Shtshtsht

Also harvey x twoface doodle.

I thought for that whole movie about the parallels between Clark and Will Navidson. Both escaping their problems in the tangible reality by throwing themselves into the nebulous unknown of a construct of their own minds. Both stepping on everyone around them as if people are nothing but tools to further their own goals. Both driven deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, pursued by the dark manifestation of their deepest repressions. They are one and the same.

But it only just now clicked for me. The memory in the wheelchair is Reston. Maybe not him as his role was in HOL. But it's a reference to him.

Bobby and Kat are Wax and Jed, the hesitant documenters.

Barbara is Karen Green, the strained relationship who got left behind amidst the chaos of Clark's/Navidson's self-righteousness.

The twisted backrooms version of Clark is, of course, the Minotaur: the self-imposed manifestation of paranoia and guilt and fear.

The entrance to the backrooms is bordered in blue, much like how the house is outlined in the book.

The psychologist who narrates passages from her book is Zampanô, the lens through which to analyze the nature of the space itself.

And all of that leaves Mary, as an outsider looking in, trying to understand through Clark's words alone, and twisted unrecognizably through time and space amidst intersplices of her own troubled past. It didn't hit me until later.

Mary is Johnny Truant. Her mother, Pelafina. She has trauma of her own that haunts her like a vulture. The memories we see of her childhood home are eerily similar to the apartment Johnny caged himself in while trying to analyze Zampanô's manuscript. The pages taped to the windows are rather on the nose, a metaphorical thing for Johnny becoming a physical thing for Mary.

We don't see much of Mary beyond these sparse intersplices. It's a far cry from Johnny's role in House of Leaves. But perhaps Backrooms needed to place itself primarily in Clark's perspective in order to give us the ending it did. An ending that is reminiscent of HOL's, with the house simply dissolving into nothing, and Navidson's strained relationships magically resolving. It's an ending that he would have liked to have happen, but one that likely didn't, if Johnny's paralleled admission of a lie is to be believed. Backrooms' is far less ambiguous, placing itself firmly in the stance of 'Navidson is an unreliable narrator who tried to lie to you'.

Mary never entered the backrooms. Clark only imagined she did. She existed as a memory, a twisted reflection of what he wanted from her: a therapist who would ease his guilt and tell him he was right. Clark never even managed to leave the backrooms to call her. And nobody defeated his Minotaur.

There is no sense to be had in the backrooms. There is no resolution to be found. There's not even a monster to slay. Everyone's deaths and everyone's misfortune was at the hands of Clark alone, blinded by his own fantasies and hubris.