u/KaineDamo

This realization just struck me as I was thinking about how often objects and spaces in the Backrooms appear much larger than they do in real life. The sheer scale of certain rooms, the chairs in Found Footage 2 (from Kane Pixels' youtube seres), and then there's Pirate Clark. The movie solidly confirms that the Backrooms builds not just spaces the nullzones happen to be near, but also from the memories of people close to those nullzones. In our childhood, the world appears larger than what it actually is. Thus, the childhood memory of a chair being recreated in the Backrooms is larger than what actual chairs are. There's more, like the various crawl spaces, forcing people to crawl through them, like a child.

The movie deals heavily in the theme of the memory of childhood trauma from the perspective of Mary, and the Backrooms recreates Mary's childhood home. As protagonist and antagonist, Mary and Clark share themes explored in the movie, like how each of them handles trauma, how each of them handles the 'loops' they're trapped in. Mary's opening narration is as much about herself as it is Clark. So hidden under the surface of the movie, I posit that Clark's anger, Clark's alcoholism, is a result of being stuck in a 'loop' he's been stuck in since childhood, just as Mary's trauma is from childhood.

I theorize that, while never explicitly stated in the movie, Clark's father was an alcoholic with anger problems. Sometimes people that are hurt by childhood trauma due to their parents end up becoming reflections of their parents into adulthood. Mary deals with the childhood trauma of her own mother being a paranoid schizophrenic by becoming a psychologist and trying to help others, trying to atone for never being able to help her own mother, until she realizes that she never could, that people only change when they want to change. While a part of her will always be there (the Still Life still in the Backrooms) (Still Life is the name in the youtube series given to the entities that are copies of people), she deals with her trauma in the most healthy way she can. Whereas Clark does not want to change, he repeats his 'loop'. He replaces drinking with being obsessed with the Backrooms, which is just an extension of living in and being trapped in the furniture store.

In the Backrooms, Clark paints a mural depicting Pirate Clark. Pirate Clark in the mural is throwing a person (probably Clark) into the air. Like a father throwing a child into the air as play, right?

Pirate Clark is both the Still Life of Clark, and Clark's memory of his own father, which is why Pirate Clark is so large because he'd have appeared that large to Clark as a child, which is why Pirate Clark is like a father figure in the mural. Maybe Clark doesn't even realize it consciously. But he does realize it sub-consciously. Just as he realizes sub-consciously that his wife was afraid of him, as the Still Life that appears to be Clark's wife runs apparently in fear the moment Pirate Clark shows up. Pirate Clark picks Clark up. Like Clark is a child.

Kane Pixels has shown the Goya painting 'Saturn Devouring His Son' in the channel 'Not Kane Pixels' in the video 'A Clear Blue Sky'. This painting looks remarkably similar to what happens in the movie with Pirate Clark and Clark. I believe I've solved the mystery of the meaning of why Kane posted that painting. Not just to show visual symmetry, but to show the symbolism that Clark is being devoured BY his father! Clark is devoured by his own trauma, because he won't change.