Backrooms Spoilers under the cut because I don’t see enough people talking about Mary Kline’s arc (I just realized how much I wrote after I wrote it holy shit)
Mary is such a tragic figure; borne from a subconscious desire to save her mother, she went into psychology to help others and ultimately unlock those answers. “The Window Within” is such an amazing choice for her book name, referencing the window she’d try to look through as a child and was subsequently torn away from by her mom at the worst moments of her illness; she wants to see the world outside her trauma and help others do the same.
In many ways, Mary’s life is as empty as Clark’s; we see that, despite some minor success as a psychologist with her books and tapes, she has nothing else really going for her. House parties can’t fill that void, since when she saw a mother and child interacting, she quickly left to be alone (literally in her “back room”) to take anxiety medication in the midst of an episode.
She spends late nights on her couch eating dinner and staring at a TV playing her infomercial ad (and I believe her house doubles as a her office, so she, too, literally sleeps where she works), the same as Clarke in a bed inside his furniture store. Neither of them can escape their trauma (Clark’s drinking habits and Mary’s concrete handprint from her mother) or their workplace.
The difference with Mary is that she’s put herself in a position to help others, and needs to keep that facade up at all times. She’s unable to speak her true thoughts because that’s not what psychologists do; they’re supposed to guide others to find their own way out. But she herself is lost, like the blind leading the blind, and when she’s told by Clark that he “found his window”, it sets off alarms but it must’ve also piqued her curiosity; what answer did he find in those weird, endless rooms he was talking about?
Then she discovers that his answer, in fact, was to double down on his worst aspects, to embrace the trauma that’s trapped him. “I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.” The kitchen facade of his Backrooms home, the Still Lifes he’s gathered around him, the fact that one of them is (heavily implied to be) a distorted version of his ex-wife; wallowing and ruminating on one’s trauma wasn’t the answer she was looking for.
The psychological exercise, the roleplay of Clark’s fateful night, is repeated. The first time they did this was on her terms, in the sterility of her office; safe and divorced from emotion, she spoke her lines and allowed Clark to express his misgivings, then commented neutrally. “How does this make you feel?” She can’t make her own feelings known on the situation, she is acting as a platform to give Clark a voice to his emotions.
Now, this roleplay is on Clark’s terms; trapped and restrained and forced to play the role of the wife wearing the scalp of his ex-wife’s Still Life (she cannot see them as he does, as husks of misremembered people, she sees the act as horrifying and deranged), she initially goes along with it, telling him what he wants to hear (fawning is one of the forms of survival response), until she can no longer remain passive. She breaks her typical routine and give Clark her honest opinion, something that could’ve reached him if only she’d been allowed to (Clark calling out her terrible poker face was illuminating, how long has he seen through her?):
He whines, he refuses to take responsibility for his own actions, he displaces blame on others, he copes with this through drinking, he refuses to be wrong. His response? “Are you saying this is my fault?” And she reaffirms this. Then, she tells him, “I can’t save you!” [only saw the film once, I’m probably forgetting stuff]
And through verbalizing this, she stares in shock, more so at herself; she found her answer. The truth at the heart of her trauma. She couldn’t save her mother. In fact, it wasn’t her job to save her mother; she was just a child. In that situation, her mother could only have saved herself and had an obligation to not let Mary be trapped in it.
Then Clark goes, “But I don’t think I want to change.” And she replies, “Then don’t. But let me go.” She speaks to her captor, both Clark and, subconsciously, her mother. She wants to move forward from her childhood trauma, she found her window and wishes to go through it. Clark, delighted at her permission to remain in his self-destruction, frees her.
Then, Pirate Clark walks in. It’s the manifestation of his trauma and anger and his worst aspects given form, the monster that’s been chasing him and the others through the backrooms, and we see how the other Still Life’s react to him. His ex-wife proxy tries to flee, runs to the corner screaming and ramming herself into the walls; the other two similarly flip out. Clark, with his new understanding of himself, and the revelation he received from Mary, tries to reason with Pirate Clark. “She said we don’t have to change! It’s okay!” He thinks he can have a life here, in the Backrooms, and tries to placate his own trauma.
But Pirate Clark, I believe, is not just his worst traits and trauma, but the innate desire to change and seek help. The look on his face is one of anguish and helplessness, he reflects Clark’s desire to find a way out. So when Pirate Clark is confronted with Clark’s decision, to stay the same, to stagnate, Pirate Clark consumes him, symbolizing Clark letting his trauma consume and kill him.
But Mary wants to escape, she found her window, now she needs to go through it. After a long chase and confrontation, she finds her salvation; she runs into Async and they extract her from the Backrooms.
What’s so interesting about the end scene is that in many ways, despite breaking the chains of her trauma (the concrete piece she used against Pirate Clark), she found herself back at the beginning; trapped in a room, looking at the windows like when she was a child. It reflects her last moments with her mom, who was committed to a psychiatric hospital and strapped to a chair with a dead stare on her face. She knows she won’t be free after what she went through. The scientists will scrutinize and interrogate her, with an unknown fate in the future. She couldn’t escape her childhood after all. These fears and this new trauma manifests in the Backrooms. Her demolished house, her neighborhood, and even the very room she’s in, appears, and with it her very own Still Life: a woman trapped in a chair.
I’m sure I’ve missed a whole bunch and I need to rewatch Backrooms again to see what I missed (memory is a tricky thing, you see), but I absolutely loved the movie and can’t wait until it’s out. Once everything improves, I’ll eventually buy a physical copy of the movie.
