lancelil

(Backrooms SPOILERS)

The birds with broken necks — Clark, and Mary, and everyone else who keeps flying into that "locked" window, caught in their loops. Flying around the backrooms of our minds, looking for windows in a place with no windows. (Ruminating is the loop. We cannot ruminate our ways out of our minds.)

Clark, when he approaches Mary saying "it's just me. You know me. This is for your own good" and then suffocating her — a parallel to her mother, who did what she did out of love, whom child Mary trusted because she knew her, and whom suffocated Mary in her own way.

Clark giving in to the path of least resistance, because it is "comfortable and familiar", still hurts but it is known so it is safe, being consumed by the persona he has decided to accept (his current life) — that last bit of dream, hope, want for better, the trying part, killed. To say "I'm just wired this way" is easy, is blameless. Having to do our work, to want and still have to fail and keep wanting to try after hurts. No one else can do this for us.

The Remembered People and their symbolism for our memories and how malleable they are, how we can grow comfortable with them if we spend too much time making them do and say what we want, changing memories and running through scenarios and never having to bear the consequences of our choices — how we can subsist off them in artificial ways (Clark eating them) and fool ourselves into a false sense of contentment for a life we never lived/will live.

Mary, realizing through Clark's lost cause, that she cannot save everyone (her daughter. Her mother. Her patients.) and seeing the only way out is through taking that stone in her pocket, the weight she's been carrying, and smashing through that "window" (Clark's downfall in which she sees a potential version of herself reflected) of sorts.

"Not a harm to himself or to others." And she declared him not a hazard, not in an obvious way. But he was already gone. His dangerous behavior pulled in two innocents, through a power inbalance and false assurances, nothing forceful or outright threatening. A mind hazard that drew them in deeper, to a place where he knew danger lurked but did not care. He used them to lose himself further.

Using the persona to "heighten" himself to an inner sort of window? A sense of dissociating that allowed that dream, that hope part of him to continue pretending and feel free, while it deteriorated and ate up his real life.

Mary's end ... she came to peace with what she'd been carrying — or did she dissociate and lose herself in her mind, realizing there is no point now? Just on the cusp of that peace? Did she see what her mother meant? She ran from Clark's downfall, seeing herself in it, but did she make it? Was Async a metaphor for thinking you've found an open window, racing for the light at the end of the tunnel, only to find yourself in another room that simply has an extra lamp or two, slipping back into that loop, old habits? A guilty mind punishing you for seeking more, better. Healing? Is the trying worth it? Like ruminating for so long and finally thinking you've had a breakthrough, found the Big Answer, only to find you're writing the same goddamn journal entries a year later.

Why MRI machines? They show us what shouldn't be seen? Is it the radiation? In a way they're like overthinking, scanning and showing every little detail and allowing us to analyze and see what's wrong, to find a solution, but they don't actually do any of the fixing, the healing. Idk. "Async" is ironic too.

the cavemen cut outs. I need more time to think about this one there's thoughts but they're not coherent. Something something We don't remember ourselves something something are we us if we're remembered differently or is the memory us OR is it something about the memories of the earliest humans (primal fears and particular habits/"human nature") being "remembered" genetically and I've lost the plot I'll stop there lol but the concept of the standard not quite right caveman created en masse and used as... A lure? but speaking all those languages in all those voices — begs the question of what were they luring with human language? Modern language at that (I presume, I don't speak all those languages lol) and coming from that particular design of cutout.... I suppose it could be used for precisely what it did, luring other humans who had found their ways inside the backrooms, but the caveman usage. Was it supposed to be familiar, comforting?

(again, Backrooms SPOILERS)

An architect lost in the rooms of his mind and unable to build a life outside that — just poetic. And devastating. He can draught blueprint after blueprint of the floorplan of the backrooms and all he will have at the end of it is an unfinished map that feels like progress just because there's more lines.

No real lighting. Everything is artificial, from LEDs, to the warm yellow glow of nostalgic childhood lighting, to the dim Christmas tree lights; nothing can grow here, because nothing lives here. Memories aren't alive, they haunt.

Windows -> birds see the reflection and think it's open sky -> Clark mentions thinking the backrooms entrance is a mirror trick (I think he said double mirrors) -> he is flying into his own window, thinking it's an entrance/exit.

A little more on my previous "Async" being ironic comment: asynchronous, intellectually understanding the issue and answers but emotionally, mentally unable to bridge the gap, thus creating that hyper-self-aware agony; the asynchronocity of your mind being elsewhere while your body goes through the motions of daily life, or the asynchronocity of memories, never quite "right", incongruous with what actually was.