A soft place to land

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.

“What happens if I just… choose to stay.”

It kills you. It will eventually kill you. Because you’re choosing to live in a memory. An echo of the past.

To live in the past is to no longer experience the future.

To no longer experience the future is to run out of the present.

To run out of the present allows the past to catch up to you. Quickly.

Clark was dead the second he made that choice. Not just because of the captain. But because in that very moment he let go of his future.

Why did God create a dual universe? So he might say, Be not like me. I am alone. And it might be heard. —–- Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves.

Clark has always been like this. We saw his extreme anger at the start of the movie. His disregard for those around him with how he speaks to and about them. The implied breaking of the glass was that he threw it, not knocked it over.