More backrooms rambling, spoilers below
I really like that the Captain Clark still life had this sort of distraught, terrified look on his face. It would have been easy to make him look angry or give him some kind of scary facial expression, but instead he looks almost pitiful…. The fact that while his body is a lot more warped than the other still lives we see but his face is less warped than the others also (correct number of eyes, nose, mouth etc), it really makes him stand out as different.
And that’s kind of sad isn’t it? Like Mary pointed out at the start- he’s alone. Even his Still Life copy is alone, different from the others for some inexplicable reason…
And the fact that Clark and his Still Life are able to co exist with one another for a time only really hammers this in- he’s so alone his only company is LITERALLY himself, and even then, not for long, as his own actions become self destructive (again in the most LITERAL way)
Maybe you shouldn’t really feel sorry for him- he’s someone who explicitly doesn’t want to change, who only goes to therapy for the validation of being told “it’s not your fault”, and it’s implied that he may have been more than just verbally abusive to his wife, but it IS tragic that it got to this point to begin with.
Quitting drinking cold turkey, finding an impossible version of reality, getting his employees killed via his own negligence and eagerness for “proof”, and then being confronted with his own twisted doppelgänger, it’s no wonder he behaved the way he did when Mary found him in the backrooms, I don’t think anyone would really come out of that mentally unscathed, let alone someone with pre existing issues and a drinking problem.
He’s serving as a reflection of Mary- they both continue to dwell on their past, for him, that moment of being thrown out of his house, for Mary, her circumstances with her mentally ill, abusive mother who kept her trapped within her family home. And while she was able to somewhat move on, use her experiences to try and help others, Clark was still trapped in that moment, looping it over and over and over again.
We see Mary stuck in that loop too to some extent- but seemingly not of her own volition, seeing her childhood home within dreams, possibly triggered by seeing her childhood home torn down.
Where Clark chooses to stay in the Backrooms, Mary is forced to stay.
And even after escaping, she finds herself trapped once again- reliving the same trauma of being trapped within a place again, and again, and again.
It’s a bleak ending for both of them.
Clark, a man who is visibly struggling, supposedly finds his happy place, escapism made manifest, a place he can be free of his own struggles, but his own self destructive tendencies destroy him.
Mary, who outwardly appears more composed and successful, is once again living her own childhood nightmare, kept against her will, unable to leave, unable to open that window once more.
Neither of them get a happy ending. But the Backrooms will remember them at their worst. Forever.
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