i cannot be killed by conventional means

It occurs to me with the Backrooms movie that Mary doesn’t have a proper ending. As in, yeah she survives, but in the end she kinda just ends up just stuck in a clinical room. Wating. She doesn’t really get to process her trauma, she doesn’t really get to be free of the Backrooms, she doesn’t really get an ending to her story. She’s just stuck in transition. There’s no proper ‘ending’ to the film either. The film itself was stopped right at the threshold of something greater. It’s making you wait.

Mary is in a permanent stage of liminality, always at the threshold but never able to move on.

Clark was at that stage- which is why he was able to live so long in the Backrooms. He was unable to take that step, he was in the same state as Mary until she helped him. He ‘made the next step,’ (or in this case, stepped back) he was not longer in a state of transition, he made a choice and stuck with it. Which is why Still Life Clark killed him right after. He no longer belonged there.

It’s why the scientists and ASYNC are so obsessed too. They’re now looking to make the next step in human history, believing this to be the greatest discover in history, but they’re unable to at the moment because they don’t understand it. They’re stuck wating too.

The Backrooms is the Threshold of reality, one where you can’t make that next step. Because around that corner is going to be that same yellow wallpaper, on and on, forever.

seeing clark divorced, struggling with money, no friends, sitting and drinking and festering in his own self pity brought tears to my eyes faster than anything ever had before.

I saw him out of breath hopping around on the peg leg with the pirate impression talking about how you don't even need credit to buy from him and I was so close to sobbing it wasn't even funny. putting on a face when you're breaking down inside with no hope is terrifying to me.

I was so sad during the kitchen table scene because everything Mary said was true, he was lost now. It's like seeing someone you wished would succeed just give up and fall asleep in their grave.

The backrooms are generative AI trying to capture something real but only achieving a malformed, mindless imitation.

The backrooms are stagnation, an unwillingness to step into the new and uncomfortable effort of changing, instead running through the same old routine even as it starts to fall in on itself.

Okay. But its going to consume you.

"We don't have to change"

Okay. But it's going to consume you.

Eventually you have to leave. Eventually you have to run. And its painful and it's so much harder than staying in the comfort of what you know. In that house that stopped being a home years ago. Living memories you've replayed so many times over and over that the details are warping and becoming hollowed out corpses.

And it will consume you when you least expect it. You'll rot right there along with the building foundations and distort right along with your memories.

You'll have to run eventually, even if that's not how you're wired.

watched the backrooms movie & went “how can i make this about me”.