an inverted monolith

 It's always postgame here at the Echolocution desk.

 

So I'm re-viewing Backrooms, back to front, for no reason other than boredom, really.

 

This was worth watching in the theatre, mainly for the sense of scale.  Without the Big Screen, this could easily be a webisode.  What I failed to pick up on, when we watched it, was the truly subtle shit.  Like the Kubrick.  Not the Shining references-- that's as on the surface as the overlay of the Red Room onto the Backrooms.  No, it's the Monolith:

The monolith is all over this thing.  And not just the implied dimensions of the hole in things that the Monolith represents--  the monolith, inverted.  Look at that top shot, of the abyss the door is perched over, and the stairs leading up.  That's this 2001 shot, turned inside out:

 

No naked vacuum of space above, no structurally sound archaeological dig & secure ground below, and a sadistically ordinary household door with a petflap, lording over it all.  That's a really, really wildly interesting inversion, to me.  Because it says something and it's mute, all in one.  Like the monolith.  Like the phenomena of the backrooms, its actual pop culture ubiquity.

 

We choose art because it reflects something in us.  Art, like our friend the monolith, is the o.g. black mirror.  And there's no small amount of art that goes into figuring out why an image Speaks, and what it's saying.  In this instance, for me, it's all about capital, baby.  The backrooms is about what america is, and has been since before my grandparents were inclined to have kids.  It's a machine for living in, and getting lost in, which only knows how to propogate the images it steals, and it's increasingly shoddy, slapdash, and surreal.  And the way you get there is by stumbling through a door you either didn't realize was there, or, by falling through an opening that wasn't all that hidden or structurally sound to begin with.

Capitalism, and its discontents...

 

I've heard a lot of chatter about the Still Lifes in the backrooms being a metaphor for the AI bullshit that's drawn all the flies, and yeah, sure.  But AI is just capitalism, too.  The material reality of AI is that it's just a tool, and the tool's utility is down to our ability to imagine uses for it beyond, y'know, cannibalizing everyone & everything it has ever brushed against.  It's an outgrowth of capitalism, that's all.  It's not the Dominant Metaphor for how much America sucks, even if it is in the running for top five examples.

 

No, at the end of things, the backrooms are the monolith:  a dark slab of potential, containing anything we care to envision.  We like to pretend we can envision Infinity, Eternity, and the Silence of God in all their terrible, meaningful aspects, but the fact is that Void of Potential & its Projected Contents will stun and belittle us and leave us feeling very old and alone with unkind, inevitable death.

Because...  That is the end of 2001.  Starchild notwithstanding.

 

Because there's nothing for that weird, isolated foundling to stand on.

Lest I sound like there's no Happy Ending, well--  there was.  In the original book version of 2001.  (Has that been revised by Clarke & his estate?  I've only read the original novelization.)  The starchild returns to earth and takes out our nuclear missile defense network and all the satellites attached to it.

Kubrick cut that shit.  And Kane Parsons doesn't leave us in any less enigmatic of a place.  Those final images, my friends.  Instead of a sinless, reborn infant wombed by naked space, we're left with a fragmented (therapist's!) self-image, adrift in a non-place.  Tell me that isn't saying something very specific & true about the involuted maze america is beginning to recognize itself as.

Yeah, yeah, spoilers:  NOBODY GETS OUT.

Is The Backrooms a great movie?  No.  But my god, it's full of sta