SPOILERS AHEAD, I’ll be talking about a theory of mine :)
So, first of all, the Backrooms gets personified. Like, a lot. It “remembers” things. “Makes” things. It— especially to people like Clark, who’ve been in there for a long time— is often seen as and referred to as something alive. Even in the release trailer, the critic comment “It felt like the walls breathed” was chosen to be there. Breathed. Like an organism.
There’s a theory that the ocean is a living being. That is to say, a superorganism. Currents pull water from one side of the Earth to the other, and that water circles back to its original position every thousand years or so. Like a pulse. Wastes from ocean-dwelling organisms are almost entirely used, either rotting and becoming part of the sand bed or being eaten. There is a small percentage that we literally don’t know what happens to it because it just… disappears. It’s a TINY percentage, but yes, some organic matter and energy is lost in the ocean— as if digested by it. Phytoplankton act like antibodies in an immune system, breaking down pollutants. It’s a very interesting theory, I’m summing things up in a very basic manner but if you’d like to look more into it, go research!! It’s super cool!
Now, back to the Backrooms. Through both the movie and the YouTube series, the Backrooms is HEAVILY likened to and associated with the sea. Descriptors and metaphors such as “an endless ocean” etc are common. Beach/ocean imagery can be found in both sketches from the series and in the mural found by Mary in the film. Even Cap’n Clark’s as a furniture store is pirate-themed! There is beach imagery EVERYWHERE! Clark literally sets out into dangerous, uncharted areas with his “crew.” Like a pirate at sea.
What I’m saying is, I think the Backrooms is a superorganism. It is very much alive. Perhaps not fully conscious, not in the way we perceive consciousness, but it acts like a body. The still lifes are antibodies, keeping out foreign invaders— humans. And, of course, it’s capable of mimicry. Describing the Backrooms is like telling someone who has never seen a dog about them, and then asking them to draw one. Things are off. The idea is there, but because they’ve never seen one, there’s things missing. The Backrooms does the same with our reality. It “hears” about it, but doesn’t “see” it. It tries to recreate what it “knows” about. And, of course, there’s things missing. Things wrong.
I should say, I’m not well versed on Backrooms theories. This may have existed for a while, I may be just… slow to realize. But the connection to the ocean-superorganism theory is absolutely fascinating to me.
Can. Can you tell I love this film? Because I LOVE this film.
Okay so there’s this new theory that the Backrooms movie and the YouTube series itself exists entirely in the Backrooms. Or at least a very highly detailed plane of existence in the Backrooms. That our world, maybe even our universe, is just another misremembered room in the backrooms.
And the film provides a number of subtle hints that this may be the case.
1. The circuit breaker in the furniture store has clipped switches that shouldn’t exist there. As far as we’ve seen up until now, geometry doesn’t clip through things in the real world. That’s only a feature of places that exist in the backrooms.
2. Captain Clark’s furniture store sign on the outside of the building has two swords for no reason. Why does his building have a sign with a pirate holding two swords out of one hand? That’s not how swords work. Why would that sort of detail exist? That’s the sort of thing that happens when the backrooms misremembers things.
3. The sky and framing of some of the shots in the real world seem artificial. Especially the shot of the apartments Clark goes to when he reaches out to get Kat and her boyfriend. That shot and that framing reminds me of the way the backrooms are filmed and it feels wrong.
4. The fact that the furniture store itself has a permanent portal to the back rooms open. We know that null zones exist. That there are spaces where the backrooms butts up against our reality. But outside of the threshold at Asynch, we’ve never seen anSTABLE one. All previous examples the null zones are volatile and unpredictable. Having this weirdly stable portal in the basement of a furniture store, a space already feeing like it’s in the backrooms, feels like it’s just an extension of the backrooms doesn’t it?
5. Similarly the fact that Kat gets trapped behind a wall and from her perspective it’s a glass window, but from Clark’s perspective it’s a tiled room, seems to indicate that these sorts of stable portal like spaces exist within the backrooms.
6. When the Asynch employee is interrogating Mary at the end of the film he says “how did you get in here?” That’s a strange choice of wording, no? This is after she’s been supposedly taken OUT of the backrooms. Why would he ask her how she got IN here when she’s not IN the backrooms anymore? I get you’re supposed to assume he means “how did you enter the backrooms” but this is a film by someone who is VERY careful about every single detail, no matter how tiny it may be. I find it hard to believe that line was just overlooked and we aren’t supposed to read into it.
Maybe our world, the place in Asynch. Maybe that’s reality. But that does beg the question of… was the world Mary and Clark came from the SAME reality? Or were they versions of people who exist in backrooms? Was the entire film set in a high level backrooms space and these are the copied versions of Mary and Clark just venturing deeper into the backrooms unaware of their existence? Is that why Asynch is so terrified of Mary when they pull her out? Is she proof that there are layers of consciousness in the backrooms that is indistinguishable from their own reality?
7. And probably the most important aspect of the film is the ending. The fact that the Backrooms remembers a version of Mary, disfigured, sitting in a chair in a room. How can the Backrooms make that if it’s not iterating on something that already exists in the Backrooms to being with? That’s its whole deal. The more it tries to remember the more it forgets and gets things wrong.
I dunno how I feel about this theory. But I gotta tell you ever since watching the film and thinking about it, it’s starting to click together more and more for me.
Edit: OH YEAH! Also… is that why Mary’s mother was so terrified of the outside world? Did she become aware of the world being a copy of reality and understand that they were all entities of some kind? Is that why her psychosis was so acute? Was she really crazy or just aware?
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