"BACKROOMS" THE MOVIE: WHAT THE HECK IS IT ABOUT?
Article by LiveReal Agents Kevin, Courtney, and Mary
What is the movie Backrooms about?
“Therapy gone wrong” seems a bit simplistic.
“A therapy session where Kafka drops acid and finds himself in a Buddhist bardo or hell realm” seems a bit closer.
However you might interpret the film, it’s clearly struck a nerve with modern America. It’s made roughly a zillion dollars, which isn’t bad for a low-budget non-sequel horror flick (and especially compared to, say, the latest corporate attention-gobbling product manufactured by the Disney entertainment industrial complex).
In a word, Backrooms - directed and co-written by Kane Parsons - is art.
It has something to say.
But what?
What’s the movie really about?
Why does it resonate with so many people? Can it answer the questions it poses?
Sounds like a job for your loveable LiveReal Agents.
Here’s our take. (Spoilers ahead.)
Backrooms is about therapy gone bad.
Before the key events of the main plot kick into gear, there’s critical backstory.
In a nutshell:
Society: “Hey, kids! You can be anything you want to be!”
Clark: “Great! I’d like to be an architect!”
Society: “Sorry. Can’t do that.”
Clark apparently became caught in a particular “gap.”
It’s the huge, gaping chasm that seems to exist between hype and reality.
Young people today often grow up on a relentless diet of hard-sell marketing, cotton-candy platitudes, and weapons-grade soft nihilism until roughly the ages of 18-24.
At that point, they’re often thrust suddenly into the “real world” of adulthood.
That transition can be brutal.
It was brutal for Clark. His dreams of becoming an architect, for whatever reason, didn’t pan out. His “day job” soon consisted of selling cheap furniture, something he seemed to have no love for. This, in turn, apparently fed a heavy cloud of misery and gloom that enveloped a wearying daily grind, soon worsened by financial strain, which at some point became drinking too much, a broken marriage, and crushing loneliness.
In this situation, therapy was presented as a possible solution.
For example, a therapist named Mary might write a book implying (but not exactly promising) that the secret to happiness is right around the corner, possibly within reach after just a few sessions.
At this point, the therapy “client” (such as Clark) embarks on a classic journey into “the unconscious” – the “other world” within us all – the world of the psyche that “depth psychology” tries to explore.
In Backrooms, Clark literally walks through the border between the conscious world and the unconscious.
Traditional psychoanalysis aims to “make the unconscious conscious.”
In some ways, Clark and Mary’s efforts along these lines succeed all too well.
But as we learn in many fairy tales, we should often be careful what we wish for.
Not everything in the unconscious is the sanitized, affirming, warm-fuzzy, slightly scary-but-with-a-heart-of-gold force it’s often made out to be. The trickiness can depend on which aspects of the unconscious come to the surface.
Therapy's aim is to discover a source of healing, happiness, and inner strength.
But modern psychology is sometimes playing with forces it doesn’t entirely understand.
It isn’t always prepared for the forces it can unleash.
To understand this, we’ll need to take a few steps back and describe the larger context – the role psychology and therapy often play in peoples’ lives.
Therapy, it turns out, isn’t as simple as it might seem.
Part of this is likely due to the role it has unknowingly stepped into.
Today, psychology has often replaced religion.
It’s an idea we’ve explored here.
Over several recent decades, many skeptics and secularists characterized religion as essentially outdated, premodern superstitions and fairy tales.
In the name of “progress,” we often abandoned those “superstitions,” or at least pushed them to the back burner. (We could call this “The Death of God,” which Nietzsche warned us about a while ago) in favor of something much more reliable.
Instead, we moved on to science.
Scientists became "The Experts." And science, after all, seemed to work incredibly well, at least for a while. It's given us technology, solved numerous mysteries, and given us relative clarity in certain areas instead of speculation and guesswork. It seemed to work incredibly well in specific areas such as physics, chemistry, technology, space travel, and the world “out there.”
And then, naturally, we soon decided to apply the ever-successful scientific approach to humans.
And so, the "science" of human beings - psychology - was born. “Therapy” - administered by the "Experts" of the human mind - arrived soon after that.
Yet a core question remained: can we really understand and explain human nature scientifically?
That was the promise of psychology, and applied as therapy.
It’s an objective, non-superstitious, rational, scientific approach to solving the key human problems of life.
Put differently: it’s supposed to be a way to solve even life’s toughest existential riddles.
That was the hope.
The reality, however, has become something very different.
Science, after all, strives to be objective.
To be “objective” means to remove the subjective. (“Bias,” for example, is a typical culprit that must be removed. And bias means personal bias, or having elements of the personal in a process that’s supposed to be impersonal.)
According to this approach, objective is good, and subjective is bad. Subjectivity, however, is the “I” – the “me,” the first-person self, the experiencer of experiences, the opposite and other-side of the mere “object” that’s “out there.”
If “psychology” is the scientific approach to understanding human beings, and science strives to remain purely objective, then psychology becomes us trying to be objective about ourselves.
All of this might seem fine in theory.
But in reality, it can become very hazardous, very quickly.
A purely scientific approach applied to human beings becomes an objective pursuit of the subjective.
But eliminating subjectivity in favor of objectivity leads to a gradual erosion of the “I” in favor of an objective, sanitized, impersonal perspective – and approach that soon becomes dehumanizing.
This dehumanizing effect can easily lead to a material prosperity alongside a spiritual deterioration – thriving on the outside while hollowing out within – an idea explored here, and dramatized in stories such as The Picture of Dorian Gray or The Substance.
The result is an inevitable side-effect of the scientific approach.
Genuine science is a method. It’s a systematic process of observation, experimentation, and evidence-based reasoning to understand the world.
Yet genuine science can mutate. It can sometimes morph away from pure science into a philosophical position that is often hidden or assumed: an assumption that only what is measurable, quantifiable, and physical is real.
This view reflects materialism, a worldview or life philosophy (or set of assumptions) claiming that only physical matter and energy exist, and anything “spiritual,” non-physical, or supernatural does not.
Materialism isn’t a scientific conclusion. It’s a metaphysical assertion. It isn’t science; it’s philosophy. It’s not the result of a scientific experiment; it’s a claim about the context of scientific experiments. It’s a set of assumptions that soon becomes a personal commitment or ideological allegiance. When people treat this materialist assumption as the unquestionable foundation of science, it becomes “scientism.”
“Scientism” treats science as a religion.
This particular “substitute religion” defines a person’s answers to the Big Questions or life philosophy – the approach to human nature, how we know anything, the meaning of life, and so on.
Under scientism, anything that even hints at the spiritual, religious, or non-material is automatically dismissed as unscientific and illegitimate heresy.
Logical consequences soon follow. In psychology, religious and spiritual approaches get systematically excluded from the study of human nature.
And this is no small matter. Psychology, after all, governs our view of ourselves, and our view of ourselves is a key part of how we navigate life.
And today, psychology isn’t up to the task.
It’s not just a matter of keeping up with the latest Harvard studies on this or that. It’s not just that psychology cranks out reports on various random topics that offer various random conclusions. It’s not even that many of the topics psychology focuses on are inconsequential or trivial, and have little to say on the core questions we live our lives by.
It’s that we often treat psychology as a substitute religion.
And materialistic psychology fails when it tries to replace religion.
G. K. Chesterton said it well:
“Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.”
Psychology (therapy, counseling, analysis, etc) often means examining and even scrutinizing one’s weaknesses, flaws, whims, mistakes, feelings, passions, and sometimes less-than-noble “hidden” motives in relentless and agonizing detail. It can sometimes provide insight, make some connections, and help us understand our minds better.
But it often ends there.
In genuine religion, there’s “absolution.”
Real absolution - defined within a theistic worldview - is defined as the Creator and Ruler of the universe forgiving a person of wrongdoing, absolving them of guilt, and blessing them with grace or providence. For the less theistic, it’s a person becoming aware that, according to the Big Picture of Ultimate Reality, “Everything is OK.” In more psychological terms, a person is restored to wholeness by the Ultimate Source of everything that exists.
But some therapy and modern psychology consists primarily of endless analysis of feelings spotted with occasional insights or replacing this idea or habit with another.
Ideas of forgiveness, “grace,” “redemption” and so on hardly play a role.
This leads us to a difficult conclusion.
Psychology’s current models of human nature are inadequate.
What, after all, is the foundation of modern psychology?
Many individuals have described modern psychology as a house of cards, built on a foundation of quicksand.
For example, the “Bible” of modern mainstream psychology is the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), a book that attempts to gather and organize the insights of psychology in one place.
Arguably, it doesn’t succeed.
To boil the DSM down to a single sentence:
“We’ve noticed that some people seem to act in this way, that way, and another way, and it seems to be a problem, though we aren’t really sure why or what to do about it.”
(Anyone who has attempted to read the DSM would likely agree here.) If the DSM is the foundation of mainstream psychology, it seems safe to say that the foundation of mainstream psychology is made of straw.
Backrooms echoes this. The mysterious, supposedly all-knowing lab coat scientist who lurks in the background, watching everything through surveillance monitors, observing everything – the kind of seemingly omniscient figure who typically knows and explains what’s really happening from their side – seems to be a cognitive scientist who confesses that he knows nothing. He says, in so many words, “We’re fascinated by these problems, but we have no idea how to solve them.” He admits that they’re out of their depth.
This brings us back to Clark in therapy.
Clark’s predicament is that of being an depersonalized, unanchored (and technically homeless), struggling human soul at the wrong end of a depersonalizing method being used to systematically and impersonally examine his subjective experience, his emotions, his “I,” or his very self.
And unsurprisingly, it isn’t going well. His therapy sessions likely felt like wandering through endless empty rooms in his mind, exploring empty caverns of memory residue where emotions were once present, looking restlessly for…something. The metaphor is clear: therapy itself can sometimes seem like aimlessly wandering through the halls of a mind, searching for…something that isn’t there. (This could even be extended out to the idea of life itself seeming meaningless, or like a search for something that doesn't seem to exist.)
To be clear, the fault isn’t necessarily due the therapist. Mary, in some ways, seems nearly as much of a cog in the machine as Clark.
The fault lies in playing with forces we don’t entirely understand.
Ultimately, Mary – the therapist in Backrooms – as an “expert” author eventually confessed to her “client:” “I don’t know how to fix you.”
The therapist was never armed with the tools she needed to succeed. She was essentially standing on a battlefield holding rubber bands and a few broken crayons.
She was tasked with solving problems she was never truly trained to solve.
After all, if there is a “spiritual” component to human nature – and there is – then we’ll never be able to understand human nature without it.
Modern psychology doesn’t offer the tools to navigate this terrain.
It’s simply out of its depth.
Despite the heroic efforts of individual therapists, it doesn’t equip them with the knowledge or ability to solve the profound problems they’re tasked with confronting.
Its models of human nature are often inadequate.
This explains the “backrooms.”
When examining the unconscious without religion or any form of spirituality, the only tool we’re left to with is the intellect.
The intellect – that part of the mind that analyses and examines – just analyses and examines whatever is in its sights.
And it can do this endlessly. Everything can always be examined in greater detail. Every answer can give birth to new questions. Every opening in the labyrinth leads to more openings. In this sense, when examining the world in this way, by using the intellect only, there are no ultimate answers. Answers become impossible because of the method we’re using to search for them.
The intellect flattens things out in order to analyze them objectively. This means nearly everything “out there” exists on horizontal dimension only, like a sprawling building with an infinite number of rooms. But there are few real stairs, and every new opening is nearly another replica of what came before, slightly extended and distorted. There are hardly any depth, height, or vertical openings. The only dimension allowed is the endlessly horizontal.
And yet, another dimension seems to exist.
In the experience of endless flatland, something clearly seems off.
The terrain is marked by a profound absence, as if there’s supposed to be something or someone there – but that something or someone definitely isn’t there.
Its rooms are supposed to be filled with people and activity. But instead, they’re hollow. There’s only emptiness, seemingly caused by a dimension that seems to be missing.
That other dimension haunts the place.
It warps, twists, and bends everything – from walls and corridors to people – and throws everything out of whack.
It’s a sensation of something missing that can’t be found. It’s an absence – as in “someone should be here, but no one is here.” That leads to a nightmarish unending labyrinth of increasing distortion, absurdity, and senselessness.
Within these labyrinthine passages, there’s no activity of life, only dead artifacts and remnants of a dead past – things that were once involved in life, but are now discarded and abandoned. Life has moved on. To where? To…somewhere else.
It’s the architecture of alienation.
Wherever life is, it isn’t in there, in the memory banks.
This absence of what is all-important winds up with alienation from one another, ourselves, and eventually Reality itself (also described in The Lighthouse, here).
Of course, materialistic (atheistic) psychology sometimes tries to answer existential riddles or Big Questions – most especially the Question of “Why do we suffer?”
But when it does this, since it’s tightly constrained within bounds where theology, spirituality, or even philosophy aren’t allowed to trespass. (Double-blind studies only!) As a result, it typically winds up offering merely trite and mundane platitudes. For example – to use an example from the film – our problem is that we “get stuck in loops” where we try to solve certain problems by repeating the same solutions, over and over again.
-as if The Answer to The Problem of Life is, “Try something else!”
The entire approach is based on a cliché.
Even that “insight” is based on a platitude that Einstein never even said.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
(Why is Einstein even a factor in this? Perhaps because he’s one of the few figures who is nearly universally respected in an age where only scientists are allowed to be experts. (He’s the closest science comes to having a “high priest” or Pope.)
But still – even if Einstein had said it, he was a physicist, not a psychologist. And great physicists don’t necessarily make great psychologists or philosophers.)
It’s an inadequate definition of “insanity.”
If the definition above tries to define insanity, then its opposite would define “sanity.”
This means “sanity” would be defined as “the practice of doing different things in the hope of getting different results.”
(As a definition of sanity, that’s hardly inspiring or clarifying. It likely sounds more like word mush.)
A much better definition of sanity, in our humble opinion – explored here – is to be in touch with reality. And reality – assuming it is anything other than mere materialism or nihilism – includes a vertical dimension – a dimension of the sacred.
Without this dimension, depth psychology can become nightmare fuel.
Lacking an adequate model of human nature, the absence of any vertical dimension of spirituality or religion means psychology often becomes confined to an endless search for “the problem” that can lead to “the solution.”
In practice in therapy and pop-psychology, this often takes the form of a search for trauma.
“Trauma,” in this model, is blamed as the cause of suffering.
This can lead to an archaeological dig for a missing Rosetta Stone of trauma – a magical missing puzzle piece of some long-forgotten trauma – that will finally lead to happiness.
But once again, that approach uses an incomplete model.
At least for many, trauma isn’t the key to psychological health.
The trauma model of psychological health is often overused today as a generalized approach for everyone. But often, there is often no Rosetta Stone of trauma that will unlock a final restoration to health and happiness.
This key does exist, reportedly. But it lies elsewhere.
The search for that memory-to-heal-all-ills can risk leading to what Nietzsche described – and what Backrooms depicts – as “being devoured by some minotaur of conscience.”
In Backrooms, the sole moment of relief came from abandoning this model.
In a climactic scene, the therapist finally admits “I don’t know how to fix you.” (The confession: the mainstream scientific approach to solving human nature has failed.)
She then challenges Clark to take responsibility for himself instead of blaming other people or things such as his “brain”. (From Mary: “It isn’t ‘your brain’s’ fault! You are ‘your brain’!”)
Clark, to his credit, in a pivotal moment, does just that.
He essentially admits being responsible for his problems. And instead of feeling condemned by this, he feels relief. It was as if he had received forgiveness and absolution after a moment of confession – or, in a word, “repentance.”
This process is often the very opposite of the way modern psychology becomes nightmare fuel.
To recap: modern psychology sometimes encourages us to use the intellect to dissect ourselves endlessly, search for imaginary traumas, and blame external conditions for our suffering – all of which converts subjects into objects.
It’s a process where we objectivize ourselves and therefore dehumanize ourselves through a process of self-negation.
This process encourages us to blame our brains, genes, cultures, past traumas, oppressors, etc etc, for our problems – as if we are the victims of our own brains (genes, etc). This process narrows our real selves – our souls – into increasingly smaller and more constricted spaces.
Eventually, with the subject encircled and trapped by a dehumanizing objectivity that’s relentlessly closing in, it can feel like there’s no room left to move anymore. The walls become claustrophobic and seem to be closing in.
It’s as if the individual soul sometimes isn’t allowed in the modern world.
Selfies are welcome. Posing is welcome. Irony, sarcasm, and a posture of pessimism and soft nihilism are totally welcome.
But the actual human soul?
That's often something to keep hidden and safe from exposure.
If science makes everything objective, there’s no room for a human subject.
We’re allowed to be “consumers,” “participants,” “fans,” “viewers,” “voters,” “clients,” “taxpayers,” “customers,” and so on. But we aren’t allowed to be Mike, or Jen, or Lawrence, or ourselves at our most human.
The “minotaur of conscience” that risks devouring us is our false self – the summation of our efforts to conform to something that demands that we become what we aren’t.
In this way lies a great paradox of modern times:
Our modern science of human nature often prevents us from becoming fully human.
In this way, therapy fails.
The medicine that should cure us instead feeds the illness.
Clark’s brief moment of clarity is short-lived. It’s soon overtaken by “the pirate” – his sense of humiliation, failure, and self-hatred – that consumes his moment of clarity and ensures that its reign will continue.
“He is entering a labyrinth;
he is increasing a thousand-fold the dangers
which life already brings with it,
not the least of which is
the fact that no one’s eyes see
how and where he goes astray,
gets isolated,
and is torn to pieces
by some cavern-dwelling Minotaur of conscience.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
In the final haunting image, Mary herself became a memory. She tried to follow Clark into his subconscious, and wasn't able to "fix" him. The therapy failed, ended, and Mary only exists as a memory.
Beyond this point, we're on our own, which raises the key question.
Is there a “better solution”?
Backrooms is a horror-tragedy.
Clark doesn’t escape “the monster.” In this sense, Backrooms doesn’t offer an “answer.”
But is there something we can learn? Is there an answer for the rest of us?
For starters, we can try to avoid the hellscape of modern materialistic, atheistic psychology that offers “confession without absolution,” platitudes about bad habits and loops, trauma-hunting that’s eventually revealed as a vast quest for a snipe, and an endless searching through the dead caverns of our emotions and memories in hopes of finding the Fountain of Happiness.
Instead, for starters, we can adopt a better model of human nature.
Just as science contains an implicit philosophy, religion contains an implicit psychology.
That was explored here.
There’s a model of human nature baked into real religions. And these models can offer a much more comprehensive view of the riddle of human nature.
Scientific psychology is still incredibly young, having been around for roughly a century or so.
Yet before human nature existed as a “science,” humans weren’t haunted by flatland Kafka hellscapes. In fact, in some ways, they often seemed more psychologically healthy than many today.
Depth psychology requires models of human nature with depth.
If there is a spiritual component of human nature, then psychology will require an approach that encompasses spirituality rather than excluding it.
It might be the case that Freud was wrong, and what lies at the bottom of the unconscious isn't a monster, but something sacred.
Religion, for all its other flaws, offers depth.
It offers answers to the Big Questions of life. It offers a coherent philosophy or worldview that hangs together and encompasses all aspects of life, including meaning, happiness, anxiety, depression, coping with suffering, and all the rest.
It includes methods for making the unconscious conscious.
In their best forms, these methods are holistic, encompassing all heights and depths of the human experience, and are arguably much more effective than the Frankensteinian, purely man-made techniques often available today.
Everything Problems require Everything Solutions.
Effective religion or no-nonsense spirituality promises – and often delivers – exactly that.
The trick is to find the real thing instead of substitutes.
There are plenty of substitutes, decoys, and counterfeits.
But experiential spirituality, combined with philosophical rigor, a steady diet of spiritual exercises, and a contemplative practice, geared toward the ultimate goal of awakening, theosis, or union with God as part of a larger spiritual renaissance – in short, a wholesome regimen of existential fitness – offers something Backrooms doesn’t.
It offers hope.