The definition of hell is: On your last day on Earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become. ~ Anonymous
Twenty-two years ago I was invited to the premiere of “Saw” and after nearly fainting in my seat, I exited the theater never to return to the horror genre. That was my first and last attempt. Today, if I require horror, I simply read the front page of The New York Times.
A patient told me that the new film “Backrooms” was “very psychological” and my curiosity was piqued.
Forty years ago I entered (yes, entered – it’s a room) Marcel Duchamp’s masterpiece Étant donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Professor Philip Rieff had explained that the work was a temptation to glimpse into the horror of one’s own unconscious. Peepholes drilled into an old barn door lure visitors across a mysterious antechamber to peer through… on the other side lies a dead, mangled nude woman, sprawled in a stream and clutching a lighted gas lamp in broad daylight. The horror is not what we see but what we experience – the repulsion, the curiosity, the allure, the questioning, the shock, the grief…
“Backrooms” operates similarly: like the cabinet portal in “Being John Malkovich,” a wall in the basement of a furniture store is a portal, a descent into the unconscious where we are confronted with that which our minds have hitherto forbidden us to see. Our minds have good reason for hiding certain traumas from our conscious daily lives – the images are too disturbing – if the repression is undone so are we. And trust me, you do not wish to become psychologically undone. We can usually only get hints of what is repressed through parapraxes, dreams, and repetitions that require interpretation by a skilled analyst.
Directed by the youngest director in A24 history – someone who has been on the planet 1/3 of the time that I have – “Backrooms” follows Clark, a failed architect and now a furniture store owner struggling with alcoholism and played with soulful conviction by Chiwetel Ejiofor. When the portal in the basement of his showroom entices him in, Clark is swallowed into a labyrinth of jaundiced corridors, stairwells that lead nowhere, and rooms that replicate themselves infinitely. His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline — played by the Renate Reinsve with hauntingly contrived intelligence — follows him into this netherworld.
What director Kane Parsons has built with writer Will Soodik, set designer Danny Vermette, and cinematographer Jeremy Cox is nothing less than a spatial rendering of Jacques Lacan’s concept of “subjective destitution.” Lacan famously proposed that “the unconscious is structured like a language” — like being the operative word. Parsons has the ingenuity to translate that structure into the language of architecture: into a place you enter and can even check out, but you can never leave. The endless repetition of jaundiced corridors, stairways to nowhere, rooms of jumbled furniture — it is a mise-en-scène of self-loathing, the floor plan of a life half-lived.
Clark is not simply lost in a building; he is attacked by his own unrealized potential, ambushed by his moribund dreams. And his therapist Mary refuses to absolve him. She informs him that the dismal state of his life is the product of his own poor choices and blunt instruments. This honesty, in the economy of Clark’s unconscious, is punishable by a fate worse than death. Mary escapes the monster only to discover that she too is now imprisoned, awaiting judgment like the characters in Sartre’s No Exit — condemned not by fire and brimstone but by the collapse of fantasy and the intolerable confrontation of who one has failed to become.
Thus the definition of hell holds: the person you became meets the person you could have become. “Backrooms” makes this encounter visceral. The film presents the unconscious not as something we have but as something that inhabits us and can ultimately destroy us.
Luckily this time, “the horror, the horror” did not cause me to almost faint; instead I was entranced by this comprehensive vision and the psychological portrait offered by these genius young filmmakers. I daresay that the film posits that nobody can help you but yourself, that the monster appears when/if subjective destitution resolves to utter nihilism. “Backrooms” provokes audiences to break out of victimhood and escape from the hell of unrealized potential. And in that sense, like Duchamp’s “Étant Donnés”, it is a masterpiece.
