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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.
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 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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