keep your voice down.

now, to some extent, I do agree with this. Yes, Clark as a character was not written to have a specific race. Yes, if he had been played by a different actor who was a different race, he’d still have the exact same lines, the exact same directing, the exact same clothing, the exact same beginning, middle, and end, the same character traits, the same fate, all of it. That is true! He COULD have been played by a man of any race. But he wasn’t.

It’s not as though Kane and everybody else involved with the movie intentionally made it have racial implications. They didn’t. But if you have a movie set in 1990 where the protagonist is a black man, you are inevitably going to have UNINTENDED implications no matter what. Sometimes these implications are good, sometimes they’re bad, sometimes they’re neither. I might not be properly articulating myself here, but I think that if your protagonist is a black man, that’s going to create implications about the way the world treats him and about the way the world expects him to be. Especially if his wife is a white woman whom he treats very poorly, and his therapist is also a white woman whom he treats very poorly, EVEN if you did not intend for it to be that way at all!

I’m not saying you can’t write a black character who is a bad person; every racial group should get nuanced portrayals from all across a morality spectrum. But what I am saying is that there are going to be racialized implications that would be different if the movie was redone, shot for shot, line for line, with a white guy instead of a black guy. (Side note, but we’d see different treatment in fandom, too; Clark would probably have a lot more people focusing on him and a lot more people excusing his actions/shipping him with mary than there already are)

I agree with this. I highly doubt there were any bad intentions behind Clark as a character, but as a black person, I couldn't help but notice that he could be seen as falling into negative stereotypes about black men.

Perhaps that was intentional to a degree. I've already since a post or two that intertwined his race with the narrative and how that could have interesting implications for Clark as a character.

we could've discussed how it wanted to be two different movies the whole time: one aesthetic-driven, classic analog found-footage horror, and a more introspective commentary on the themes of mental illness, oppression, and the ways we are unintentionally and intentionally caught up in their spirals. we could've discussed the themes of hyper-consumerism; how we discard the still-warm husks of our society as we endlessly chase after new and shinier things while discarding and disregarding the people that can't keep up. that could have never kept up due to how society is structured top-to-bottom to keep them down. even fucking- the series constantly touches on corporate greed and how corporations and governments constantly put innocent lives in danger to pursue the tiniest advantage over their competition. where was that? async was kinda just thrown around a little at the beginning and end with no further exploration. when you think about it, it wanted to be three movies. it wanted to be found-footage of what happens when a group of people stumble into the backrooms. it wanted to be an introspective and suspenseful thriller that meaningfully engaged with its themes. it wanted to be a commentary on the inherent horror of corporate greed. ultimately, it could not get away from its shallow roots in true aestheticism. it failed, but it still clearly wanted to be more.

but it's literally not even worth it to engage with it on these levels because ultimately parsons and soodik and whoever else was responsible for the choices made in this film made racist art. casting a Black actor and then refusing to analyze the script any further was a racist choice that ended in making a caricature out of the only Black character and was so disgusting and hateful to watch, that it completely ruined whatever goodwill i had left for the movie.

It’s a breath of fresh air to see a structured argument that goes more into detail as to how these potential issues of race could end up arising unintentionally in fan-spaces and how they could have been avoided, without ignoring that the film was always intended to be about psychological horror which it does well. Apparently the script was written in 2023 and casted in 2025, so I highly doubt they wrote this with the races of actors in mind.

You made a really good point about how we already find ways to consider how gender could be thematically significant without it being a sole focus of the film, and how there isn't really anything stopping race from joining the discussion, which hadn’t even occurred to me! But you’re right, people could easily pick into that. Like I said, confirmation bias is when people almost exclusively focus on information that reinforces already existing opinions. So there are probably going to be viewers who are already racist who watch the movie and completely look past the intended themes of memory and trauma and the nature of humans to become obsessed with what they don’t truly understand if it allows escapism, just to be all “See! Black man bad! I’m right to be bigoted!”

Plus, you made another good point in how depending on the time period the film is set in, Clark’s behaviour may be impacted by his race and being conscious of how he is perceived by a white therapist. Again, I study psychology, and there’s a massive emphasis on racial bias within psychology, especially in the diagnosis of disorders and how mental health is treated due to cultural differences that may arise from race even in households that aren’t immigrants. Which is even more reason that as a black man, Clark may have likely been more conscious about who he went to regarding his mental health like you said.

As much as the idea of casting actors based on their race when the film doesn’t consciously have that as a topic feels a bit off to me, I think you’re right that they could’ve avoided unintentionally portraying black people this way by having other black characters who didn’t spiral into aggression and cruel behaviour. This seems like an unfortunate case where the writers and director hadn’t considered the possible implications of having one black actor be the (turned) antagonist of the film.

Ideally that’s how it should be, casting people for who best understand a character when race isn't intended to be important to the media and audiences don’t think twice about a character who is personality and story first and racial/sexual/gender identity second, but we are still at a point in time where it does still matter, and people love to knit pick for justification of their views of other people.

Also, sorry for the yap session! I wanted to contribute to the conversation and bring up a few points in real life applied human psychology that your discussion reminded me of, how they could’ve been used to look at character behaviours in film and how we may see this confirmation bias appear in audiences when the film marinates for a bit or goes deeper into release. But I was scared of just typing a comment or reblogging since people on both sides of this debate seem really intense and eager to dogpile and behave aggressively towards others who disagree with them even slightly. Some notes under other posts have been ROUGH 😅

I appreciate the yapping, as a yapper myself. And thank you for this message.

I want to start off by saying I won't disparage anyone (and I'm not accusing you of doing this, anon) for not liking the film for a couple of the reasons I listed in that post (or more I missed or didn't add), considering the history the US has of depicting marginalized communities as inherently "bad" and "up to no good". Particularly the Black community. We should hold those to task who have the opportunity to shape or uphold the popular zeitgeist in culture. It can lead to or further enforce stereotypes (and confirmation biases, as you've pointed out) that can incite and inspire actions that cause harm. Because they have historically and presently.

More thoughts under the read more because we love reading and diving deeper because it is that deep.

Think about it for a second. The movie wouldn't change at all with the characters being different races, the race doesn't fucking matter in this situation. Why are you even making things about race in the first place? Doesn't that say more about you in the first place? Media literacy, much?

don't try and yell at me over media literacy when you yourself claim that race makes zero impact on this movie when it actually does. it is exactly as you say, they absolutely could've casted these roles as any race because theyre so 2 dimensional that it makes zero impact, so exactly why did they choose to cast a Black man into a role of an unfleshed out aggressive protagonist who turns into an antagonist? It is continously implied that he is some character with "deep backstory" by fans of the movie yet at most we get him roleplaying with his white therapist about him being verbally abusive towards his white ex-wife and him continously implying that he learned to push people away as a kid. the characters literally have a conversation where his white therapist tells him that he is incapable of taking the blame, something that as his therapist she should have told him sooner because its clear she already thought this but didn't tell him because she was scared of him, and that it is just the way he is wired and that he doesn't have to change. then, after delightfully accepting he is an angry Black man who is incapable of realizing when thingd are his fault, he gets killed by a caricature of himself who is played by a white man. Said caricature proceeds to chase after the white woman until she manages to escape him and then is saved from the backrooms by a bunch of white people in hazmat suits.

Explain to me how this movie is deep and complex. Because we get flashbacks where Mary, the white therapist, has trauma about her schizophrenic mother? Why is she the only character allowed to have flashbacks? Especially when these flashbacks are only relevant to explain her book, to make it more impactful when Clark scalps a redhead and puts the hair on her, and then when she beats the Black caricature to death with a piece of concrete that represents her childhood innocence? This movie is a bunch of halfassed themes and symbolism thrown together to create an awfully written movie where they then casted folks in the roles to create an incredibly racially charged movie to anybody with an ounce of knowledge about how Black men are seen as evil aggressors especially towards white women. This movie is built on the idea of a white woman, quite literally his fucking therapist, trying to help an aggressive Black man but she is too scared to tell him what he needs to hear. She is "proven right" that he cannot hear the truth and that he is beyond help, and is punished for trying to help him. Her only escape is for her to tell him to stay the angry Black man who takes no responsibility for his problems, and to tell him that he is just wired that way, implying she could've never helped him in the first place. We see this man be disrespectful towards his own employees, especially his young asian assistant manager. We see him be vague towards his young employees when asking them for help with "research", ultimately leading to their deaths, which paints him in a predatory light as he preys on their naiveness and eagerness for money. Specifically, he keeps Kat's head in the fridge after implying that he was responsible for her death. Kat's role in the movie is that of a college-aged asian girl who is helpful despite the fact she dislikes Clark's treatment towards her and she dislikes the idea of being in the Backrooms in the first place. It is racially charged as she is put in a similar position as Mary, trying to help Clark run his failing business, and in the end she dies for it. She is an asian woman whose entire role is to help her boss and then dies for it while the white character gets to survive.

Think about it for a second. The movie wouldn't change at all with the characters being different races, the race doesn't fucking matter in this situation. Why are you even making things about race in the first place? Doesn't that say more about you in the first place? Media literacy, much?

don't try and yell at me over media literacy when you yourself claim that race makes zero impact on this movie when it actually does. it is exactly as you say, they absolutely could've casted these roles as any race because theyre so 2 dimensional that it makes zero impact, so exactly why did they choose to cast a Black man into a role of an unfleshed out aggressive protagonist who turns into an antagonist? It is continously implied that he is some character with "deep backstory" by fans of the movie yet at most we get him roleplaying with his white therapist about him being verbally abusive towards his white ex-wife and him continously implying that he learned to push people away as a kid. the characters literally have a conversation where his white therapist tells him that he is incapable of taking the blame, something that as his therapist she should have told him sooner because its clear she already thought this but didn't tell him because she was scared of him, and that it is just the way he is wired and that he doesn't have to change. then, after delightfully accepting he is an angry Black man who is incapable of realizing when thingd are his fault, he gets killed by a caricature of himself who is played by a white man. Said caricature proceeds to chase after the white woman until she manages to escape him and then is saved from the backrooms by a bunch of white people in hazmat suits.

Explain to me how this movie is deep and complex. Because we get flashbacks where Mary, the white therapist, has trauma about her schizophrenic mother? Why is she the only character allowed to have flashbacks? Especially when these flashbacks are only relevant to explain her book, to make it more impactful when Clark scalps a redhead and puts the hair on her, and then when she beats the Black caricature to death with a piece of concrete that represents her childhood innocence? This movie is a bunch of halfassed themes and symbolism thrown together to create an awfully written movie where they then casted folks in the roles to create an incredibly racially charged movie to anybody with an ounce of knowledge about how Black men are seen as evil aggressors especially towards white women. This movie is built on the idea of a white woman, quite literally his fucking therapist, trying to help an aggressive Black man but she is too scared to tell him what he needs to hear. She is "proven right" that he cannot hear the truth and that he is beyond help, and is punished for trying to help him. Her only escape is for her to tell him to stay the angry Black man who takes no responsibility for his problems, and to tell him that he is just wired that way, implying she could've never helped him in the first place. We see this man be disrespectful towards his own employees, especially his young asian assistant manager. We see him be vague towards his young employees when asking them for help with "research", ultimately leading to their deaths, which paints him in a predatory light as he preys on their naiveness and eagerness for money. Specifically, he keeps Kat's head in the fridge after implying that he was responsible for her death. Kat's role in the movie is that of a college-aged asian girl who is helpful despite the fact she dislikes Clark's treatment towards her and she dislikes the idea of being in the Backrooms in the first place. It is racially charged as she is put in a similar position as Mary, trying to help Clark run his failing business, and in the end she dies for it. She is an asian woman whose entire role is to help her boss and then dies for it while the white character gets to survive.