another backrooms parallel i really like is how clark’s furniture store being a rip-off of another furniture store (i forgot the name but ykwim) is like how the backrooms is a rip-off of people’s memories. it’s fake, it’s wrong, and it’s so obviously a mockery of something solid and real. this is especially clear when clark’s insistence on refusing to change gets him eaten alive by the mascot that he ripped off of someone else. clark’s still life looks like clark if you squint and tilt your head, just like all the still lives (and the entire structure of the backrooms) look like something else through the faded lens of memory, but they are decidedly working against the real thing. clark is profiting off of another person’s business, he’s luring people in (not maliciously, but still definitely shadily) under the guise of looking like something familiar, just like the backrooms brought him comfort by bringing him back to a part of his life that he can’t let go of. just like he would have to change himself in order to escape the backrooms, or the cycle of traume he’s caught up in, he would have to overhaul his entire store in order to make it his own.
another thing is both the backrooms and cap’n clark’s are both bad rip-offs. they’re obvious, and it’s pointed out by multiple people. just like cap’n clark’s is a bland, tasteless imitation of the other furniture store, the backrooms is a soulless mimicry of real life settings that used to have feeling and emotion attached, with the only real appeal of them (and any other liminal space) being the nostalgia attached to it. but nostalgia is a perishable good, which ends up with cap’n clark’s being a failing business and the backrooms being an endless loop, both requiring it’s tenants to keep digging and digging, searching for another hit of the feeling instead of moving on and looking for something different. it’s easier to keep walking through the endless maze rather than to turn around and accept how lost you are, it’s easier to sleep inside of your unoriginal, failing business rather than to go home and apologize, and it’s easier to place blame on others rather than to take responsibility and change.
