Father, Can’t You See I’m a White Woman’s Instagram?
A lot has been said about Inside, Bo Burnham’s musical comedy special that he wrote, shot, and edited by himself while in self-isolation in 2020. It garnered plenty of critical acclaim, all of which has been well-deserved. The topic of the film in general — degrading mental health and the role of internet culture in an increasingly bleak neoliberal hell — is pertinent to the discussions in our book. However, this time we’d like to take a look one particular piece called White Woman’s Instagram.
The piece is mostly hilarious, opening with a description of an idyllic scenery traditionally associated with calm, content pleasure before asking, “Is this heaven? Or is it just a white woman’s Instagram?”
Most of the piece is cropped to a 1:1 aspect ratio. It utilises a series of images in what is now mostly familiar to us as essential Instagram aesthetics — colours, poses, objects, and so on.
It’s easy to see this piece as something that simply makes fun of the shallow narcissism of white women on the internet. However, nearing the middle of the song, it does something different. The aspect ratio widens as we get the following somber lyrics:
Her favorite photo of her mom; the caption says, “I can’t believe it. It’s been a decade since you’ve been gone. Mama, I miss you. I miss sitting with you in the front yard. Still figuring out how to keep living without you. It’s got a little better, but it’s still hard. Mama, I got a job I love and my own apartment. Mama, I got a boyfriend, and I’m crazy about him. Your little girl didn’t do too bad. Mama, I love you, give a hug and kiss to Dad.”
The selfie child
One of the most famous cases of Freud is that of “The Burning Child”, which was relayed to him by one of his patients. A father who fell asleep at his child’s funeral dreamt of his child asking him, “Can’t you see I’m burning?” This prompted him to wake up, upon which he realises that the cloth on his child’s body in the next room has been caught on fire from a candle’s wick.
Freud, Lacan, and Žižek have all built upon the analysis on this case. In Event Horizon, we develop this analysis further in relation to the proliferation of the self-image on the internet — what we call “selfies” as an umbrella term (though not always strictly featuring self-portraits). While we would save the detailed development for the book, suffice it to say that we conclude the following: Selfies, while pleasurable, always come with a sense of not being recognised enough, or correctly, or as a complete person.
The guilt involved in the dream of the burning child — that the father is inadequate, and so on — is the same guilt we feel in regards to the social media Other: the recognition, likes, comments, and shares in social media is never enough to capture the full weight and complexity of our emotions and desires.
The dream and the waking moment both offer a respite. The dream, because the father gets to see the child again (Freud), and the waking moment, because the father escapes the true horror of his own desires in the dream (Lacan, Žižek). Likewise, selfies offer a twofold enjoyment. The post of the selfie itself, since we get to feel recognised, and the moment outside of the selfie, where we experience ourselves as something much more than what the internet knows.
Her favorite photo of her mom
The bridge in the middle of White Woman’s Instagram gives the song a lot more depth than it initially appears. While most writers will take the obvious route and criticise how shallow internet culture has become, Bo recognises that behind the apparent shallowness lurks the depth of a lived experience. Pain, hurt, vulnerability, and struggle are all there.
The white girl you think is shallow may still be dealing with the loss of her mother from a decade earlier. Getting a job, an apartment, and a boyfriend may seem like silly little accomplishments that a lot of people can achieve, but some people may be very proud of that in the memory of their parents.
The changing aspect ratio is significant. As the bridge plays, we move away from a picturesque 1:1. Our horizon widens to take a look at what used to be literally cropped outside of the frame.
This is how selfies — and Instagram streams, and other online posts relating to one’s life — function today. The important things always lie outside of the frame. Every selfie is a shout, “I’m more than this. Please recognise the complexity of my lived experience outside of this photo of myself.”
Database culture and whiteness
Another theme prevalent in the performance is how much coded and template-like Instagram culture has become, especially among white women. This is a perfect illustration of what we call, after Hiroki Azuma, database culture. Visuals used to express the self and other individuals increasingly come with their own grammar and aesthetics.
“Take apart, categorise, collect” is the motto of database culture. While Azuma analyses otaku as the most prevalent expression of this injuction, we argue that one can find it throughout internet-dominated media culture today. The instagram stream is no different. Visual aesthetics and hashtags are tools of identity expression. It implies participation in certain groups or micro-cultures.
As a non-binary person of colour, the aesthetics shown in White Woman’s Instagram is not exactly foreign to me. But Bo Burnham makes it quite clear that much of those aesthetics have been developed by white women. It thus makes for a fascinating discussion on how whiteness colours social media aesthetics, and in turn, how images of “heaven” are structured in the larger sphere of the internet.
If the grammar of visual expression is mostly developed by certain groups of people alone, then globally reinforced through social media algorithms, what does this say about the development of culture as we move forward? While this question is interesting to ponder in terms of whiteness, it can easily be argued, as we do in the book, that otaku structured much of the internet today.
But what about other genders, races, and ethnicities? Even as we develop our own aesthetics, will they ever become as mainstream as the aesthetics of a white woman’s Instagram?
Beyond selfies, into solidarity
This question becomes pertinent as we consider the self-expression of minority groups. While I personally did not touch upon trans issues in the book, I would like to add that the trans selfies brings with it a certain added weight. It co-opts the established grammar of selfies for a more defiant statement, “This is me. I’m pretty now although the world tells me I should not be. Please recognise me and my struggles in building this self-image outside of my assigned gender at birth.”
This applies to other minority groups as well. Fat people, people of colour, disabled people, people with eating disorders, and others with self-image issues can utilise selfies to empower themselves. Trans joy and other kinds of defiant joy is something to be celebrated.
We must remain critical of selfies and their potential for shallow, self-absorbed narcissism (and anxieties, self-hatred, etc). We must also be wary of all the bigotry contained in traditional notions of beauty and standards of visual aesthetics, as they are often infused with whiteness — not to mention of a certain class as well as physical and mental ability.
At the same time, we have to acknowledge that they can be empowering. The question is whether we take them at face value or if we are willing to look outside of the crop area and listen to the vulnerable voices on the margins. What we think of as heaven may just be a white woman’s Instagram — but what we see as someone’s Instagram may contain all the joys and sorrows upon which we can build solidarity.
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