Watched Bo Burnham: Inside. It was pretty good, and I encourage others to watch it, but this part bugged me. It bugged me because of how spineless and trite it is, and maybe that's the point. A visibly aged Bo watches his younger self with contemptuous disinterest. When his younger self launches into talking about how he's experienced others kill themselves, he distracts himself and looks at his phone and only looks back up upon hearing, "if I could kill myself." Every subtle look on his face conveys a bewildered and dismissive message in response, as if to say, "Really? You think this is going to change anyone's mind?" It's a very good visual metaphor and conveys the the sort of internal turbulence someone feeling those emotions expresses.
What bothered me was that it gave none of those raw, nihilistic sentiments about living a voice. The film was and is ostensibly about the experience of isolation and alienation from meaningful human interaction. The extent to which those ideas were raised was forced into the narrow band of "acceptable in polite society" critiques: "Hey guys, my mental health is really bad right now.", "I want to die.", "I want to put a bullet in my head." Nothing vulgar or backed by any emotion other than brief, terse little one-off statements that give no insight into their thoughts. The "I want to put a bullet in my head" comment immediately preceded this scene, but that emotion was immediately defused by a smash cut into, "I just want to say for the record that I do not want to kill myself. I'm not going to kill myself. And if you're out there and you're struggling with suicidal thoughts and you want to be yourself, I just wanna tell you: don't. Okay? Can you not? Please? Just don't, alright? Fucking quit it with the... but, really, don't be yourself."
I think it really cheapened any resonance that the "mental health updates" throughout the film could have had. For context, this scene takes place about half way into the film, but additional mentions about Bo's mental health come up a few more times afterwards, and when the film ends, one of the end cards was the typical "If you or someone you know is struggling..." with a link to a website, as you can see in the video.
It's just... odd. It's a strange sort of self-censorship in a film that is immortalized and most well-known for the scene, "Welcome to the Internet" (
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