The Backrooms from the Front Room

 

I just went to a matinee with my two kids (15 and 21) to see “Backrooms”.  The photo that gave birth to this movie has been on the internet for at least a few years and looks to be an empty retail space with various branching rooms all illumined by halogen lights behind the rectangular light covers of a drop ceiling.  The walls are a kind of yellowish green color and the carpet is uniformly beige.  The image became part of the “liminal space” craze during the pandemic.

This image so intrigued me when I first saw it that I screen captured it, superimposed an elongated image of myself on it, and wrote a poem based on the feeling it gave me.  What I find so fascinating about this particular image and this particular phenomenon is that it pulled from me a kind of premise for the poem that closely mirrored that of the movie.

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[Spoiler Alert]

In the movie a man is seeing a therapist and attempting to work through the incident of separating from his ex-wife that has gotten him stuck psychologically-speaking and unable to move on with his life and achieve his goal of being an architect.  Instead, he owns and runs a sad used furniture store that uses a mixed metaphor of being both a pirate theme and a sultan theme (ottomans - get it?).  He has little insight into what is driving him, which makes interacting with his therapist frustrating.

The electricity in his store starts doing weird things with the lights flickering and he has an electrician look at the breaker box only to find it is fine, except for three oddly placed red breaker switches that have been added to it at the bottom.  These extra switches do not appear to do anything.  Later when he is alone he flips all of the breakers off and the red switches on.  He notices a glowing anomaly on the basement wall that turns out to be a hidden doorway to the “Backrooms”.

With time and exploration he finds these mostly empty rooms and hallways are littered in places with things (both animate and inanimate) from his life to include a kind of personification of his dark side that roams the place sowing terror.  We also learn that there is an outside group that is monitoring things within the Backrooms via video cameras and have knowledge of the existence of other portals cropping up for unknown reasons.  They are studying this phenomenon and their representative admits they don’t know what it is or what it is for.

It quickly became clear to me through the main character’s experiences that the Backrooms are concretizing things from his unconscious mind as understood in psychoanalytic terms and giving them physical form.  These are things that might only come to conscious awareness through dreams or free associating with a psychoanalyst.  It is like a movie of his repressed trauma becoming real.  The inanimate objects in the Backrooms and the Backrooms themselves provide an uncanny feeling, but the animate objects provide the possibility of real danger and even death.  

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And so I come back to the poem I wrote after first seeing the Backrooms image and adding my elongated image.  The style of the empty rooms gave me a sense of nostalgia, but their emptiness gave me a sense of loneliness and melancholy.  It had me thinking of memory and the repression of memory in regards to traumas that might have occurred in childhood.  That would explain both the nostalgia and the emptiness.  My frightening form that appears too tall is the distortion trauma can bring about but in a visualized way, ie, in metaphor.

This is my way of understanding the Backrooms (unconscious mind) phenomenon as understood and interpreted from the front room (conscious mind).