What The Backrooms Teaches Us about Sin, Human Nature, and Our Search for Meaning
Film production studio A24 may have the biggest, surprise hit of the summer with Backrooms, a suspense/horror film directed by 20-year-old YouTuber turned Hollywood director Kane Parsons. The concept of the backrooms originated over seven years ago on an internet forum when the image of a vacant hobby store went viral for being just a little bit off-putting and creepy. Now millions of people are watching the film and talking about the backrooms. The movie–and the backrooms lore–says a lot about human nature and provides Christians with a great opportunity to show how the Gospel remains relevant, even in an age of meme-based movies.
The Backrooms as a Metaphor for What Architecture Can Do to Us
The backrooms are unsettling because the spaces don’t make much sense. Even the best of the rooms are empty spaces devoid of purpose and thus full of dread. The original backrooms image that started this viral storm is a yellow-beige, seemingly endless space, with low ceilings and the omnipresent fluorescent lighting of the 1990s. The image reveals a space that is not only dated but looks uninviting. And since the featured doorway creates several blind corners, we can imagine how uncomfortable extended periods of solitude might become in a place like that.
The reality of most modern architecture is that it was created to be a flexible empty space for any number of commercial enterprises ranging from furniture stores to technical support call centers. Yet, when people and furniture are removed, so is the purpose. The results are spaces that lack meaning and cause our brains to work overtime to make sense of them.
This is not a new phenomenon. In the 1950s and 60s, Brutalist architecture became the precursor to the backrooms as these massive, concrete boxes popped up around the world. In his book, A Vision of Britain, King Charles III (Prince Charles at the time of publication in 1989) wrote: “The fashionable architectural theories of the 50s and 60s… have spawned deformed monsters which have come to haunt our towns and cities… we have ended up with Frankenstein monsters, devoid of character, alien and largely unloved, except by the professors who have concocted these horrors in their laboratories.”
Director Parsons critiques the backrooms aesthetic using various inserts throughout the film, juxtaposing the horror of backroom architecture with our practical but wildly ugly telephone poles, transformers, and power lines set against a blue sky. Humanity has surrounded itself with things that mar beauty and make us feel less human. We don’t even have to look as far as the backrooms.
Christians know that our souls are impacted by the things around us, from the friends we spend time with to the spaces we occupy. Cathedrals and churches used to be designed to draw the eyes and hearts of occupants forward to the table or pulpit and heavenward to the throne of Him whom we worship. Ultimately, Christians know that cramped, chaotic yellowish rooms with humming fluorescents bother us because we were designed for a perfect garden.
The Backrooms as a Memory Manifestor (Very Minor Spoilers)
Throughout the press tour, Parsons maintained that he approached his film as a way to explore how human memory works, or—as is more often the case—doesn’t work. We don’t retain picture perfect replications of reality indefinitely. Experiences are seen through the lens of emotions or, as Parsons put it in one interview, “The goal is not to hold reality perfectly. The goal is to try to predict the future.”
Regardless of why or how our memory works, our memory isn’t what it ought to be, and it certainly doesn’t retain something accurately unless we are disciplined about it. That is why the Lord frequently tells His people to memorize His Word by setting it in front of themselves every single day (Deuteronomy 6:6-9). The longer we go without, the easier it is to forget, distort, or misuse it.
Spiritual disciplines are a serious matter. When Clark enters the backrooms, he begins sketching a blueprint on every surface he can. Yes, this makes him appear obsessive or even psychotic, but we understand that it’s necessary for his survival. It’s his Bible. In the Christian life, familiarity with scripture is also a matter of life and death. It is how we come to know the Lord. It is the “sword of truth” (Ephesians 6:17) and the foundation for being “ready to give an answer to anyone who asks [us] about the hope [we] have” (1 Peter 3:15). Our memories are bad, and–like in the backrooms–our world is full of enemies prowling around looking to devour us (1 Peter 5:8), so we need to cling to and obsess over the Word of God.
Backrooms as an Argument for Absolute Truth and Fighting Our Sinful Natures (Major Spoilers)
Perhaps the most important lesson derived from Parsons’s first-time outing is unintended. Parsons isn’t a believer, nor does any aspect of backrooms lore find itself steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Yet, walking out of the theater, one thought would not stop circling within my mind: Backrooms is scary and unsettling because it shows us a world without absolutes, where we are given completely over to the worst parts of ourselves.
Upon entering the backrooms, Clark discovers random items piled around, walls at weird angles, tiny doors with three doorknobs, shoes embedded in the floor, a random stop sign written backwards, and much worse the deeper he delves. It is a world that makes no sense because it is a world without rules, and that puts us on edge. A world without absolutes is something unfamiliar and undesirable.
C.S. Lewis explored a facet of this concept in his novel That Hideous Strength, in which the protagonist is placed in a room to break him mentally and morally. This room had many backrooms-like features: “A man of trained sensibility would have seen at once the room was ill-proportioned, not grotesquely so, but sufficiently to produce dislike.” Yet the longer he remained in the room with no logic, order, or reason, the more he became sensitive to those very things.
“The built and painted perversity of this room, had the effect of making him aware, as he had never been aware before, of this room‘s opposite. As a desert first teaches men to love water, or as an absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight.” Backrooms makes viewers yearn for the sweet and the straight because we were made for a world of absolutes.
Against that backdrop, the climax of the film is a therapy session in a deep, dark corner of the backrooms. Surrounded by grotesque manifestations of his worst memories, Clark is finally confronted by Mary. She breaks with standard therapist language and finally speaks honestly. She accuses him of being the cause of all the problems in his life. He is why his wife left him, why he struggles with alcoholism, why he hates his job, and why he hates himself.
Clark remains unremorseful. He doesn’t want to change, nor does he want to leave the backrooms. They are the place he feels like he can be himself. Mary concedes, “Then live in it, just let me go.” The moment Clark receives affirmation to abide in his selfish, broken life, the giant, pirate-clad manifestation of his hate and anger arrives. Despite his protestations that everything is fine, since Mary said he does not have to change, Pirate-Clark devours human-Clark alive, a chilling image of how our sinful flesh will consume us the moment we stop mortifying it.
Scripture teaches God’s people to resist temptation because abiding in sin leads to death. This is the warning in the Garden, it’s the warning throughout the Mosaic Law, it’s repeatedly in Proverbs, and the New Testament authors pick up the call as well. “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (Romans 6:12-14).
By default, our natures rejoice like Clark when we are told nothing needs to change, that we can live in this broken world with no fear. Yet the real relief of burden comes not in living openly in our brokenness but accepting the burden of Christ’s name and walking with Him in all we do.
