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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.
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.
Ignoring Japanese media for reasons others have alluded to.
David Eddings' Elenium has at the very least Sephrenia, Dolmant and the Cammorian pastor, and more broadly essentially all the non-royal Good Guys (there's some degree of question whether explicitly-religious crusading paladins count as priests or not). The main bad guys are a corrupt priest trying to take over the fantasy stand-in for Christianity (but not succeeding), a corrupt paladin, and a priest of an evil god. There are a couple of good priests in the Malloreon, too, but the vast majority of the priests in the Belgariad/Malloreon are bad (unless you count Belgarath/Polgara as priests, which is complicated).
Terry Brooks' Elfstones of Shannara has one of the characters be a straight-up religious martyr, overcoming a crisis of faith and all. I'm not sure it'd entirely pass reactionary muster, though, seeing as she's a priestess and men explicitly couldn't accomplish what she did for vague magic reasons. The Word and the Void trilogy is also to a large extent about a paladin.
Babylon 5, of course, has a whole pile of good priests including some actual Christian ones. I think the only evil priest is the insane Soul Hunter who's explicitly disavowed by the rest of the Soul Hunters.
Deep Space Nine has a few non-evil priests, although the Space Pope is evil for 70% of the series. Sisko himself is, again, complicated.
I've only played Morrowind of the Elder Scrolls games, but in Morrowind the Imperial Cult are straight-up good guys, and despite the main quests of vanilla/Tribunal taking a wrecking-ball to it, the Tribunal Temple clearly has a lot of good in it as well (just also a fair bit of rot).
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is... complicated, since all the faction leaders are supposed to have good and bad qualities, but Deirdre Skye and Miriam Godwinson are canonically two of the nicer ones, and they're both priests, Miriam a Christian one (though in-game the AI for Miriam keeps trying to kill you for not being a theocracy).
Look at the dates on those.
Elenium: 1989-1992
Elfstones of Shanarra: 1982
Babylon 5: 1994-1998
Deep Space Nine: 1993-1999
Morrowwind: 2002
Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri: 1999
And even then, for culture war purposes, priests of fantasy religions shouldn't count.
If we're not counting priests of fantasy religions, then we shouldn't count evil fantasy priests and evil fantasy religions, either. I think that would cut down the initial grievance by a lot.
That's fair, but on the other hand there's also the tendency for evil priests to include the things that people hate the most about religion while there is no corresponding tendency for good priests to include the things that people find positive about religion. An evil priest who is a demagogue is not really balanced by a good priest who is just a spell battery.
Dolmant, the Cammorian pastor, the girl from Elfstones of Shannara, a decent chunk of the priests in Babylon 5 (though not so much the Minbari religious caste), Bareil, the Imperial Cult, the Tribunal Temple, and Miriam Godwinson, at least, do priestly stuff on-screen.
Then I would count them, with the caveat that it's still all from so long ago that it isn't part of any modern trend.
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