Though INSIDE takes place over the course of a year I feel that its progression follows a metaphorical 48-hour session. I’m not certain if anyone has mentioned this before.
This can be seen in a literal sense, with most of the scenes in the second half of the special being lit much more dimly than in the first half, but is specifically prominent in the thematic progression.
While most films and albums tend to have a playful first act/side, followed by a darker second act/side, INSIDE has a bit more nuance to it in my opinion. I’m going to break it down by scenes (again this is specifically in the metaphorical sense, but many of the scenes do visually match their day/night placement), and I hope you’ll let me know what you think.
Intro-HTWW (Morning): The start of the day promises opportunity, and likewise, the first few sequences feature a very optimistic, albeit sarcastic, tone. While some of the topics portrayed are dark, they are conveyed in a playful manner. This is really the last time in act 1 that we get a somewhat cohesive story before it turns into what can best be described as a clip show.
Brand-Knife (Afternoon): As mentioned previously, this segment features a bunch of sequences which aren’t connected in any way, a lot of them being very brief and (though in no way an insult) ultimately meaningless, such as Bezos I, Unpaid Intern, and Knife. Unlike the morning segment which featured interludes like Camera Test, Set-Up, and Plane which neatly strung each song together, there is no hand-holding in this segment; interlude scenes are now replaced with sketches and parodies. I feel that this is supposed to reflect the overwhelmingness of the afternoon. Around this time of day, most people will be active in social environments (like work or school) which expose them to social interactions that are mostly unmemorable.
LWIA-Problematic (Evening): “Look Who’s Inside Again” perfectly mirrors the calm and longing atmosphere of the evening. The way I see it, the evening is a very strange time of day. It’s not night yet, so you can’t head to sleep, but it’s also too late in the day to do work on anything meaningful. If you begin working on a project around evening, you won’t get very far on it before you have to go to sleep, so you’re stuck in this one or two hour long period of doing nothing meaningful. “Problematic” is a song about reflection on past mistakes, which feels thematically fitting for the end of the day.
30-Video Game (Midnight): Funnily enough, this matches the literal timeframe of 30 as well, which I personally feel is intentional. The second act of INSIDE starts off a lot more intimate and relaxed than act one. Don’t Wanna Know and Video Game are very ambient and gentle, so much so that I’d be willing to argue that a person could easily fall asleep to them. The intimacy associated with 12 AM comes from the fact that most other people are asleep around that time. At first, that notion is comforting, but as we see in INSIDE, that comfort turns to dread the longer the night goes on.
Sleep-Bezos II (Post-Midnight): Sleep, Shit, and All Time Low all have an eerie undertone to them. Even Video Game, which was apart of the midnight segment, ended in an off-putting manner when the instrumentals gradually pitched down once the in-game day ended. However, this dread reaches its climax in Welcome to the Internet (the 3:00 AM track in my opinion). I may be alone on this, but whenever Welcome to the Internet has come on in my watch-throughs of INSIDE, I’ve gotten this eerie feeling; the same one I get from watching a YouTube video with zero views; that feeling of watching something that feels like it shouldn’t have ever seen the light of day. Welcome to the Internet feels like a paranormal encounter. As for Bezos II, the harsh transition from immense dread to absurdity also fits the emotional shifts that everyone experiences later into the night.
Pirates-Funny Feeling (4:00 AM-ish): Very calm; serene. The hangover of the last segment. I don’t have much to say about this one.
AEOM (pre-sunrise): All Eyes On Me almost feels like a last stand here, as if it’s the final performance of the night. I’ve spent a lot of nights up until 6 recently. Funnily enough, it started because of a filming session which took from midnight till sunrise to complete. Therefore, I am familiar with the feeling of wanting to seize the night right as it’s about to reach its end. I can almost imagine Burnham’s desperation in All Eyes On Me to express himself before time runs out.
While I’ve had trouble deciphering the ending’s metaphorical day/night placement, I feel it most accurately represents another, give or take, 12 hours. The Packing Up segment seems to visually occur between the morning and afternoon, but because Goodbye shares the themes of intimacy associated with the night segment as well as some mild hopefulness associated with morning segments which likely places it somewhere in the early night, it is likely being insinuated that additional clean-up tasks (such as exporting the footage and moving back into his real home) are accomplished off-screen leading into the late evening.
As for the actual ending, it seems to fluctuate. It’s been said many times that INSIDE parallels the hero’s journey trope, where the protagonist returns to where they were at the start, a changed person. This is shown explicitly in the visual parallel between Burnham entering and exiting the room. The idea that INSIDE ends in the morning (the same place it started) reenforces this idea. However, Burnham’s exit is a fakeout, and not only does the final sequence take place at night in the literal sense, but it also harbors the dark and dreadful themes present in the night sequences.
So, overall, most of INSIDE seems to take place over a metaphorical 24-hour session, and is concluded with an epilogue that likely also 24-hours long, but condensed into a much shorter period of time. Or at least that’s the way I see it.
I’d love to know what everyone thinks!
