Things Are About to Get Weird
Backrooms was just the beginning
Back in business. Thank you to the paid subscribers who joined during my break.
A criticism often levied at contemporary young actors is that they have a “face that’s seen an iPhone.” Backrooms is made by a face that’s never not seen an iPhone. It is, by virtue of Kane Parsons’ age, the most online film to ever trouble the US box office.
It shows. Plenty of critics have rightly noted that Backrooms is split between the eerie liminality of the backrooms themselves (effective!) and the traumacore, screenwriting 101 plot (clunky!) What this overlooks is that the film’s most conventional elements are precisely what make it feel so weird.
Liminality isn’t new, and the backrooms sequences are indebted to Lynch and Kubrick, among others. They are well-executed, but they aren’t that odd if you’ve seen similar movies before. Meanwhile, the film’s attempt to situate itself in an analogue 1990s world of self-help tapes, camcorders and fax machines is so uncanny, so divorced from any tangible sense of what a pre-internet world was like, that Reddit is awash with theories that the entire movie takes place in the backrooms.
Until recently, every movie we saw on the big screen carried some traces of the Before Times in its cultural DNA. They bled through in how characters used technology, how they spoke, how they interacted with the world.
Now, things are changing. I’m 33 years old, so hardly over the hill, although my knees have started to go and I can no longer handle a hangover. But I’m old enough to know what a pre-ubiquitous-internet world was. I remember having to ask my parents whether they were expecting any phone calls before dialling up to play games on Miniclip. Even when I was a student in the 2010s, I remember us being mildly inconvenienced, rather than existentially terrified, at the prospect of not having wi-fi in our new house for several days.