on the topic of things like liminal spaces and the backrooms movie by kane parsons, in terms of a dialectical materialist perspective it almost feels as if liminal spaces were going to be something that would be brought up anyway specifically because of the desire to look back upon nostalgia in the midst of a crumbling empire and the overall architecture of suburban areas literally separating people physically. because of the sense of alienation capitalism creates and the separated nature of suburbs such that you may spend your whole life never knowing your neighbors, we tend to try to spend our time looking inwards (again, something that is also intertwined with the fact that modern capitalism drives the blame of alienation inwards as something to do with laziness or lack of productivity, and so we end up hyperindividualist and lonely, and having lots of time to ourselves, looking back on our memories) and as we try and remember memories over and over again, it changes, which is something the backrooms reflects (copying geometry, creating distorted versions of people known as “still-lives”) and the fact that the liminal nature of things like the backrooms is specifically due to spaces being entirely devoid of people, which also loops back to the idea of loneliness and alienation as well as the idea of nostalgia and introspection simultaneously, it all shows just how connected these modern ideas of liminal spaces and backrooms internet mythology are to the material effects of capitalism especially in the united states
what do y’all think?
It all feels very thick heavy and heady, the original copypasta, and I’m not surprised it got quickly interacted with in a way symbolizing our moment. Which is attempting to find the lore, expand the lore, develop the lore. You can look up “why is Gen Z obsessed with lore” for some discount think piece ass articles defining what that means. It’s probably a result of people interacting with media through transcription, where instead of watching the movie, they watch the TikTok (why is it formatting it like that what am I an alien gleep glorp) and watch the video essay twice as long as the pretty short, background-ified Netflix marvel dialogue slop film.
In watching media about media, the interaction forms new dimensions like Discourse and of course lore. Instead of looking at the backrooms and seeing the pretty identifiable relatable themes (like, alienation in Marxist sense within AmeriKKKan SSuburban malaiSSe creates rumination worlds where false memories and nostalgia haunt), content consumers (HELP HELP ME I DO NOT WANT TO CONSUME CONTENT) relate to increasingly watered down media by collecting facts to no end, writing fan fiction about the world of the story if there was one, collating wikis that are never read. It’s the conditions where profits must be maximized to larger structural discomfort (in this case upsetting the KKKonSSumers). Rent seeking by trying to get the insurance money.
My train of thought is kind of lost. I guess I was trying to help connect the ideas you were referencing, about the cultural significance of backrooms and why backrooms 2026 was made and made so. Art if we can use that word is in quite the place. I should like to write and read about our times, without intermediaries.
This happened in a sense with the TADC finale where some fans care way, way more about minute details of the C&A backstory not getting answers instead of the main themes the story was exploring about friendships and gender identity.
And presumably it’s not out of a love of the original story/themes that they interact in this way. For older let’s simplify to pre-web 2.0 fan communities, this sort of investigation or fanfictioning was in service and admiration to the material. But here, the material serves as a sort of asset pack, facilitating creativity without having to do the work of writing from scratch.
I really fear what the necessities of extracting profits via social media have done to a generation’s art. This is the generation that while they may see no future, understand that within the context of promises of treats and false ‘good living’ where there is NOTHING. But of course we can’t isolate variables, pretend political economy can be political science and economics, think rigidly.
Your connecting of background Netflix / “discourse” to liminal spaces, or identifying those as liminal spaces, is quite insightful.
This sounds very similar to the ideas Jean Baudrillard described in Simulacra and Simulation.