Why are there so many people certain Clark Backrooms is a terrible person. I've never owned a furniture store that I hate and I've never smashed glass in front of my wife but I found him deeply sympathetic/tragic. I'm sure he was absolutely wretched to be around in the five minutes his wife got to see him every day. More than that, I'm sure his depression over his lot in life and his constant vagueing that she was partially the reason for his lackluster career spread his sadness like an illness. I'm sure his ex-wife is better off without him. That being said, Clark isn't wrong when he says it sucks that he paid for their house and she's the one who took it in the divorce. It sucks he paid for her education and now that investment is gone. That being said (x2), Clark is clearly jealous he's paying for his wife's dream career when he feels like he can't pursue his own. Key phrase "feels like," because being in a rut doesn't mean that Clark is completely barred from pursuing architecture in other ways. Instead of drinking after work he could have poked around for contract jobs. He could have made friends with other architects bare minimum just for for the sake of engaging conversation.
Easier said than done, though, no? Why aren't you doing your dream job? Why aren't you happy? The economy? Money? Your family? Inexperience? Mental health? Just the way you were wired? There's a reason why the Backrooms as a movie and a concept is popular right now. Fear of corporate monoculture, the decay of richer eras bleeding into the current year. People are walking out of the Backrooms movie into dead malls and making jokes, but its fear ethos is built around the dread that both our inner lives and the world have become stagnant, absurd and beyond our understanding.
Something that sticks out to me about Clark is how much he sincerely wants to be a changed person. He pins all of his hope on therapy working. He goes to it consistently, he listens to Mary, reiterates her "open window" metaphor, goes to her first when he discovers the backrooms. We also see him listening to Mary's audiobook. Clark is trying to use Mary to improve. He really believes in her. And then we see Mary in an old home, on an old couch, framed by the camera in a sort of depressing way and staring absently at her audiobook advertised on TV. Mary doesn't seem too enthused about her own methods, but Clark is depending on her. It's so, so important that when Mary breaks down and shouts at Clark during the dinner scene, this genuinely gets him to pause. He asks her how to change, and she comes to the conclusion that she doesn't have an answer, informed by the mother she also couldn't fix. I don't blame Mary personally or anything, but she fails Clark, and she fails Clark because she can't leave her own mental loop that she's been stuck in since she was a child.
I think the Backrooms presents an issue it refuses to solve, probably because, like Mary, it can't. How do you fix someone like Clark in a world that's built like this? How do you fix someone who is doing real, progressively worse harm, when you have the same issues they do? When it feels like everyone in the world is suffering from something similar? Mary shouting at Clark is cathartic because Clark has just done a series of insane and assholeish things, but it's also cathartic because "then don't change!" is a real answer, and we're afraid to admit it's a comforting one we'd like to give in to.
The ending scene is so haunting because we see Mary crack the symbol of her mental loop, and despite that, Mary is yet again sitting across from someone in a chair, trying to discuss her feelings, beneath a sky she consistently remembers as bright blue with bright, white clouds. This is how we see her replicated in the backrooms.
Anyways. Feel worse for Clark, ok?
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