In order to explain my gripes with the film properly, I would have to get into the plot and movie that they build scaffolding to support the backrooms. It's a good thing I'm not hungover but even still consider this analysis still under construction:
The performances by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve are so. so good! I think they played characters who feel this kind of existential dread that draws them to the unknown very well. My gripe comes in with the optics from a racialized lens of Chiwetel's character and nuance not being as present in the writing.
Coming off of Is God Is has gotten me aglow with joy over mentally ill black people being the film protagonists!!! And in a way Backrooms does that as well. But the character ultimately "Clark" is ultimately written to be a misogynist in a dead end job with little interiority beyond that. It wouldn't be so apparent if he wasn't the only black man in the film, and if he didn't become an antagonist in the second act, antagonising Renate Reinsve's character, his white woman therapist, "Mary."
The narrative external to the backrooms becomes a story about a black man who's unable to change from being fundamentally angry and violent who's just unable to be helped by the caring white therapist (who is not on some melfi timing fr she was dogs hit but also a therapist who sold VHS tapes so character accurate perhaps?). Over the course of the film, we see these two roleplay out scenes of domesticity, with Mary pretending to be Clark's Ex-Wife who's also a white woman!
Later in the film, Clark incapacitates Mary and kidnaps her, doing his heel turn into being a villain who's content in his derangement. This blow is softened with his eventual self-sacrifice, as he dies being eaten by the backrooms' memory monster of him. The defanging that added a Scary Guy brings to the backrooms aside, the monster is a kind of warped caricature of the man. And while ultimately not explicitly offensive, feels the reheated nachos of the race politics in the cinema of yesteryear.
@ghomanimation first of all, thank you for telling me this! Second, WHAT THE FUCK?
the most succinct argument that I can make right now is this: tall monster performer man isnt responsible for all the questionable racialized choices in this movie BUT‼️ I have never seen Doug Jones do blackface
Okay I wanna talk about these kinds of responses I've been seeing to this post. I may edit this later when I'm feeling more collected and less aggravated but.
I fear in attempts to be so adamantly anti racist, people are just looping back around to being racist again (I'm talking that first tag reply specifically).
And, (in reference largely to the second tag reply) thee solution encountering that a film that has racist elements (problematic I should say generally speaking) is not to Disavow your relationship to the art completely. Honestly, it reads a lot like wiping your hands of the situation in absolution that you'd NEVER consume something with racist undertones or messaging!
Now. Am I endorsing the film and telling to go pay and see it? No, not really. But I also am not saying people block out everything the film and put their heads in the sand. As I said in my initial post, I love Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance in the film! He honestly saved that theater experience for me, but I can't pretend that there aren't broader issues with the film to pick apart. Personally? I'd say pirate it, it's very well acted and visually appealing, and is worth study as an adaptation of internet horror that inherits prejudiced storytelling conventions of the medium.
I don't do that digital circus shit but both it and backrooms have been useful examples for talking about the implementation of racism in film media, in all its multifacetedness. But that's a post for another time.
