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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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