Think of the worst moment of your life. Reanimate everything from the exact moment your heart collapsed to every dust mote that happened to eavesdrop on that scene. Now re-reanimate it. In fact, conjure this scene daily for the rest of your life. After six months of these daily reveries, are the details the same? What about after a year, or a decade? In your canonised history, you may have substituted wallpaper for plaster, or day for night. Perhaps you were sitting down instead of standing up when it happened, or the key detail that generated said trauma has been so misaligned and tampered with that you don’t properly remember why it has affected you in the way it has. You just know it has. All you remember is the effect, not the cause. Like the Ship of Theseus, you have replaced each constituent part with duplicates, pale imitations or, worse yet, you have removed them entirely. Memory reconstruction has turned into memory replacement. The room where it happened (w/o Hamilton chorus) had four walls, but these are walls entirely in the abstract, sans detail and actuality.
In Backrooms, Clark and Mary are united in their constant reanimation of the bones which haunt them. Clark thinks back to the night his wife left him, the drunken state he was in when it happened, and every justification under the sun for why it wasn’t his fault. He doesn’t re-live (at least not before his first on-screen therapy session), but re-examines in a desperate need to find reasons and explanations – as if this will make him happy. There’s an essay in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or where he lays out, from an aesthete’s point of view, who the unhappiest person in the world is (sadly, he wrote it pre-Morrissey). He comes to the conclusion that happy people are those who live and exist in a present state of mind, then one step removed are those who either fixate on the future or dwell on the past, and the unhappiest are those who do so towards an impossible future or a false past. Clark neatly fits into this third tier of miserable. He advertises his store dressed as pirate Cap’n Clark despite his ‘Ottoman Empire’ furniture store pun – acting out a history that makes no sense. Kierkegaard writes, ‘Memory is pre-eminently the real element of the unhappy […] what he hopes for lies behind him, and what he remembers lies before him’. We find Clark caught in a self-destructive cycle of evaluating his past and then denying whatever truth is revealed to him. At the start of the film, he’s already deeply entrenched in his seeking/denying loop, and doesn’t so much as talk to his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, but pleads to her. Mary herself has baggage, but her coping mechanism is to hide from her past, rather than confront it.
Freud argues in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that the traumatised don’t remember these moments, but repeat them, ‘[the traumatised are] obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past’. Clark and Mary actively roleplay as himself and his wife during their breakup multiple times in the film. If the Backrooms are seen as the physical manifestation of the psychology of those who are thrown into its labyrinth, then the conjuration of the iconography of Clark’s and Mary’s most traumatic moments are their psyches’ attempts to compulsively restage what it cannot integrate or reckon with. Littered throughout the liminal corridors are objects of their past: furniture, homes, kitchens, stop signs (I’d be tempted to throw myself into the Backrooms for half the chance my beloved 2007 iPod shuffle might come back to me). Return to reanimation. Do we not reduce our memories down to their most primal icons? A marriage is captured in a ring, an alcoholic parent is whittled down to an empty bottle, a childhood home becomes a concrete handprint. On a long enough timeline, our memories will shed all details and become their base symbols.
Clark’s inner psychology is projected throughout the Backrooms as he explores it. In the present tense, Clark is a failed architect and a man who sells furniture: the Backrooms’ corridors are characterised by their impossible (or failed) architecture, and its entrance is a heap of furniture. It’s not a stretch to suggest that Clark is creating this world; conscious or not, this is for him (in perfect contrast to the islanded epigraph in House of Leaves, of which this film may be the closest thing to a soft adaptation of: ‘This is not for you‘). The further he explores its hallways, and moves away from his present, the deeper he explores his own psyche. However, it is a false psyche. These objects are not real. The Backrooms aren’t filled with copies of real-world objects, they are filled with simulacrums whose original referents have disappeared. Stop signs, gulls, chairs, Christmas trees, even people and a monstrified version of Clark himself – are all near-copies of things that didn’t quite exist in the first place. As he explains at one point, ‘It’s like describing a dog to someone who has never seen one and then asking them to draw it’. He is trapped within Baudrillard’s hyperreality:
The era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials […] It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real […] Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself.
The most visually striking sequence of the film is the slow pan-down of a series of rooms where, with each iteration, its details are warped and eventually lost. There is a heat death to copying a copy of a copy. If you drink your piss enough times, you will dehydrate. The liminal space is a by-product of a hyperreality. On a podcast, director Kane Parsons said ‘We’re kind of getting stuck in this monoculture’, and isn’t that exactly what happens to Clark? He gets stuck down there in his own feedback loop, like Cobb in Inception, trapped inside his own limbo. It’s only when Mary confronts him at the end that he realises just how short-lived his spiritual revelation has been. He re-enacts the death of his marriage, and gleans some catharsis, but the mannequins he talks with do not talk back. His downfall is that he treats his trauma like something he has to repeat in order to put right. Psychoanalysis (i.e., the journey into the Backrooms) becomes just another avoidance to recovery.
Think of the worst moment of your life. Imagine you’ve been thinking about it for years. There comes a point when you’ve exhausted every thought you can have about it, you’ve felt every variable emotion you’re ever going to feel. And if that pain floods back with just the same tenacity as the day it first happens, despite going through every possible combination of feelings and secondary thoughts and reflections, then the best course of action is just to, ultimately, stop thinking about it. The centre of the Backrooms is an empty hole, after all. As an avid Nabokovite (the professional Freud hater), maybe that is where psychoanalysis leads: to absence, not understanding. And if Mary’s avoidance is the foil to Clark’s meaningless reflection, then her journey to leave the Backrooms, and her own psyche, suggests it’s best to stop the destructive loop altogether (i.e., just get the fuck out of there and, by extension, out of your own head).
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