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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.
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.
Oof. That guy from Twitter...
This is either a man who has a deeply inaccurate perception of social reality or is hardcore engagement-baiting, or both.
If it's the former, and maybe even if it's the latter, then there's a good chance that this man's troubles with women have at least as much to do with his mental issues as it does with the transformations of puberty.
Yeah that was truly one of the most... unique tweets I've bookmarked and I keep coming back to it. I think he did hit on something big on the mental repercussions of male puberty, but there's a level of self-awareness in his nihilism that I find fascinating. His entire tweet history (monologuing about the "low value male" lifepath) reads like someone who stared into the abyss and liked what he saw.
In women's defence they stop viewing us as cute because we stop being cute. If the average man is anything like me, and I'm a very average type of a man, there's a distinct change from being silly kids who want to show them the cool thing that we discovered into randy buggers who mostly just want to see their tits and are put out that they're reluctant to oblige.
Looking at the guy's Twitter though he just reads like a contrarian shitposter. It's reminiscent of Hlynka's bit about people being so immersed in a woke-adjacent worldview that even their rejection of it is framed in the same terms. It's very "You want navel-gazing idpol gender conflict? Okay, but this time men are the victims! Ha!".
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I remember feeling like that as a teenager and young adult. Puzzled at why women suddenly treated me so different and feeling the pressure of expectations suddenly trust upon me. Then I started reading social media which only made it worse. Puberty is hard and the social expectations for men are rough, especially if you were never really prepared for them. I can believe some people would stay in that mindset for a while.
I never really encountered this. It certainly wasn’t a sudden transition. My experiences didn’t change drastically when I hit puberty; women in authority liked me before, and liked me after. The girls didn’t pay me much attention before, but paid me a bit more attention after. My mom’s attitude didn’t get worse in any way. If anything, I felt my connections with women improved after puberty, but I also had a tough childhood.
I didn’t feel the kind of pressure you’re hitting at until I was around 24 or 25. Even then it was pretty light pressure. It’s fair that people have higher expectations for productivity, emotional control, and accomplishment for grown adults than for children.
So, I don’t know. I believe you and the tweeter are talking about a real phenomenon, and I’m aware of deeply misandrist women, even mothers, who treat their boys as dangerous rather than beloved once they reach puberty.
It’s true that there have been various times in my life where my negative emotion was seen concernedly in a way it might not have if a woman experienced the same thing, but this has always been defused by actually talking about it and demonstrating reflectiveness and control. I feel like every relationship I’ve had with women has rewarded my ability to communicate emotionally, and I do wonder where the gap is between my experiences and other male experiences sometimes.
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I don't really remember that.
I remember new expectations feeling unfair, or intimidating, or whatever. But it always seemed well explained why 'you're a teenaged boy, you don't get treated like a kid anymore, them's the breaks- but you also don't get to be treated like an adult'. Granted, I was a bit of a late bloomer and have been consistently physically attractive.
It's a matter of how you are raised I imagine. Pre-puberty I rejected the idea of identifying with my gender and the roles that came with it. Still saw myself as a boy in the biological sense, but didn't really care for the social role of "boy" or "man". I was told by authority figures around me this was fine. So puberty ended up hitting extra hard. Had the LGBT culture been more active where I lived, I might have become nonbinary.
I imagine the more boyish girls get a similar reality check, going from playing in the mud with the boys to someone who is obviously, undeniably female and treated as such.
Turning it back to the culture war, there is a real question here of how much we should enforce gender roles on young children, and what we do with the girls and boys who don't cleanly fit the mold.
We should tell them to fit the mold. I benefited greatly from enforced sports, and girls seem to benefit from skirts and babysitting and home economics.
But I also don't remember much tolerance for gender bending. I remember 'that's feminine' as similar to 'that's low class' or 'that's wrong'(and for my sister 'ladies don't do that'). And people, even tomboys, raised that way turn out fine.
That would be the conservative answer, I suppose. It is also the answer that pushes people towards the LGBT. While the manosphere recruits men vilified by leftism, the leftists recruit men and women who have felt gender roles to be stifling with little benefit. There are absolutely people who will run from the mold the moment they get the chance.
But of course, it is the duty of adults to guide children. Defining their identity by themselves is not really something most young kids are capable of.
I think there are multiple ways to embody masculine traits in ways that suit different kinds of boys. The academic is different from the sports star, and both are different from the politician. But they can all be men. It is the duty of the parents to figure out what kind of archetypes and traits suit their children the best, and try to raise them accordingly. You may push your academically inclined son to do sports for the sake of his health and physical capabilities, but you are okay with him not excelling at it, since that is not the arena you expect him to compete in. His brother who is much more talented with his body can then be pushed harder as he actually enjoys the competitions and pushing his body to its limits.
Where you really run into problems though, is when manhood is defined as performative nonsense and subsequently discarded, leaving boys to figure everything out from scratch.
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Definitely. I remember feeling that way too. It sucked. It's hard for me to imagine how a man would jump from such an experience to "most women want you to die and call u a creep weirdo" unless he absorbed exaggerations from social media. As you said, social media made it worse for you. If this guy isn't engagement baiting, then perhaps social media made it much worse for him. What one pays attention to is usually selective and emotion-dependent. If you become convinced for some reason that women despise you, it's easy to go online and find examples from various nutcases and engagement bait artists who will confirm you in that belief.
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Sorry lads, are ye all complaining about "women think little boys are cute"? Well duh, of course! That's the evolutionary hook to get us to have babies and then stick around and not abandon the kids!
Going through puberty is hard on everybody, I have to say guys do have it extra tough what with voice breaking, wispy facial hair, etc.
But if this guy is really lamenting "Now I'm in my 20s/30s/40s no big mommy want to cuddle me and treat me like liddle baby boy cutie-face and protecc", um, I think there's an entire niche fetish website or two for that, friend.
Maybe in the people-finding-you-pleasant-to-look-at sense it is. But to me as a guy, having to deal with menstruation and other female reproductive issues sounds like an order of magnitude worse.
Oh, waking up and finding you're bleeding out of your lower parts and panicking (back in the days before everyone was educated since age six about such things) was, as you can imagine, so much fun. Then "oh yeah this will happen for the better part of a week every month for the next forty years or so"?
But it's much less visible than what happens to boys. Though for girls, growing breasts does get you male attention, and creepy adult males leering at thirteen year olds is rare but does happen.
I imagine that suddenly being sexualised by your school classmates, maybe even your friends, to be a weird and difficult thing to sort out.
The male side is not all bad. I remember being pretty stoked about the rather sudden increase in strength. But the smell, the voicecracks, the fact that I was no longer "cute"... Then there was the increasing expectations that I was supposed to be confident, good at sport, have suitable levels of self control... All while experiencing new emotions with no one providing good advice on what to do. The flood of sexual desire in particular and just being told to essentially figure it out yourself, while knowing that losing control of yourself at the wrong time would be heavily punished, was distressing to say the least.
I still appreciate the strength boost. And while I am rarely cute, at least women find the physical changes attractive, assuming decent grooming and exercise practices.
I used to share Goodguy's perspective that periods are harder than anything I experienced. These days, I prefer to not compare suffering. Men and women go through different things with different pros and cons. And hopefully the advantages of adulthood makes puberty worth it.
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No, he's just, like 80% of men, ugly in the eyes of women.
Thinking that "most women want you to die and call u a creep weirdo" if you are not in the top 20% of attractive men would be a profoundly inaccurate perception of reality.
They only do that if you attempt to interact with them in any way.
They don't, actually.
Like, I don't know if you interact with some unusually unpleasant set of women, are unusually unpleasant yourself, or simply have perceptual issues, but I promise that you do not need to be in the top quintile for hotness for women to not think you're a creep for existing near them.
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