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Kino Review: Backrooms
Spoiler warning obviously.
Backrooms the movie is superficially based on the 4chan meme “the backrooms”, and yes, there are lots of fun found-footage scenes visually exploring the aesthetics of liminal spaces, but good horror movies are never about the monster, they are about what the monster represents. Backrooms is about the fear that no educated professional white woman will ever love you.
Male Lead is a black entrepreneur who runs a local furniture store. Female Lead is his upstanding attractive white PhD therapist. Male Lead is in therapy primarily because his financially dependent law student wife (who is also an attractive white woman) left him.
It is hinted that Female Lead is also lonely and wants children. From a purely narrative perspective, it might seem as if Male Lead and Female Lead are destined to get together at some point. Taking into account their respective biographies, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA of course that wouldn’t happen. He is a schlubby loser from a lower social class and an unprestigious career. You can practically taste the ick she feels behind the professional facade in every scene they have together. It's great.
The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.
Given widening education and earning gaps between men and women, this is very quickly becoming a theme that men of any race can sympathize with, and it probably makes a good thematic hook for a film aimed at young men. What I find strange is that they cast two actors that are pushing fifty for a movie primarily aimed at zoomers. Maybe they are relying on the IP to bring in young people, and using the casting to broaden the audience demographics a bit.
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I just watched it. I'm a fan of all the Kane Parsons YouTube series, and have spent time on the Backrooms fan community wiki. I prefer Parsons' universe as its more consistent with its lore.
I thought it was good. 7-8/10. Mainly because I like the lore and got more out of it than your average normie.
I like how the lore was expanded and it puts past renditions of 'monsters' into hi-res context, which is great. The universe is more or less fleshed out now in detail, so if this movie does well commercially we might get more.
This is a very valid interpretation of the film. My theory is that the 'copies' of people are influenced by the mental integrity of the person copied. Clearly Clark was mentally unstable due to alcoholism, his external locus of control, his suppressed anger at his ex-wife, not helped by his undisclosed (nonlinear?) time stuck in the backrooms alone.
As usual with Backrooms, I love that they have normies enter the place and do normie things, which is kind of part of the setting. I don't get how the 'other organisation' is still so unprepared, incompetent and shit scared at going in there, but I guess they're like MRI technicians or something and completely unprepared to that environment.
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I feel obligated to post a link to the mildly entertaining story Two Gay Furries Kissing in the Backrooms (behind a login wall; here are the first 30 chapters/⁓70,000 words in HTML and PDF), in which two men (an autistic computer programmer and an outgoing NEET living on life-insurance proceeds) (1) are teleported into the backrooms and transformed into anthro/furry characters (a tall fox and a short cat, respectively), (2) meet each other, and (3) fall in love while exploring. Despite the suggestive title, romance does not start until chapter 28 (the end of part 1), and sex does not occur until chapter 54 (part 2 chapter 26, the end of part 2; the characters magically do not need to eat or drink, so no special preparation is necessary). According to the author:
But "plot" is a bit of a stretch. IMO, it's the kind of cute-but-utterly-pointless fluff that I used to seek out 15 years ago under the "NaruHina" label on fanfiction.net.
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I'm reminded of a Spongebob meme I saw a while ago, a comic made up of screenshots where, IIRC, Spongebob is ordering from Squidward, with alternating frames, saying, "In my medieval fantasy story, it turns out that the church is actually evil," "How original," "And the demons are actually the good guys!" "Daring, are we?" It's quite possible and even likely that there's some valuable insight and even challenge there, but this is such well-trod ground that comports with the general thrust of basically all media in the mainstream that this description, in itself, makes it sound boring, if not tiresome. That said, it all comes down to the execution, of course.
I used to have fun asking people if they could think of a few examples of evil priests in fiction. No problem of course; there are many. Then I'd ask if they could think of any non-evil priests in fiction. Crickets.
Over the years a couple of examples have come up, of course, but mainly it's a landslide in the other direction. Particularly for anyone who mainly consumes contemporary media as opposed to reading Chesterton or something.
There is a pretty popular Father Brown TV show on the BBC that’s been running for ten years, so regular people it’s may have more familiarity with the character than you might think.
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Zadok is the obvious example. Father Ted and Co. as well, although I accept there is scope for disagreement here.
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You've almost piqued my interest enough to watch the film. Almost.
My life improved immeasurably once I genuinely stopped giving a shit what this type of person thought about me. It concerns me now about as much as I am concerned by the fact that no herd of American bison will ever love me.
Bisons are majestic thought.
Fair point. I guess being loved by a herd of bison could indeed help the soul and I shouldn't have been so dismissive about them. My point still stands about educated professional white women.
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Wait wait wait - the film has a black man pursuing a white woman for sexual purposes against her will and without her consent?
Hoo-boy. How did it get made? Doesn't it know this is the Emmet Till Murder motivation? Doesn't it know how the myth of white female purity being assaulted by rapacious black men was behind so many lynchings?
I'm being slightly facetious here, but only slightly. I've seen some mention of the movie online but nothing about this being the plot. Has Peak Woke indeed passed?
EDIT: Okay, reading the Wikipedia article on the movie, it's slightly different. The monster existed there before the Male Lead discovered these places, and it seems that whatever is there, if there is anything independent there, shapeshifts into a version of the latest real-world person who stumbles in. So it's not, as described, a creation of the Male Lead's id and the backrooms being creations of his as well. That makes more sense for a movie adaptation, not "scary sexuality of scary black men pursuing white women".
I have only seen the film once, but I think the Wikipedia summary is an overly literal interpretation. In the context in which the monster is first fully revealed onscreen, it is a metaphorical extention of the frustration and aggression of Male Lead towards Female Lead.
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Title IX on campus has already been disproportionately used against black men. Nobody dares question it except a few right wingers.
Black men and white women are both on the woke scale, so being against the former and for the latter is inter-woke conflict, not the woke losing. White women are in theory less oppressed, but they influence more media.
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For all the talk about women "hitting the wall", it seems quite evident to me the average male has an even limiting shelf-life, if even that. Online is full of guys who never recovered from their loss of childhood social value. The older I get, the more I've come to believe that humans are only mostly monogamous, or rather "serially monogamous". In the absence of monogamous social constraints, the "low value males" (real or perceived) slip to the wayside and struggle to recover. This movie seems to capture that psychology (mostly) accurately.
We don't need to paint all of humanity with the same brush. In fact there's lots of room for individual and group-level variation here, even speaking on a purely instinctual level before nurture comes into it.
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The Wall is about sexual value, not social value, as hitting it entails a strictly biological/bodily transformation.
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Eh, I think the wall hits both sexes in the thirties. Losing all value when you hit puberty is pathetic, at least wait until your skufization.
I think men an women hit the wall 5 years apart. Historically, at 25 and 30, but today I guess most would agree you get some extra time. Although I don't know how much of that is cope.
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I think "the wall" is an expression which isn't very well defined, allowing people to argue past each other. Obviously, everyone's physical appearance declines with age, male or female. But defining "the wall" in this way, elides a significant difference between men and women: Essentially all women suffer a steep and inevitable loss of sexual attractiveness at some point in their 30s, while men do not.
I agree and I don't. I'd say it's like this:
In other words, women suffer a steep and inevitable loss of sexual attractiveness at some point in their 30s, while men suffer a steep and evitable loss.
In its essence the Wall is simply a biological reality - boys generally mature slower than girls but women also generally age faster then men. It's no wonder that an age gap of 3-5 years has been widespread in marriages throughout history (on both sides of the Hajnal Line, as far as I know, but again, I'm no ethnographer). And in societies where early marriage and childbirth plus enforced monogamy are the norm, the Wall practically does not matter, as the average woman hitting the Wall is already a wife and the mother of multiple children, plus soon to become a grandmother, in fact. So she already bought into the social fabric.
I suggest there are three main aspects to the Wall in the current social reality. One: there are more and more women hitting the Wall when they are single or at least childless, which then causes lots of hurt and disillusionment. Two: the worsening trends of female alcoholism, drug use, prescription pill abuse, sedentary and unhealthy lifestyles in general are all accelerating ageing, which makes the whole phenomenon worse. Three: a small but visible and loud minority of women are capable of spending a great deal of resources on anti-aging measures with notable success, which in turn creates the widespread illusion that the problem is much less worse than it actually is.
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Greater Male Variability hypothesis wins again!
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Anything is unlikely to be well-defined when any discussion of it is purged from society instantly even on the internet.
Yeah, I think that the issue here is that society is uncomfortable with differences between men and women if those differences favor men. So people have a tendency to deflect, distract, and distort when those differences are brought up.
It's interesting to note that people will readily agree to the existence of "the wall" provided it is framed in such a way as to make women seem superior to men. For example:
"Most men are creepily obsessed with youth when it comes to the women they date. Do you see the way Leonardo DiCaprio dates only young women and loses interest the moment they turn 30? Probably all men would do the exact same thing if they could."
This statement is basically identical to the way I defined the wall above. And yet one formulation will make people freak out while the other will make those same people nod their heads in agreement.
One of the pushbacks people will give is that DiCaprio's dating young women is a kind of moral failure. Therefore, your readers would disagree with it this way: many of them are morally upstanding and would only ever want to date someone with similar levels of life-experience and power. And so, they would take issue with "Probably all men..." bit.
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A lot of people seem to have this mythical idea about "attractiveness" or "good looks" or "being pretty" or "beauty" or etc. that exists as a concept outside of human judgment, as if how "attractive" someone is isn't defined by how many and how hard other people actually are "attracted" to them. I think this sort of thinking is especially encouraged in women, which is why the idea that "all women are 10s" is so common among women. And why the idea "straight men will judge you, a straight woman, as less attractive" registers as something different from "you, a straight woman, is less attractive."
It seems to be the opposite: it's is a matter of highly subjective judgment so any group of sufficiently motivated humans can just change the prevailing social judgment or just ignore it.
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You have a point that slight reframing can change people's opinion depending on who is flattered and who is scolded, but the two statements here are not identical.
The way to reconcile this is to say that while older women are still objectively stunning and great catches, men refuse to acknowledge this because they want unequal, power-imbalanced relationships to oppress women. Over 30 women are too wise to all the manipulative tricks, they are harder to boss around, too financially and professionally stable which intimidates men etc.
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True in my case. When I was a kid, girls in my class and even grown women would come up to me - sometimes even in the supermarket - and tell me I was "cute". You better believe that stopped the very minute I hit puberty; suddenly I was invisible to half the human race!
Related anecdote: thirty-some years ago I was in a shopping mall, and an attractive woman I had never seen before smiled, with real warmth, seemingly at me. Turns out she was actually smiling at a baby being carried by a woman right behind me! Sheesh, can't win for losing.
Your appearance obviously invoked motherly feelings as long as you were just a boy, that is all. It has nothing to do with The Wall.
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As someone who hasn't seen the movie I assume there are two things going on. One: the store owner, unlike his female therapist, is not college-educated, which is a significant social barrier to a potential relationship between them. The therapist would probably suffer social ostracism if she paired up with him, which obviously could be offset were he an attractive stud, which he isn't. Which leads to - Two: it'd be possible for a store owner entrepreneur and a therapist to have a successful marriage, as the difference in terms of social status does not seem to be that big, but again, mutual attraction needs to be there for that first.
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Well, I imagine that probably makes for a bad backrooms movie if true. Horror fiction that touches on the weirdness that can happen in romantic relationships can be very interesting, I think, but that is not what the backrooms is about.
Weighted by screentime, the majority of the film is about the aesthetics of 90s furniture stores. It's hard to convey this feeling by text, so I focused on the thematic subtext of class and relationships.
Having thought on it more, the one healthy relationship in the film is between Male Lead's two employees. They are both lower-middle class. They even have the exact same job!
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