The Backrooms and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Recently, I watched the backrooms movie and although it was at home with a friend, it still freaked me out! Watching this movie at your home is almost more effective than in a theater. You see the weird abstraction of the concept of a Room and then look around at your couch, your TV, and even your memories of the room, and think about how the backrooms is remembering your life via the locations you inhabited. But living in a big city like Chicago allows me to wander through many bustling streets and shops full of people, so it becomes harder to imagine the locations I inhabit becoming creepy isolated zones. However, for much of the country, the isolation and decay of our current capitalist society has set in so extremely that it's pretty easy to make the jump from decaying mall to supernatural, never ending hall of Stuff. But the backrooms isn't an emotional or psychological metaphor, but the physical embodiment of Capitalism as a concept.
Although capitalism has existed for hundreds of years now, the start of our current state of it, the stage of capitalism visually referenced by the Backrooms, usually starts around mid-century, and is squarely defined by the modernization of Home and Work: The Suburb and the Office.
The suburb was a post-WW2 concept elevated as an idea of getting out of the smog and rush of city life and get more square footage while not being straight up rural. But in retrospect it was more a signal of white flight after racial integration was starting to gain traction. What used to be an 19th century Romanticism idea of fleeing the hum drum of city life to appreciate nature was replaced with fleeing the city to escape minorities while wanting to keep your car and urban amenities. Cities have always subsidized the suburbs; just inherently more money is being generated because more people are able to live more closely, compared to the white picket fenced dream of the suburbs. Although we aren't actually in a reverse-Romanticism era where the city is considered the pinnacle of nature and beauty, the city's ability to generate more money and more culture seems almost antithetical to the ideas of the Suburb. To be blunt, the suburbs is a parasitic and near culture-less: Is buying something considered culture? Is going from your car to work to car to home culture?
Let's also look at the office, since the overhead lighting system that is ever expanding in the backrooms is really pioneered by cubicle-filled mid to late 20th century offices. The Acoustical Panel Ceiling (ACT) is the name for the specific drop ceiling depicted in the movie.
To quote the National Park Service web page on ACTs:
"First developed in the 1930s, they became common features in offices, hospitals, schools, institutional buildings, commercial and retail spaces, and other buildings beginning in the 1950s and 60s and remain widely used today. While now derided by some for their ubiquity, aesthetics, or perceived quality, they were widely embraced at the time and remain so for their functionality, flexibility, and low cost."
This coincides (give or take a couple decades) with the invention of the office cubicle itself, invented by the Herman Miller company's Robert Probst. Initially called an "Action Office" it was meant to be a replacement from cramped office rooms. However, as the idea spread to other companies who wanted to save money, they swapped the genius (and expensive) Herman Miller design to cheaper boards, shrank the size of each action office, until it became the cramped "cubicle" design we know from so many shows and movies, usually to symbolize a boring and monotonous life.
To anyone under 35 or so, the idea of being bored to insanity at your comfortable office job with a pension makes movies like Fight Club and Office Space seem quaint in retrospect. But there is an inherent psychological damage that happened from Capitalism's desire to twist a once innovative and helpful idea into a device to maximize profits. At the time, this was seen as the logical progress of our society, and was championed as the peak of American power, so I guess it only makes sense that someone in its aftermath would look back on its relative stability fondly.
The backrooms is set in this seemingly golden era of the US: 1990. Kane Parsons, however, chose to focus on the people who didn't make it. Who, despite living in the historical age of US global power and finances, still live modestly, still do whatever they can to put a roof over their head, and still feel stuck in whatever cycles they've ended up in through both their actions and the others around them.
Clark and Mary are both seemingly successful... if your barometer for success is having a commercial on TV. Mary's tape commercial is advertised as Important and Informational. She has a pretty neutral expression on her face as her own ad plays on TV, but shots of what was once the dozens of unsold tapes makes me think she's probably just good at hiding her disappointment. Contrasting Mary's, Clark's commercial is Fun and Affordable. But really, it's kind of embarrassing to Clark. He thinks selling this wares is humiliating as he limps with a fake peg leg and makes pirate puns about his discount furniture. He has to act, as most salesman do, as if their discount wares are the funnest, most important sale ever.
To dive a little into the reality of this movie instead of just the meaning behind it: Does Clark's overall lack of pride conjure the backrooms, or is it a more specific moment? I mean we can assume he's been working this job as the manager of a furniture store for at least a year or two, based on his initial therapy session. Maybe it's him getting kicked out of his own house that causes the backrooms to find him? It seems like it's the inciting incident of him realizing he's at rock bottom. He sleeps in the store, nursing a handle of liquor and watching TV. The only people he interacts with is his employees and his therapist, and he still seems reluctant to even talk to them. His specific life circumstances led him to this rock bottom, but this specific loneliness is something that could only happen in suburban sprawl.
With Mary, she also has a loss of home, but it's more of the loss of her childhood home instead of a mortgaged house like Clark, after seeing the remains of her old home, she's shown living simply, although her furniture is still seemingly well made, so she's definitely doing better than Clark. Her introduction into the backrooms is tied to clark's discovery, but it's also tied to his disappearance, of her seeming failure to help a man stuck in vicious cycles of humiliating mundanity. Her psychology path causes by a traumatic issue with her mother's mental health and potentially wanting to help others in the way she couldn't help her mom.
An important theme of this movie is familial homes or the memories of home. Mary has memories of a place that no longer exists, as the beautiful family home is now being replaced by a condominium. I think the condominium part is very telling because although bulldozing a one family home to seemingly build multi-unit apartments seems overall fine, who do you think is going to go for the condominium? Wealthy Dinks/Bachelors are much more likely than a struggling family. I think it's one of those things that even one generation removed from Mary and Clark, you could own a home and even if you have health problems later, you'd have some hope that you'd pass down that home to your kids. But Mary and Clark both don't have that generational pass down. They rent, or don't have a house at all anymore like in Clark's case. What was once a house he paid for was now not his because of his drinking and irritability.
Also, the two young employees don't get anywhere near as much depth or backstory, and their apartment complex is shown as being sorta bland and cheap too. I mean even in the 90s, people working at a failing furniture store probably needed roommates. however, despite their lack of screen time, I do think they fit into this capitalist metaphor just as well.
Despite their age, I do think they're supposed to be stand-ins for gen-z. The "end apartheid" statement shirt is as applicable in 1990 as it is in 2026, and they're using their knowledge of new technology to help their employer succeed, even if Clark considers it too silly for an Architect like himself. Ultimately, Clark gets these kids to help him explore the backrooms and are killed suddenly mid-exploration. I think some interpretations of Clark showing the head in the freezer is that he's now fully psycho and killed his employee, but I think it's more of an ambivalence. He's become obsessed with the backrooms, but anyone outside of that obsession views it as pure psychopathy. I think that sounds pretty similar to reports that people in successful executive jobs have a higher rating of psychopathy/sociopathy. Clark's obsession with the backrooms mirrors Elite class obsession over wealth and power, or of stockholder obsessions with earning a little bit more money every year. He maps it out, and wanders the hall just trying to learn a little bit more about this insane place.
Capitalism is man-made but seemingly just as baffling and unreal, surrounding us slowly and driving those who plum its depth into absolutely psychopathy. However, in the most literal explanations of the backrooms, it's just a supernatural entity. An SCP of sorts, and one that can be explained in as much concrete detail as a comic book nerd could expand on years and dates when fictional fights happened. And while people do deep-dive explainers on the lore, I don't really care about any of that, like who discovered it first, the company behind the science team.
Although they seem like real scientists and probably are in the reality of the movie's world, I still think that they are as calmly psychopathic as Clark at the end. They'd do anything to Mary just to get her to tell them just a little bit more about the backrooms, to find just 1% more info about the backrooms itself. They're also obsessed with ever expanding growth, just as any capitalist is obsessed with financial growth. And if a dark matter supernatural world full of empty rooms shows up for free, well that would be any company's wet dream. Infinite growth, infinite profit. Even if what happens to Mary isn't Phil the Scientist's decision, he is only after information. He is less concerned with her safety and well-being, and more obsessed with the concept of just getting a little bit further, a little more of the backrooms mapped out. It reminds me a lot of colonial expansion but for the information age.
To quote Bo Burnham: "They are coming for every second of your life. We used to colonize land. Then they realized - 'human attention'. They are now trying to colonize every minute of your life."
It was new world expansion, then westward expansion, then colonies and territories and then bases set up all over the world. Then the expansion had to spread even further, eventually turning into the ever-expanding internet. It was created as a military asset, and subsequently contributed to the biggest economic growth in recent memory. I mean not for regular people, but to the 1%, to whom endless economic expansion is their constant concern. But at least the internet lets us talk to each other more sometimes, and lets me write this lengthy essay about an internet based meme turned hollywood movie.
Let's just say I go with the idea that's been floated around that the backrooms is just everyone's collective unconscious, which is why the deeper you go the more abstracted the furniture and room layouts are. I still kind of believe this magical explanation while also believing in this enlarged capitalism metaphor. Because yes, it could also be collective unconscious, since the idea that this entity copies what it sees "above ground" is so weird and unexplainable. Does this entity have eyes? Or any way to travel above ground? However, maybe the collective consciousness is also disproved by the fact that Mary's childhood home and current state with the scientists are only shown after she's gone into the backrooms and then (maybe) escaped. I think there's something more simulated about the backrooms that I think pretty accurately mirrors the real simulacra that capitalism is too good at creating.
Whether it's monocrop to maximize profits, or recreating action offices in the shape of a MDF board cubicles, plastic plants to bottled spring water to zoos with carefully recreated nature enclosures, endless grids and panels to maximize efficiency and therefore more profits; So much of our true nature is filtered through capitalism and its idea that anything can be monetized and capitalized on. And the quickest way to make money is to utilize something that is already making money. Copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste. Efficiency maximizes profits so if something can be made cheaper, quicker, etc, it will be done that way, even if it is to the detriment of the consumer, and ESPECIALLY if it is to the detriment of the environment. Mass manufacturing of the modern world has made this expansion and duplicating much easier, which reflects the backrooms ability to endless expand, almost copy and paste one room after another. But the rooms aren't all exactly the same, just endless. But the backrooms takes your life, and the lives of others, and copies it in its own sterile, corporatized office rooms, sometimes those copies get copied and copied deeper and deeper into the backrooms, until it is unrecognizable as the original room it was borrowing from.
A "non-place" is a phrase coined in the 1992 book by the French anthropologist Marc Augé. I won't turn this into a full researched essay, but this book essentially talks about the sort of anonymous buildings that don't think about but inhabit. Airports, grocery stores, elevators, waiting rooms. They all are characterless rooms that we use for a purely functional purpose, made monotonous by the same flat wall designs and the same paneled ceilings. Maybe a really fancy grocery store or airport has more amenities, but for the vast majority of people they encounter the dullest and, partly, most brutalist versions of these non-places. A costco that's just a warehouse, an airport that has enough glass to see the terminals and nothing else, or a waiting room that's just the bare minimum amount of furniture to make it look normal but not livable. A Function that has completely ignored the concept of a Form.
"Liminal Spaces" were not always modern and creepy, but instead of natural spaces that indicated a passing or transitional period. Liminality as a pre-industrial society term was more about rites and political changes, but the industrialization created all these man-made spaces that existed for one function and absolutely nothing else; a big box to hold inventory and/or people. Whether that's hotels or offices or warehouses or mcmansions. The function overpowered anything else, which renders these spaces purely transactional and transitory.
Although the proliferation of these cold, transactional spaces have expanded out from a former warmth, whether that's a mall being abandoned, a personal website being left to bitrot, or a theme park left to actually rot in a swamp, there's an inevitable decay and eeriness that comes from Capitalism. Although there was this expansion and conquering occuring, it inevitably starting to reverse, and nowadays most money is being generated via generating weird copies of informations, or consolidating businesses for their valuables. Everything seems to be consildating to maximize profits, and rehashing the same stuff to maximize profits. Because if someone already remembers the thing they're selling, they're more likely to like it and buy it. So if one brand owns many thing you remember, then they will make more money. Remembering the 20th century via consumption of media, toys, snacks, etc, it all becomes a gimmick for the sake of extending capitalism.
Your life, your loves, your cherished memories will get stolen and sold back to you via nostalgic commercials and overpriced third spaces. Your childhood home will get knocked down for a condo, and the backrooms will remember it. It'll shave and smooth down all the jagged edges of your life and regurgitate it over and over and over in the only language it knows how to communicate: efficient fluorescent ceiling panels, cheap carpet, and plastered wallpaper walls.