*/****
starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett
written by Will Soodik
directed by Kane Parsons
by Walter Chaw There are a couple of ways to approach Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, the latest addition to the Naïve Wave of films made by filmmakers raised on new media in online spaces. The first is to acknowledge that we’ve had a revolution like this before, when the film brats at the end of the ’60s emerged as the first generation of directors primarily reared on cinema instead of literature and theatre, so even this shift–though it seems retrograde for some of the oldsters in the room (okay, me)–is not the end of the world. It may, however, be the end of understanding movies as a product of tutelage in the language of film. Editing, cinematography, screenwriting–all of that has changed and will continue to evolve. Of course, one of the things to love about film as a medium is its elasticity, isn’t it? It makes perfect sense that the rumblings of revolution are happening in horror, that most flexible and reactive of genres.
The other way is to decry Backrooms for being derivative–but can something be derivative if the creator is unaware of other works that have trodden the same ground with innovation and introspection? There’s another word for it. Ignorant, but that might be too pejorative. Callow works, but that’s condescending. I certainly don’t mean either in regards to Parsons; I do think both adjectives apply to me. It’s the twist at the end of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend: realizing too late that culture has outpaced you and, in your crusade against this, you have become the Bad Guy. I’m the condescending one. The 20-year-old Parsons is just a kid, smart and earnest. He has come to the same conclusions as hundreds of artists before him, but he doesn’t know that, and it doesn’t really take away from his accomplishment or theirs. Would Backrooms have been better if he’d had the life to know what he did and didn’t need to explain? I honestly don’t know. I probably would’ve liked it more, but I’m so fucking old I look for nuance in The Cat in the Hat. Parsons has crafted a lament that speaks loudly to people of his generation, or at his level of scholarship. They will hold up this Zippo in the wilderness as evidence that he is the sole artifactor of fire. It doesn’t matter what I know; Parsons is the one who understands how to communicate in this time and place. It’s too bad. I could warn them, if only I spoke Hovitos.
So let’s approach Backrooms the second way first (the only way I really know how to), by comparing it to films and literature filtered through my experience. Backrooms is the children’s version of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, a personally formative masterpiece about the dehumanization of the 9-to-5 grind, the insignificance of the individual ego, and the constant threat of disappearing off the face of the earth and no one giving a shit. In Backrooms, our hero is Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a miserable furniture salesman and failed husband who lives in his showroom because his wife’s kicked him out of the house. Mary (Renate Reinsve), his therapist, wants him to do role-play to provoke his rage and unpack the unresolved trauma that has inspired it. After multiple seasons of “In Treatment” and thousands of identical sequences in movies as disparate as Vampire’s Kiss and What About Bob?, it’s hard for me to take the obviousness of these therapy scenes seriously. I am in the minority, I get that. I don’t need that much exposition because I’ve seen The Babadook, and I didn’t need it much then, either. I’m not smarter than these filmmakers, I’ve just seen more movies. A lot more. A lot lot lot more. I understand this is an accomplishment that is neither laudable nor admirable. It makes me harder to please. I often wish I weren’t.
Approaching Backrooms the first way, now: it’s neat. That’s it. It does the William Sleator/Cube thing, but yellow and shallow. One night, Clark falls into a liminal space in the basement of his store. It’s an infinity of hallways lit sickly by fluorescents and drawn like a linear perspective exercise for first-year art students. The younglings have figured out what everyone except tech bros and other Republicans figures out after a while: that the only expectation of them is to anonymously perform the dictates of a machine they didn’t build to enrich men they don’t admire. They don’t want to do this. Backrooms is Kafka. It is Grzegorz Krolikiewicz’s The Dancing Hawk. It is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which also has a sequence of endless corridors that Gilliam plays like a Marx Brothers joke, along with an anti-establishment hero who repairs ducts without a contract and is swallowed whole by a storm of papers. Backrooms‘ liminal spaces are like Hell in Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus, a labyrinth of file cabinets, or Leviathan in Hellbound: Hellraiser II, a cold, blue, mathematical inferno. I’m doing it again, aren’t I? If you don’t know any of these references, then Backrooms didn’t bother you because Backrooms being about how we are diminished and destroyed by a capitalist system that isn’t failing but in fact working at peak efficiency is a valuable message worth telling. With it, Parsons has joined an expansive conversation spanning the work of many great artists and thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The rest is my cross to bear.
That Parsons did it with a tool forged in the withering fire of millions of views and tens of thousands of Internet comments is neither a benefit nor a detriment. It simply is. Scorsese, Spielberg, no one before this generation received the kind of instant feedback, and in such numbers, as the Naïve Wave does when they craft successful YouTube content. Thousands of responses is one hell of a lot of notes from a screening audience watching your work voluntarily. They fly in fast, too, the opinions and suggestions. The crucible was never this hot in the history of any art form, and the things emerging from it are strange, yes, but already tested for tensile strength. Indeed, some real gems have emerged from this wave of filmmakers. (The Philippou brothers’ first two features, for instance.) Then there are things like I Saw the TV Glow and Aftersun, from chimeric creators reared on both old and new media and thus functioning as gateways to things to come. Anyway, Clark wanders around mapping out the backrooms and tells his skeptical therapist about them, and then he discovers a domestic tableau in which he gets to try to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind his childhood red notebooks. Mary, who has her own laundry list of issues, follows suit. It’s all a government conspiracy or the government is covering it up or… Something the government. Mark Duplass joins a cast of ringers meant to lend gravitas to the film’s expository soliloquies.
There’s an episode of the original “Twilight Zone” I saw when I was six or seven years old that I’ve thought about nearly every day since, called “Little Girl Lost”. In it, a little girl falls out of bed and through an interdimensional portal that has somehow opened, invisibly, in her wall. Her parents hear her cries and figure out what’s happened. They draw a door on the wall, as Clark does in Backrooms, and the girl’s dad steps through it to find her just as the portal’s beginning to close. (Poltergeist riffs on this shamelessly.) It’s stuck with me for decades, I think, because the idea that you could fall through the cracks of reality is existentially horrifying. For everyone. Centring that fear on hating your job in a world that doesn’t make much sense anymore is brilliant, and it doesn’t make it any less so if Parsons arrived here without prior knowledge of what came before. Good for him. Imagine the Backrooms that never leaves the backrooms. The one that doesn’t do the flashbacks, that doesn’t have the adults-talking-to-adults stuff like:
Clark: I’m not lonely, I have customers.
Mary: I didn’t say “lonely,” I said “alone.”
Clark: I hurt people. I don’t mean to, maybe it’s just the way I’m wired. Maybe I deserve to be alone.
Mary: Do you think anyone deserves to be alone?
Clark: I dunno, but maybe it’s not such a bad thing.
Mary: Being alone feels deeply ingrained. I understand… When we’ve experienced hurt, again and again, we start to expect it. It’s like, “Oh, I know this path! I know where it goes!” So, are you interested in forging a new path?
A new path. I get it. I totally get it. Please stop. I mean, no, go ahead, someone needs to hear this, I suppose. Not me, but someone. But, look, shouldn’t the therapist be interested in the “I hurt people/I don’t mean to” part, or is this what young men believe about men in general and themselves in particular? I ask because Curry Barker’s Obsession is another Naïve Wave hit that makes an inveterate rapist a good guy and martyr. Both Barker and Parsons, by the way, ugly-murder a Wasian girl in their films (the only women-of-colour in either), but they’re good guys who don’t mean it, right? I want to mention that Clark’s furniture business is called “Ottoman Empire,” as I can’t figure out who the butt of that joke is. It only matters because it seems out of character for Clark, who would like to be respected yet dresses like a pirate for a commercial–pirates, incidentally, having no immediate connection for me with the Turks, or with little stools to put my feet on. So is Clark making that pun because he’s an idiot? Or is Parsons so dismissive of Gen-X 9-to-5ers that he demeans Clark with a cheap dad joke Clark wouldn’t make?
Ultimately, its childishness is what makes Backrooms a tough pill to swallow–more so than its roughness, its obviousness. There is about it a sense of unearned superiority. Clark deserves better. Mary deserves a whole lot better. I thought back to the Catherine Keener scene in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, when she tells our brattish hero to go easy on his parents after hearing him rail against them because he looks like he was loved. Clark and Mary, as portrayed in Backrooms, are how angry, precocious children perceive parents who are frustratingly imperfect. What’s that Mark Twain quote? “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” It occurs to me that if you removed all the stuff speculating at what grown-ups go through–the extent to which they “sell out” by trying to afford food and a place to live–and then also excised the world-building and painfully obtuse metaphors designed to illustrate blunt points, that Backrooms could make a swell YouTube short or a series of TikToks or… Oh.
