backrooms movie spoilers ahead!!
my favorite theme of the backrooms is how you percieve yourself to stay the same, even as you change.
the interpretation of the backrooms that I walked away with was that it is a manifestation of living memory. everything that exists in human minds will find its way into the backrooms. if you go deep enough, you will find things more perverted by the ruination of memory recall.
every time you remember something, you are not remembering the event that happened. you are remembering the last time you remembered it. and though you FEEL as though it is not changing, it does. it feels like a loop, but it is not.
if you describe a dog to someone, and have them draw it, it will be imperfect. if you give that drawing to someone else and say "recreate this drawing", it will be even more imperfect. but everyone thinks they are drawing a dog, participating in a loop, when it is a spiral.
clark thinks he is staying the same. he says with relief, "she says we don't have to change." to the horrific stagnation of himself. but the backrooms is not an infinite loop of consistency. it changes all the time. it changes with the memory of its inhabitants.
the memory of the hoarder house Mary was raised in, the furniture warping and sinking into the floor. piles of clothes appearing, disappearing, stacks of chairs and dressers moved with abandon.
the nature of memory, and therefore humanity's very perception of itself, is flawed. that's why the backrooms are imperfect.
they don't get everything, they can't copy the world above. it just hangs on to what it gets. it remembers the red hair, so it make the hair redder. it remembers clark's wild, fearful eyes, so it makes them bigger. it remembers the buttons on her jacket, so it adds more. it remembers how the clothes smelled, so it makes piles and piles of them, makes them reek.
do you have an old memory? maybe your very first memory. mine was of a huge storm outside the window, when i was four years old.
was the storm really that big? was the sky that dark? the window grew, gigantic in my memory. maybe because i was only four. maybe because every time i remember it, it gets bigger.
in the backrooms, that window i saw the storm out of has too many panes. out in the world, that window is real, a normal size. i would be disappointed if i saw it.
but in the backrooms, things look how you feel they would, after so many loops that aren't really loops, turns it into something monstrous and strange.
clark thinks he is not changing. he is comfortable in the memories. he is comfortable in the backrooms, because it doesn't want him to be an architect, to change himself for the better. it doesn't require him to strive to be a good husband, a good boss. it doesn't require him to be a father.
it wants him to stay, as it remembers him. it wants to remember him. it likes him, because he is on the loop, making the same choices, and he can't see that this loop is a spiral that leads to the oblivion of all memory, the absence that awaits everything alive.
when no one is alive to remember clark, the backrooms will forget him. his pirate hat will abstract into a wall until it's hidden under the wallpaper. the wide, fearful eyes might impose on something else's face, or maybe onto the seat of a chair. his hands will ripple and grow until they are not hands, because the backrooms doesn't know what hands look like, it's just remembering what hands look like after so many loops of abstraction that they're more like table legs than fingers.
also did anyone else notice that the man in the plaid shirt from the dinner party scene is the same furniture store competitor from big wayne's furniture barn commercial?
anyways loved the movie :)
