Backrooms

“It’s like if you ask a person who’s never seen a dog to draw it. Sure they may get a few things right, but it won’t look right; the devil is in the details” (Paraphrasing obviously, I can’t remember the precise quote)  You can never experience the same moment twice. Backrooms is a staggeringly complex and profound movie about how no matter how much you try to dodge and shift blame, how much you try to escape how you are and what you’ve done, if you never change, your self-destruction habits will eat you alive. Clark talked about how he pushed the people around him away and made himself more and more alone. Clark views the world through the lens of people having jobs to do, martyring himself as some hero from being working for his wife and viewing his wife as a slothful and lazy monster for not working herself. He views people through the lens of object, they serve a purpose, usually towards his own self interests(Bobby and Kat were only useful to help him prove what he found, Mary is only “our therapist” and only serves to comfort him.) Birds are often attributed with Freedom or nature. Clark can only exist within this word of lifeless fluff because he cannot understand worth beyond it. The backrooms, in that sense, is this life of work he’s so fixated on. He runs around the same room in circles, noticing slight changes when he turns back, and yet he’s too afraid to meet what’s behind him(the creature) because he cannot truly accept who he is and how he needs to change. And so going back to the bird, the bird HAS to be dead, because the idea of anything else human, anything else like him is impossible for him to comprehend. People aren’t people to him, they’re just objects with a purpose that must serve that purpose or they are useless; they’re like furniture. And then we come back to the bird, and the lifeless people. The people in the backrooms are just distorted memories, a fractured, spoilt view of what once was. Clark tries to use the people as he uses his memories. He tears them apart, breaks them down, to try and get two things from them: the blob of fluff(or whatever the stuff inside furniture is called) and the hair. If we zoom in on the fluff, it parallels back to the bird: white, almost alive and breathing in a way. Clark wants to find peace by finding that fluff just as he goes back to the memory of the night he was thrown out. He wants something to bring him comfort, to fuel him, something that will give him a reason to avoid the responsibility and fact of the creature. He wants to escape himself, and the only way he can escape himself and escape facing himself is by consuming the idea that he isn’t the one who needs to change. He eats the fluff because it looks like the bird, like something true and natural, but it isn’t; it’s just a distorted lump of nothingness. Just like his own justifications. His wife being lazy isn’t a reason to hate the world, and it doesn’t justify who he is. Just like how the fluff will never be like the bird. He likes the backrooms because they are a distortion of life: in the backrooms, there’s nothing living, not really living, that can judge you. He can believe anything. Just like how he thinks if he keeps working as hard as he works then he won’t have to face who he is. But when push comes to shove, you reach a crossroads. You can either keep playing the role of the victim, blaming everything around you and hating everything around you and using that as justification to never leave the backrooms, or that dead end job he lives, or you can face what you are and change. Clark decides he doesn’t need to change, so his own self-destructive nature eats him alive, and in the end there’s nothing of him left but a distorted, broken, crying, desperate piece of furniture. A shell of a man, whose own self-destruction, whose own choices that tore him apart, ultimately make him unable to escape the backrooms.  And then we come to Mary. While not as overtly self-destructive as Clark, Mary’s collapse comes instead from her desperate attempt to cling on to the memories of what was; the handprint on the concrete, her mother in the flashbacks and in a way Clark too. While Clark is so focused on running in life, Mary can’t help but linger. Time moves on, yet she can’t help but cling on to what was. The memory of her mother before she got dementia is kept alive to Mary through the concrete brick, and yet in nearly all of Mary’s memories there’s that falling debris. The beginning of construction, something new over what was. Everything made new, swept clean. She can’t handle it, partially because of how her mother lost her memories and lost herself, Mary can’t handle it, she can’t handle the idea of the past slipping from her fingers, it’s why she chooses to do the reenacting activity with Clark. She needs to keep this pure idea of the past alive, and yet the future breaks through. Clark and Mary are both obsessed with the past, but while Clark is obsessed with the past being what he imagines it as, Mary is obsessed with the past remaining. Ultimately, in the end, the only way she’s able to escape the monster is with the rock. She needs to find peace in the fact that the past has left, and that’s the only way she can live on.