 20th century, despite its paramount importance within for-
malist theories, the concept of estrangement has had an unsteady fortune.
Galin Tihanov (2005: 666) argues that it «has persisted in recent literary schol-
arship, despite the apparent wane in interest noticeable since the 1980s»,
observing that its fate in literary theory was «entwined with the curve of
interest in Russian Formalism» (ibid.), to the extent that ostranenie «came to
be considered by many a mere synecdoche of formalist aesthetics» (ibid.).
Svetlana Boym sees Shklovsky’s defamiliarization as a turning point in the
beginning of a new literary theory, but, similarly to Tihanov, she argues
that «by the 1970s, the theory that had once promised to foster a new artistic
vision of the world was considered by many to be outmoded» (Boym 2005:
581). As a matter of fact, in discussing the fate of ostranenie in the late 20th
century, Boym argues that it came to be considered as «too unsystematic for
structuralism, too noncommittal for Marxist or post-structuralist criticism,
and inferior to the better-known Brechtian Verfremdung» (ibid.).
       One might ask what the legacy of the theory of estrangement may
be today, a century after Shklovsky’s foundational writings. Despite its
decline in theoretical interest, the notion found a prolific field of scrutiny
in film and, by extension, in media studies, as it was regarded, after all, as a


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Carmen Bonasera, Estrangement, Performativity, and Empathy in Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)



«general aesthetic principle» (Kessler 2010: 61) since its inception. The con-
cept has been pivotal in the acknowledgement of the inherent defamiliariz-
ing quality of movies, which are able to estrange the viewer’s perception of
reality by either showing it as it is, albeit in a way that widens the scope of
our individual senses, or by showing it in a different way from the one we
are used to, thus de-automatizing our perceptual systems (cf. Jullier 2010:
124). Furthermore, since the film industry is more rapidly evolving – es-
pecially in its techniques and technologies – than the literary medium, the
effectiveness of defamiliarizing strategies and devices is always challenged
by viewers getting used to certain cinematic styles and techniques, mak-
ing film an exceptionally intriguing perspective on defamiliarization. As a
result, estrangement has been recently re-functionalized to (re)evaluate its
historical relevance on early and avant-garde cinema (cf. Thompson 1981;
Thompson 1988), as well as to reassess its perceptual, experiential, and
cognitive impact (cf. Bordwell 1985; Jullier 2010; Tarnay 2010).

         Performing Estrangement: Brecht’s Verfremdung
      While the Shklovskian theory of estrangement exerted a significant
influence on film studies, for the purposes of this paper it seems more
appropriate to turn to its German cognate, Verfremdung5, because of its
inextricable bond with the domain of performative arts in which it was
first conceived. Due to its entanglement with issues of representation and
performativity, Verfremdung has long survived its creator in theatrical prac-
tices, to the extent that in the postmodern era its effects “can be felt almost
anywhere in the theatre” (Wright 1989: 90), an outcome that Brecht himself
had foreseen6. The influence of the V-effect spread to filmmaking (cf. Kot-
sourakis 2018) and cultural practices, becoming, as Peter Brooker claims,


     5
         Issues in translation of the concept of Verfremdung have been pivotal in
its critical reception, from Willett’s translation as ‘alienation’, which highlights
Marxist influences and relates Verfremdung to the Hegelian-Marxist notion of En-
tfremdung (Brecht 1964: 76), to its use as a German translation of the Russian
ostranenie (Brecht 1964: 99). For the sake of clarity, I have maintained a distinc-
tion between the original Russian and German terms. For thorough etymological
discussions on the several translations and their limits, cf. Robinson (2008: 173-5),
and Carney (2005: 15).
     6
         In fact, in a conversation related by Ernst Schumacher, Brecht comment-
ed: «Human nature knows how to adapt itself just as well as the rest of organic
matter. Man is even capable of regarding atomic war as something normal, so


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«so ubiquitous in modern advertising, feature films and television sit-coms
as to lose all artistic and political effect» (2006: 218).
      The circumstances that led to the genesis of Verfremdung – a term that
first appeared in the 1936 essay “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting”
(“Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst”) – are still a
disputed matter among scholars, especially with regards to the supposed
influence of Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement, an idea first proposed
by John Willett (Brecht 1964: 99)7. Whether or not there was a conscious
reappraisal of Shklovsky’s theory, indeed Verfremdung bears a strong re-
semblance to ostranenie. A play that deploys the V-effect is «a representa-
tion that alienates, [...] one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at
the same time makes it seem unfamiliar» (Brecht 1964: 192). In a striking
similarity to Shklovsky’s ‘making strange’ as de-automatizing the familiar,
Brecht argues that «to alienate an event or a character is simply to take8
what to the event or character is obvious, known, evident and produce
surprise and curiosity out of it» (Brecht 1961: 14). Therefore, the Verfrem-
dungseffekt

        consists in turning the object of which one is to be made aware,
     to which one’s attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary,
     familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and
     unexpected. (Brecht 1964: 143)

     Analogies of this kind obviously contribute to perpetuating the the-
ory of ostranenie as a major source for Brechtian Verfremdung. After all, as
Mitchell (1974: 74) points out, «[t]hat the same word was chosen cannot
be pure accident, for the term has similarities of implication», similarities
that mainly consist in viewing the role of art as «de-routinisation, de-au-
tomatisation: art is the enemy of habit; it renews, refreshes our perceptions;
by ‘making-strange’, it defamiliarises» (ibid.). To estrange the audience, the


why should he not be capable of dealing with an affair as small as the alienation
effect so that he does not need to open his eyes» (Schumacher 1974: 227-8).
     7
        For in-depth accounts of the arguments in favor of and in opposition to
the thesis of Shklovsky’s role in the conception of Verfremdung, cf. Mitchell 1974;
Ungvári 1979: 217-25; Tihanov 2005: 687-8; Robinson 2008: 169-72.
     8
        I find that the original German for ‘take’ [‘nehmen’] is best translated by
Keith Dickson as a «stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious qual-
ity» (1978: 241, my emphasis). The sense of uncovering allows for a semantic
analogy to Shklovsky’s notion of “laying bare” the device (Shklovsky 1965: 27).


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Carmen Bonasera, Estrangement, Performativity, and Empathy in Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)



actor performs expressing «his awareness of being watched», so that «the
audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an
event which is really taking place» (Brecht 1964: 92). In “Short Description
of a New Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienation Effect” (ibid.:
136-47), Brecht discussed and inventoried a number of acting and staging
techniques to achieve the V-effect, including: actors breaking the fourth wall
and directly addressing the audience; distancing from their characters’ feel-
ings and lines; displaying issues of set design, making visible the sources
of light, explaining scenes with intertitles, interrupting scenes and actions
with music, showcasing rehearsing practices, thereby showing the ‘behind
the scenes’ and emphasizing the artificiality of the staged performance;
and, finally, not proceeding in a linear way, but in a montage of «curves
and jumps» (ibid.: 37) that makes «the knots [...] easily noticed» (ibid.: 201).

                   Between Detachment and Empathy
       Ostranenie and Verfremdung differ significantly in their ultimate goals,
i.e., in the effects exerted on their respective audiences. While ostranenie
is an aesthetic notion that defamiliarizes perception, Brecht’s Verfremdung
entails social, political, and didactical repercussions, since it is determined
to trigger and enhance the spectators’ critical consciousness. In fact, albeit
with no reference to Shklovsky, Brecht rejected the view of estrangement as
a mere self-reflexive and formal act, unhampered by political implications,
by radicalizing the input of laying bare the device and speaking of his epic
theatre as «laying bare society’s causal network» (ibid.: 109). The V-effect
in Brecht’s epic theatre is thus used to «provoke an awareness of the indi-
vidual’s place in a concrete social narrative» (Brooker 2006: 210); to make
the audience conscious and critical not only of the artificiality of the staged
performance, but especially of the «historical aspect of a specific social sit-
uation» (Brecht 1964: 96), and of the many ideological contradictions, so
that they no longer appeared as unchangeable. As Fredric Jameson points
out, the V-effect would lead spectators to the realization that any current
state of things is not a natural given, but a product of historical processes:
«that the objects and institutions you thought to be natural were really only
historical: the result of change, they themselves henceforth become in their
turn changeable» (Jameson 1972: 58), thus fostering a proactive participa-
tion of the audience to their own experience of reality: «the theatre now
spreads the world in front of [the spectator] to take hold of and use for his
own good» (Brecht 1961: 15). Conversely, in terms of awakening readers
to political and social conditions, Shklovsky’s take on estrangement was


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more conservative9, since he saw ostranenie as aimed at revealing things «as
they are [...] not to change them or the social settings in which they occur»
(Tihanov 2005: 686).
      Therefore, Brecht envisioned a performance that would distance
spectators and urge them to ultimately question social conditions and is-
sues of representation, rather than to be captured by the vicissitudes and
feelings of the characters. In fact, he strongly refused to encourage mimet-
ic immersion and cathartic identification, which, according to his early
writings, would impede the spectators’ detached reasoning process and
distract them with feelings of anticipation, compassion, and empathy10.
Brecht distrusted affective responses because they would invite closeness
and absorption into the stage situation, making the spectator «a victim, so
to speak, of a hypnotic experience, [...] becoming completely ‘entangled’ in
what is going on» (Brecht 1964: 78).
      Nevertheless, Brecht’s «rejection of empathy» (ibid.: 145) and of the
viewers’ «self-identification with the protagonist’s feelings» (ibid.: 28), be-
came less radical overtime. Gradually, he began discarding the simplis-
tic duality between affective and critical engagement, a duality that was
evident in his schematic discussion of the polarized differences between
mimetic and epic theatre (cf. ibid.: 37). Brecht soon realized that such a
dichotomy would never hold: «it is not true, though it is sometimes sug-
gested, that epic theatre [...] proclaims the slogan: “Reason this side, Emo-
tion (feeling) that”. It by no means renounces emotion» (ibid.: 227). Rather,
to soften the radicalization of his earlier positions, he re-evaluated certain
types of emotions, particularly those toward which the spectator could de-
velop a critical approach as well.
      Therefore, a mature phase in Brecht’s thoughts on theatre encour-
aged empathy and identification, to the extent that he even wrote in his
diaries that the performance would resort to «two different methods [...]:


    9
        In fact, Carlo Ginzburg argues that Shklovsky did not sufficiently empha-
size the political implications of estrangement «as a delegitimizing device, op-
erating at every level – political, social, religious» (Ginzburg 1996: 18) to devoid
social and political structures of their power. On the contrary, delegitimization of
power structures through their estrangement is what lies at the core of Brecht’s
Verfremdung.
     10
        A major reason behind Brecht’s rejection of empathic effects was his belief
that they would transport the spectators into a state of mind susceptible of ideo-
logical indoctrination, while estrangement would challenge them to resist it (cf.
Koss 1997: 811; Robinson 2008: 206-12).


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Carmen Bonasera, Estrangement, Performativity, and Empathy in Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)



the technique of empathy and the technique of alienation» [die einfühlung-
stechnik und die verfremdungstechnik] (Brecht 1996: 131), leaving room for
theorists to positively reconsider the co-existence of critical judgement and
emotional responses11. The process of emotional and psychological projec-
tion usually conveyed by the German concept for empathy – Einfühlung12,
literally ‘feeling into’ – enters the dialogue with Verfremdung, also in light of
its «potentially uncomfortable destabilization of identity along the viewer’s
perceptual borders» (Koss 2006: 139). In Brechtian theatre, as Juliet Koss
argues, «whereas empathy, the ‘feeling-in’ to an object or performance,
overcomes distance by means of emotional transport, estrangement main-
tains the audience’s awareness of its distance from the artwork» (Koss 1997:
817). This pendulum-like oscillation between distance and closeness, this
«intermittent» (ibid.) experience of empathy lies at the core of the more so-
phisticated version of the V-effect in late Brechtian thought, and, I argue, it
is especially conveyed by our case study. The next section will delve into
the analysis of defamiliarizing techniques deployed by Bo Burnham, high-
lighting their interplay with more introspective moments that encourage
the audience into an affective identification with the character and his story.

           Verfremdung and Empathy: An analysis of Inside

                  Estrangement, Humor and Critique
     Inside opens with a static shot of a small white room with minimal
furniture and the door left ajar. After a few seconds, the door opens to a
flash of light, and Bo Burnham – a tall and gangly young man – enters,


      11
        For further perspectives on the compatibility between critical detachment
and emotional engagement with regards to literature cf. Robinson 2008; with re-
spect to cinema, cf. Plantinga 2018.
     12
        First theorized by art historian and philosopher Robert Vischer in 1873 in
order to describe the reception of art as a psychological projection of feelings into
an object, the concept was developed in Germany in the late 19th century, particu-
larly in the fields of aesthetics, psychology, and art history, offering «a forum for
abstract discussions of the active perceptual experience of the individual specta-
tor» (Koss 2006: 139). The term was then translated as ‘empathy’ by experimen-
tal psychologist E.B. Titchener in 1909, drawing on German psychologist and
philosopher Theodor Lipps’s theorization of Einfühlung as a process of «feeling
one’s way into» an art object or another person (cf. Keen 2007: 39).


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locking the door behind him. The image is interrupted by a black screen
signalling a head title, and then it fades to a closeup of a bearded, long-
haired Burnham, wearing an oversized t-shirt, sitting and looking down
in the dark. Spectators in 2021, still caught in the middle of the Covid-19
pandemic, will understand right away that the black screen separating the
opening scene from the following one stands for the time that has passed
between the beginning of the pandemic and the present moment. The lyr-
ics of “Content”, the opening song, say:

       If you’d have told me
       A year ago
       That I’d be locked inside of my home
       I would have told you
       A year ago
       Interesting, now leave me alone.
       Sorry that I look like a mess
       I booked a haircut
       But it got rescheduled

      Without even mentioning the words ‘pandemic’ or ‘Covid’, the song
not only explicitly refers to the lockdown experience, but immediately ap-
peals to viewers, as it draws on aspects that have become familiar to a glob-
al audience – the reference to the missed haircut is highly relatable. For the
purposes of this essay, this sequence can be seen as a first instance of how
Burnham’s performance invites the audience to recognize themselves in his
situation and to strangely resonate with it. Drawing upon Murray Smith’s
ideas on engaging fictional characters, Rita Felski introduced recognition
not only as «the most basic level of engagement» (Felski 2019: 100), but also
as a fundamental aspect of identification, for which «one recognizes one-
self in certain characters rather than in others [...]; an experience of coming
to know, of being struck by some kind of insight or realization» (ibid.: 101).
The viewers of Inside are therefore drawn into what Berys Gaut calls an
«epistemic identification» (Gaut 1999: 205) with the character, since they
share his knowledge about what is happening, and, in addition, they hap-
pen to be «stuck in the same epistemic situation» (ibid.: 211) as he is. The
song then goes on with a metareference to comedy writing that points at
the crafted nature of the artwork («I’m sitting down, writing jokes / Singing
silly songs»), while Burnham addresses the spectators («But look / I made
you some content / Daddy made you your favorite») and then he detaches
from the character he is playing by referring to himself by his birthname



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and in the third person («Robert’s been a little depressed»). Right from the
very beginning, then, the audience is drawn into an oscillation between the
relatability of the depressed Burnham in disarray, on the one hand, and the
estranging detachment that arises from emphasizing the crafted nature of
the work, on the other.
      As in his previous shows, throughout this special Burnham generally
performs stand-up monologues and sings irreverent songs, often with the
aid of auto-tuned vocals and sound effects. His lyrics aim at exposing the
inauthenticity of celebrity, the hypocrisy of capitalistic consumerist ide-
als, the vacuity of mass-mediated cultural subjects; meanwhile, he often
struggles with a performative identity increasingly split between confi-
dence and self-deprecation. Burnham’s ‘onstage’ character, in fact, oscil-
lates between the narcissistic and unapologetic millennial that sneers at
his own audience, and the self-aware comedian paralyzed by anxiety, who
feels compelled to draw attention to his own performativity to criticize the
consumer culture that forces him to deliver a fictional version of himself.
The absurdity of the caricatures of both personae often results in comedy.
Laughter is however disrupted by the growing distress arising from the
friction between the performative and the private identity, as well as from
Burnham’s attempt of subverting the same cultural and social identity
which he evidently belongs to.
      While it is unclear whether Burnham has any in-depth knowledge of
Brechtian theatre,13 the performances of this comedy special suggest a sig-
nificant use of aspects related to the V-effect, especially the interpolation
of monologues and musical numbers. As said before, music is a trademark
aspect of Burnham’s style. The use of catchy melodies and funny lyrics al-
lows him to attract the complacency of the audience, just before estranging
them with the witty twists in his song lyrics. The result of this conflict is
alienating, for the audience is placed in an uneasy position, unable to grasp
the real meaning of the performance, and thus forced to adopt a consciously
critical detachment. In addition, Burnham’s choice of bright and colorful
lights and of filming himself while he tests the equipment are further es-
tranging factors that point directly at the fabricated and rehearsed quality
of his performance. Furthermore, systematically allowing the audience to


      13
        According to some interviews, Burnham was admitted into New York
University’s School of the Arts to study experimental theatre but ended up de-
ferring his admission to pursue a career as a comedian (cf. Schulman 2018). Even
though he did not attend it, it is clear where his interests in performance arts lie.


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catch glimpses behind the scenes – by showing footage of himself editing
shots that we have just watched or monologuing about the progress of film-
ing – provides the work with a pretense of authenticity, which is, however,
just a pretense.
      Another technique to which Burnham heavily resorts is breaking the
fourth wall and explicitly addressing the audience. In ordinary live shows,
he would arrogantly deride the audience sitting in front of him in the the-
atre; in this situation, instead, he is forced to speak to the camera, the sole
audience of his monologues, thus making the address even more alien-
ating. After a couple of opening songs, he introduces the special, filming
himself through a mirror:

        Hi. Welcome to, uh, whatever this is. Uh, I’ve been working for the
     last couple of months, uh, testing this camera, and testing lights, and
     writing, and I’ve decided to, uh, try to make a new special. For real.
     Uh, it’s not gonna be a normal special because there’s no audience,
     and there’s no crew. It’s just me and my camera, and you and your
     screen. Uh, the way that... that our Lord intended. Uh... And the whole
     special will be... will be filmed in this, uh, room. And instead of being
     filmed in a single night, it will be filmed in uh, however long it takes
     to finish. I hope you, uh, enjoy it.

      The speech appears non-rehearsed, as if he were talking to his live
audience, while he is in fact talking to himself through two reflecting sur-
faces: the mirror and the camera lens. Self-reflexivity motifs recur through-
out the special, when Burnham projects his image on the wall or when he
stares at his old videos, and their significance is directly linked to his sense
of disassociation between subject and persona. Disassociation is paired
with estrangement in a sketch in which he parodies a ‘reaction video’, a
conventional form of YouTube content in which users comment and react
to somebody else’s videos. In this case, however, Burnham comments a
video of himself singing a jazzy song about being an «unpaid intern». The
criticism to the job market that allows for labor exploitation is however
promptly discarded when the video suddenly becomes in turn the subject
of a second-degree reaction video, giving rise to an absurd and narcissis-
tic nesting doll of multiple reactions to his prior reactions, much to the
viewers’ confusion. Moreover, the uncanniness of self-reflexivity is also
conveyed in a following sketch, where he lampoons the trope of the live
streaming videogame playthrough, while impersonating both the gamer
and the avatar. The setting and the scope of the fake videogame are his life



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Carmen Bonasera, Estrangement, Performativity, and Empathy in Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)



in lockdown, and the avatar’s mission objectives only consist in getting
up, playing the piano, and crying. Watching these sketches, viewers can
certainly feel discomfort at the uncanny redoubling of Burnham’s persona;
nevertheless, they are also able to relate to his loneliness and to recognize
themselves in the portrayal of alienation induced by lockdown, thus start-
ing to affectively engage with the character.
       The opening monologue ends by recalling another fundamental as-
pect in Brechtian theatre, i.e., the rejection of linear transitions from one
scene to another, in favor of a montage that highlights jumps and joints:
«And a warning. Uh, I can already sort of tell that this special is going to be
a little all over the place, so don’t expect incredibly smooth transi–». Here,
the montage suddenly jumps to the following scene, without a convention-
al transition; by doing this, Burnham explicitly foregrounds the metarefer-
ence to the construction of the work itself.
       To delve more deeply into the defamiliarization effect, Burnham plays
in explicit ways with the oscillation between alienating and attracting the
audience for the purposes of his social critique. In the first half of Inside,
in line with his earlier specials and live shows, he turns his ironic criti-
cism toward two habits that characterized the millennials’ experience of
lockdown, namely ‘FaceTiming’ and ‘sexting’. These practices, which have
recently become quasi-automatisms for Burnham’s generation, are ironi-
cally detailed, thus utterly defamiliarized, in two musical numbers. In both
cases, a relatable experience easily recognized by the targeted audience, is
de-automatized by its ironic and strangely detailed treatment, which urges
the spectator to unveil the absurdity that lies at its core. Much as in Brecht’s
Verfremdung, the viewers’ critical attention is awakened and mobilized into
acknowledging the faux connectivity that virtual exchanges promote, and
the frustration that they end up causing. However, these sketches are also
capable of fostering a further aspect of character identification as proposed
by Rita Felski, namely allegiance, i.e., progressively adhering to the same
ethical position as the character, «siding with a character and what we take
that character to stand for» (Felski 2019: 96).
       Estrangement for the purpose of social critique is at the core of “How
the World Works”, a musical sketch in which Burnham impersonates a
teacher addressing children in order to explain «how the world works».
While his character sings about the natural world, Socko, the sock puppet
that he is wearing on his hand, embarks on a cynical discussion about the
“actual” ways of the world, i.e., tackling issues of classism, capitalism, vi-
olence, power structures, politics, thus violently disrupting the framework
of the musical video for schoolchildren:


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       Don’t you know?
       The world is built with blood
       And genocide and exploitation
       The global network of capital
       Essentially functions
       To separate the worker
       From the means of production
       And the FBI killed Martin Luther King
       Private property’s inherently theft
       And neoliberal fascists
       Are destroying the left
       And every politician
       Every cop on the street
       Protects the interests
       Of the pedophilic corporate elite.

     Here, Burnham’s harsh criticism of capitalistic consumer culture,
which is a leitmotiv of his comedy specials, is rendered particularly un-
comfortable and alienating because of two main reasons. First, the sharp
contrast in the ironic «superimposition», as Linda Hutcheon (1985: 34)
would argue, between the contents of his lyrics, which unapologetically
express his criticism, and the two ridiculous frameworks that encompass
those lyrics: the cynical sock puppet and the didactical video for children.
A second reason is the cruel ending of the sequence, in which Socko is
humiliated for its impertinence in unmasking the complicity of Burnham’s
persona in the dynamics of white privilege:

        “I’m sorry, Socko. I was just trying to become a better person.”
        “Why do you rich fucking white people insist on seeing every
     socio-political conflict through the myopic lens of your own self-
     actualization?”

      The sock puppet is subjugated by Burnham, who attempts to take it
off his hand, much to the puppet’s terror, and reclaims his authority over
it, with an obvious undertone of slavery and dominance that cannot help
but exert an uncomfortable and estranging effect on the audience:

         “Watch your mouth, buddy. Remember who’s on whose hand here.
     [...] Are you gonna behave yourself?”
         “Yes.”
         “Yes, what?”
         “Yes, sir.”


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      After an intertitle signaling a fake intermission, the tone of the show
progressively shifts to a more introspective and claustrophobic descrip-
tion of Burnham’s anxieties. He directly addresses the audience, breaking
the fourth wall again, by asking for their attention («Do I have your atten-
tion? Yes or no? [...] Am I on the background? Are you on your phone?»).
While his performances turn toward his personal contradictions between
his ‘staged’ persona and his authentic self, the figure of this man trapped
in a tiny studio and living on cereal invites compassion, especially when
he sings about the existential dread of turning thirty and being lonely. But
Burnham never abandons the social critique. “Welcome to the Internet”
is a song in which he impersonates an imaginary Internet executive, who
exposes cheerfully and in a spasmodic musical crescendo the mayhem of
contents that can be found online, from pasta recipes to instructions on
how to build a bomb. Interpolated by high-pitched demonic laughter, the
chorus frantically repeats: «Could I interest you in everything / All of the
time? / Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime / Anything and every-
thing / All of the time». He emphasizes the polarization that the web and
social networks encourage («What would you prefer? / Would you like to
fight / For civil rights / Or tweet a racial slur? [...] / We got a million ways /
To engage.»), and his satire extends to the hypnotic force that digital tools
exert on youths («Insatiable you / Mommy let you use her iPad / You were
barely two / And it did all the things / We designed it to do / Now look at
you [...] Your time is now / Your inside’s out»), pointing sharply at the so-
ciety’s role in exploiting Internet addiction to media corporations’ profits.
As one can easily conclude, this musical number markedly evokes Brecht’s
approach to defamiliarization, by «turning the object of which one is to be
made aware [...] from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessi-
ble, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected» (Brecht 1964: 143),
for the purposes of enhancing the viewers’ critical consciousness of their
position in the social world and of the «historical aspect of a specific social
situation» (ibid.: 96). And, in 2021, nothing is more ordinary, familiar, and
immediately accessible than the Internet.

                    Seeking Empathy in the Spotlight
      Approaching the end, as Burnham’s mental health is visibly deterio-
rating and his appearance looks extremely unkempt, the special gradually
elicits the viewers’ compassion, shifting from mere relatability to empathic
arousal. “That Funny Feeling” is one of the most poignant examples of
Burnham’s distillation of both alienating the audience and attracting their


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emotional response. Playing an acoustic guitar with a projected campfire
behind him, he mentions all the polarized tensions that, as a generation
and culture, we are immersed in, i.e., the uncanny conflation between seri-
ous and vapid, existential and mundane:

       The whole world at your fingertips
       The ocean at your door
       The live-action Lion King
       The Pepsi halftime show
       Twenty thousand years of this
       Seven more to go [...]
       A gift shop at the gun range
       A mass shooting at the mall [...]
       A book on getting better
       Hand-delivered by a drone
       Total disassociation
       Fully out your mind
       Googling ‘derealization’
       Hating what you find
       That unapparent summer air
       In early fall
       The quiet comprehending
       Of the ending of it all.

      By juxtaposing the haunting climate crisis, terrorism and mental ill-
ness with cheap simulacra, trite catchphrases and useless cultural prod-
ucts, the spectator is drawn into experiencing “that funny feeling”, a mix
of alienation and relatability that activates not only the viewers’ awareness,
but also their potential for identification with the character. Nothing of
what Burnham mentions is new or shocking, especially to American view-
ers – on the contrary, they can recognize themselves and their day-to-day
life in these lyrics. Nevertheless, what results in a discomforting dialec-
tics between identification and alienation is Burnham’s historicizing and
photographing the strange coexistence of all these things together, in the
same globalized arena; a coexistence which, according to Burnham’s use of
estrangement, his audience must be aware of.
      Although diluted in an estranging framework, “That Funny Feeling”
promotes character identification and invites empathy. In film, the audi-
ence’s empathic response can be encouraged by the narrative and through
camera angles, perspective, music, and lights, which are able to foster
perceptual, affective, and epistemic identification with the characters’ por-


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Carmen Bonasera, Estrangement, Performativity, and Empathy in Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)



trayed situations (cf. Gaut 1999). While perceptual identification is hardly
achieved in Inside, as the camera rarely shares the character’s point of view,
performances like “That Funny Feeling” speak at the dire exhaustion that
highly resonates with the viewers’ everyday experiences and their epis-
temic frames, while simultaneously de-automatizing mundane contents
and delegitimizing haunting social issues.
      In Inside, affective identification is particularly invited as a response
to the character’s suffering and pain. As Berys Gaut (ibid.: 210) argues,
the visual evidence of a character suffering leads to affective identifica-
tion, even if viewers do not really share the same perspective. Similarly,
Suzanne Keen confirms that «empathic responses to fictional characters
and situations occur more readily for negative emotions, whether or not
a match in details of experience exists» (Keen 2007: xii). When, later on,
Burnham confesses his distress at finishing his work, he is actively inviting
affective identification. He tries to monologue about his progresses, but he
gets frustrated and starts again, over and over, to the point of bursting into
tears and knocking over his equipment, implicitly acknowledging that his
mission to «heal the world with comedy» has failed.
      Despite his distress, he ends up performing his climactic – and possi-
bly cathartic – music number, “All Eyes on Me”. This sequence opens with
the sound of a crowd cheering over instrumental ballad music, while the
camera that faces the mirror begins to zoom in; as the screen gets darker
and darker, viewers feel swallowed into the dark lens, as if they were final-
ly inside Burnham’s mind, while he acknowledges a strong empathic link
with his audience:

        I couldn’t have done this without you guys. I couldn’t, really. I…
      This last year has been… You know, there have been times that, um…
      But just knowing you’re here, you know, feeling you here with me. Um…
      Yeah, thank you. (my emphasis)

      The dark screen fades and reveals a disturbing closeup of Burnham’s
face as he looks away. The opening lyrics of “All Eyes on Me” recall con-
ventional crowd instructions («put your hands up», «get on out of your
seats»). While the soothing melody, the blue lights, and the closeup convey
intimacy, the viewers’ sense of safety is threatened by Burnham’s voice,
which is distorted – thus defamiliarized – to sound much deeper and
haunting than his normal pitch. As he addresses the audience, he suddenly
looks directly into the camera, resorting once again to breaking the fourth
wall, singing: «Are you feeling nervous? / Are you having fun? / [...] Don’t


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be scared, don’t be shy. / Come on in, the water’s fine». Viewers’ alienation
peaks while they realize that they have been addressed, watched, and
lured the entire time by Burnham’s performances. He resumes a stand-up
monologue framework («You want to hear a funny story?», he asks) and
starts explaining the reasons why he stopped performing live. In a confes-
sional – albeit ironic – tone, he says that he had been suffering from panic
attacks on stage, «which is not a great place to have them», he says in a
self-deprecating manner. With the intimacy favored by this monologue,
sympathy (to feel for someone) and empathy (to feel with someone) are
sharply elicited in their complex interplay; some viewers may feel con-
cerned for him and care about his situation, others may feel represented
on the grounds of a shared experience and empathize with him. Overall,
within the framework of a narrative that has constantly played back and
forth between alienation and identification, this characterizes as a major
emotional moment for both performer and audience. He says that his men-
tal health slowly improved to the extent that in January 2020 he decided to
come back to the stage, but then «the funniest thing happened» – the fun-
niest thing being, of course, the outburst of the pandemic. Once again, he
uses irony and defamiliarization for the purposes of making the audience
aware of the disruption that an unprecedented situation may have caused,
both globally and individually.
      He resumes his autotuned ballad, pointing at the unsettling global
situation and the problem of climate change, delegitimizing it with a pes-
simistic take that finally shows how mental health issues and depressive
thoughts can sink individuals into nihilism: «You say the ocean’s rising /
Like I give a shit / You say the whole world’s ending / Honey, it already did
/ You’re not gonna slow it / Heaven knows you tried / Got it? Good. Now
get inside». It is clear now that the haunting distortion in his voice symbol-
izes his depression and alienation, the true villains of this story. After some
other repetitions of «get your hands up», he addresses the viewers violent-
ly («Get up. I’m talking to you. Get the fuck up!»), as he walks towards the
camera, grabs it as if he were grabbing a person by the throat, and lifts it,
while obsessively repeating «All eyes on me, all eyes on me.» In the end,
it is all performance. The lockdown, climate change, media and Internet
simulacra, capitalist commodification, mental breakdowns, all bow down
to performance.
      The convergence of arrogance and self-loathing of Burnham’s two
personae finds expression in this disquieting musical number. As Judith
Butler (1999) famously argued with regards to gender, all actions that at-
tempt to define one’s identity actually function as performances of identity,


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rather than a reflection of an inherent, predetermined self, her argument
being that «there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed,’ but that the ‘doer’ is
variably constructed in and through the deed» (ibid.: 195). Burnham urges
his audience to be aware of the constructed nature of identity, as well as
of Internet-driven life, as he says at one point during the show: «the out-
side world, the non-digital world, is merely a theatrical space in which one
stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital digital
space». To this end, he is bound to split himself into two personae that
conflict through absurd, parodies and estrangement. Clearly, he struggles
with his complicity to the social system; similarly, the viewers struggle to
reconciliate, on the one hand, the portrayed emotional rollercoaster that
resonates with their experience of the pandemic, and, on the other, the
awareness that, as a celebrity, he certainly did not spend the lockdown
stranded in a tiny studio, and that he has just delivered a Netflix-distrib-
uted work that thrives in the boundaries and ambiguities of non-fiction.
Nevertheless, Burnham actively attempts to subvert the context in which
he is caught, pushing the audience to critically engage with his message
and with the limits of his performance, making viewers uncomfortable and
estranged, but also opening new spaces of interaction between performa-
tivity, estrangement, and empathy. In the end, a smiling Burnham watches
his special on the projector, maybe satisfied with his final product. His use
of Verfremdung cannot help but point at his own inescapable performative
nature, but, as the light cracks through the door at the end of the special,
thus bringing the story full circle, some emotional, intimate, and empa-
thy-seeking glimmers manage to shine through.




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                             Filmography
Inside, Dir. Bo Burnham, USA, 2021.



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Carmen Bonasera, Estrangement, Performativity, and Empathy in Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)



                                     The Author
      Carmen Bonasera

     Carmen Bonasera is postdoctoral research fellow in Literary Theory
at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca’
Foscari University of Venice. She holds a PhD in Theory of Literature and
Comparative Literature from the University of Pisa (2020). Her research in-
terests center on modern and contemporary literature, and they span from
gender studies and the relations between lyric theory and life writing, to
narrative empathy and empirical approaches to literary studies.

      Email: carmen.bonasera12@gmail.com



                                     The Article
      Date sent: 30/10/2021
      Date accepted: 31/03/2022
      Date published: 30/05/2022



                            How to cite this article
     Bonasera, Carmen, “Estrangement, Performativity, and Empathy in
Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)”, Straniamenti, Eds. S. Adamo - N. Scaffai - M.
Pusterla - D. Watkins, Between, XII.23 (2022): 93-116, www.betweenjournal.it




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