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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.
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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