u/marcelkroust

Though Clark and Kat won't even get off their fat fucking ass to help them.

Waht happened in 2002?

According to the first source I found about this number https://www.zodiacsigns101.com/angelnumbers/8754-angel-number-spiritual-meaning-significance/

8754 has two meanings :

- Dream Big and Take Action

- A marriage held only by material conditions will collapse

Strikingly close to what Clark is thinking at this moment, what the tape says, and close to what happened in his marriage.

Regarding the first one, the house's facade and the tape are seducing him into doing something stupid, ie to "step through so [he] can reclaim what was once [his]". He knows it and that's why he has no other choice but continuing therapy, and then when even Mary doesn't believe him, exile in the backrooms.

Now to the second point, his marriage was only held by material conditions : lack of money and loss of status created a situation of mutual codependance that poisonned their relationship and made it last far longer than it was supposed to, until the threat of staying together became even greater than the force that was keeping them chained together.

What brand / age / type

There's a lot of 5 [thing] throughout the story, isn'it?

https://www.reddit.com/r/KanePixelsBackrooms/comments/1ur1s3f/the_backrooms_is_a_pinhole_camera/

Another proof that the complex works with electromagnetic waves going through nullzones and getting deformed in the process by various "wave-altering" phenomenons like diffraction and stuff.

Here the movie shows us an illustration of the first stage of the "backroomification".

See how the sunlight is modified? The rainbows on the floor?

That's goddamn right, here you can see that the electromagnetic waves coming from outside are refracted, as if they were going through a prism or an heterogeneous medium. You can see the visible part of it (AKA light) but safe to say that the rest of the spectrum (infrared, radio waves, ultraviolet, Xrays...) follows the same rules.

How many corrollary of the pinhole theory do we have at this stage? It's the gift that keeps on giving.

- The yellow stuff above "Plans" looks like houses, a sun, flowers?

- There is an orange eye looking down, in the crane cabin

- There is some kind of yellow fragment in the blue tornado

- The broken leg actually bleeds

- The lamp under the eye is actually orange

- Under "CAPITOL", the bloody roots look like it's sprouting

The more you look at it, the more you find stuff.

It just goes on and on and on.

This is a bit tongue in cheek but I still like to think this.

Look at the colors throughout the film, they give many answers.

But these curtains here? I have no idea, apart for them being some kind of ironic meta joke about the "the author only meant that the curtains were fucking blue" meme.

Now please bury my post before I start making yet another wacko theory about them being actually slightly purple (just like Async's logo uh?) and it works as a symbol of the complex/Clark using a fake version of spectral violet that's actually a mix of blue (will/hope to get higher/outside/find purpose/meaning) with a bit of red (destruction) to mask real sunlight (sun in splendor, nature, human nature) or some shit.

Something bad happening to a character is not trauma. Grief is not trauma. Mourning is not trauma. Bad stuff happening and characters dealing with it is simply what we call A STORY. Go look at wikipedia's examples for what causes PSTD and come back once you understand that mere adversity is not trauma and that trauma is not something you get over by throwing a souvenir away or some shit.

Saying Backrooms is about trauma is a stretch and the tree that hides the forest. Who has actual trauma anyway? Mary, that's all. Saying Clark is intended to have it is a stretch. Bobby and Kat have trauma I guess... for a very short time before death. Phil is doing okay.

Backrooms is about how the characters deal with the absence of meaning and purpose.

Mary's arc merely uses trauma as a tool. It's more about her accepting the absence of meaning of her mother's illness and quitting being guilty about it, the meaninglessness of Clark's excuses and her trying to make a decision only Clark can do, and moving forward to survive and create new meaning of her own. The complex analogy strikingly fits her trauma story, but is way larger than this.

She doesn't cure a trauma here, that's just not how it works, at all.

Clark's arc is falling is love with the absence of meaning and decay of truth to support his lies and avoiding a necessary change, until self destruction.

Phil's "arc" is just being stuck in a loop looking for meaning in a place that's precisely defined by its absence of meaning.

The film simply keeps the core concept of the backrooms and succesfully extends it to human characters.

Why do you think Parsons chose The Neverending Story here?

It's because this very scene is about creation of meaning.

Here Bastian realizes he is part of the story (while Clark didn't realize that he was still his fucking brain and still had freedom/responsibility in the story). He shouts the Empress’s new name and saves Fantasia form the Nothing.

If the Nothing eating Fantasia away before Bastian got off his fat fucking ass to actually continue writing the tale isn't the same story as the complex eating standard away because we couldn't be arsed to use our radical freedom to actually build something meaningful out there, I'm ready to eat my hat.

See the yellow/red/blue inside some letters? And the inconsistent use of capital letters?

Have someone tried making sense out of it?

I tried many things but obviously there are two problems :

- I can't put my hand on a high definition, color accurate screenshot of the whole mural (this one is incomplete)

- there are many ways of interpreting this as binary or morse code. Do we have to take all closed letters into account or just the circles like o and a etc? How to cut the result into smaller chunks? 8 bits words? Do morse words end with each line? Are the unexpected use of some capital letters intended to achieve a wanted result?

Don't tell me it's just Clark drawing giberish and that I'm looking for something that isn't there, because I definitely know it's a possibility. I just want to make sure there isn't something we missed.

Alright, tinfoil hat time : THE MURAL IS A FILM NEGATIVE AT THE BACK OF A PINHOLE-CAMERA

Every color symbolism used in the movie is based on a spectral additive system. Kinda like the RGB system of your screen. https://www.reddit.com/r/backroomsfilm/comments/1v2wwlm/the_colors_of_backrooms_all_point_to_a_single/

But there's a little something off with the mural. The color symbolism is not as clear as in the rest of the film, and the colors used here follow a reversed system : substractive pigments, with paint (here RYB : red, yellow and blue).

Besides that, the complex is the other side of the pinhole-camera, right? https://www.reddit.com/r/KanePixelsBackrooms/comments/1ur1s3f/the_backrooms_is_a_pinhole_camera/

It explains, among other things, that some elements are inverted (or inverted twice or more)... But WAIT. You know what else is inverted in a pinhole camera? The film and the colors printed on it are inverted.

WHAT IF those who are tricked by the complex (Clark and probably Capn Clark) have a completely opposite "colors symbolism" in their mind? I'm not saying that Clark sees different colors, but that he has some kind of inverted "moral value system".

And now everything makes sense (refer to the first link for the color meaning) :

• Copied yellow houses : representation of how the backrooms (yellow = stagnation, decay) copy things via the pinhole-camera effect while deteriorating at every iteration. Clark knows how the complex works.
• Yellow bolt and yellow outlets : electricity, using the path of least resistance. Here it simply get its orignal color back.
• The throne : a mix of potential and hope for Clark. The status and power he was looking for (blue = hope/will, cyan = potential) Clark thinks that harvesting the backrooms' potential (cyan) can bring back his authority and his "true" self (purple)
• The blue purple guy being lifted : Clark's being lifted through the window by his new "backrooms self" (spoiler : in reality, Clark is yellow as fuck and only stagnating more than ever)
• The blue purple Async suits : Clark knows that Async has the same objective he has. He thinks they are right and that truth is hidden in the backrooms (spoiler : in reality, Async's project is stagnating and in a dead end and their poor employees are yellow as fuck).
• The yellow square highlighting Barbara and Clark's old house, and yellow splatters on the buildings : it's Clark realizing that he was stagnating in the real world (failed marriage and failed architecture project)... With UNREALIZED potential
• Clark's real potential finally being freed is represented around the blue purple guy being lifted.
• Tables don't bleed blood, underlined with cyan : Clark deduces that if the still lifes don't bleed, it's because they are furniture. He sees potential with that and we do see him using them as human furniture to play make believe, and even eating them.
• (see top left) For Clark, the sun (the sun eruption which planted the seed of the complex) has potential (cyan). The potential to bring his golden past and UNREALIZED potential back. In reality, the sun eruption destroys (red) reality and rips spacetime apart.
• Kat's heads. Parsons said that Clark was keeping her head in the fridge because he thought that somehow the complex could be able to bring her back. So the red is really blood here, but Clark sees potential (cyan) in this.

What do you think? Apart from that being a huge stretch and me being crazy of course...

EDIT : is this blue or purple we're looking at here? With a more color-accurate version it looks more purple than in my post and that makes it even more consistent with the rest of the film. In the film, purple is the color of Clark's shirt, Clark's throne and Async's logo... and the color of ILLUSION. Clark and Async "confuse purple and violet" (violet is truth, and is a color that technically can't be displayed in the film... see 1st link). If this is purple on the mural, then it is not so much about hope but more about confusion between truth and lies instead, which fits more the theme of the film and Clark's/Async's arc.

For those who lived under a rock, here's the original theory :

https://www.reddit.com/r/KanePixelsBackrooms/comments/1ur1s3f/the_backrooms_is_a_pinhole_camera/

My 2 cents are this : some objects in the complex are subject to a particular phenomenon that happens when you have 2 little nullzones close to each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

Once again, a beautiful use of a phenomenon linked to light for worldbuilding, by our genius Kane Parsons (only a two-cellular embryo when he came up with this idea)

You don't have to judge this character like you would like to be judged yourself in a real trial. That's what I did the first time because I like being fair to others so maybe the others will be fair with me. It failed, and the first time I watched the film there was something off. Then I figured it out.

This isn't a trial and this isn't real life. Doubt and probability doesn't work the same in a story because it is not an objective reality : the objective elements that are shown are insufficent and you have to take into account that it's made by an author and the author uses them to serve a story as any good writers do. For instance, in a tragic story where there is a grey character that achieves complete fall into darkness, there would be at least one scene where he does something nice for someone.

Now try this experiment : imagine Clark had one violent dispute while drunk and has a restraining order. Then he's mandated to therapy by the judge (just imagine). He's cornered, stuck in a loop, still delusional and needed somone to repair his only thing left : his broken ego. Now rewatch the film. The therapy, the drunk night stalking scene, the "I've opened the window... I'm never coming back" message after, the climax with Clark roleplaying a life where he's not guilty, with his human furniture toys, and acting like a violent psycho.

You'll see everything falling in place together and the movie making much more sense. Every "emotional tone" employed in the scenes, every detail of acting and even every colors. This is a story of a cornered liar that fell in love with the backrooms because it could validate his lies and absolve him of his sins. Every time there's something unclear about Clark in the film, assume he's guilty.

- it doesn't contradict the evidence

- it explains many more elements

- and most of all it makes every scene far more powerful and the end more natural

The doubt/unclarity is just the cherry on top that habitually serves stories about liars. You're not supposed to believe them the second time you watch the film though.

This is all color theory used in the film, starting from white, then all spectral colors from violet to red (electromagnetic frenquencies from 790 THz to 400 THz), then black at the end.

You can see the symbolism is built along a coherent emotional/temporal/spatial logic : from birth to death, from past to future, from the highest to the lowest place… And everything in between.

"WAIT! How did you miss purple? There's Clark's throne, Clark's shirts, and Async's logo"

I didn't miss it. But purple is not a spectral color : it's a mix of red and blue. Purple and violet are fundamentally different.

"Okay smartass, but anyways, don't RGB screens reproduce all those spectral colors approximately by mixing two colors, making us perceive a color with a frequency somewhere in between?"

That's not true for one color : purple. Indeed, violet's frequency is completely outside the bandwidth between red and blue

"What is this sorcery?"

That's just how human vision works. Read some articles about iodopsin receptors if you're interested.

And there my friends we have yet another light phenomenon brilliantly used by Parsons for storytelling and worldbuilding.

With the help of this little scientific bit of knowledge and a loose use of language, we can pretty much say that :

PURPLE IS A LIE

- Clark's sultan/empire business is a RIP OFF. His throne may bear the color of royalty, the sultan turned into a pirate.

The reality is a mix of red (destruction) and blue (hope/will). His life was destroyed but he had hope in his new store. What color is his storefront already? Blue, but if you look closely there's more red than he wants to admit.

- Clark is lying to us about Barbara.

The reality is a mix of blue (hope/will) and destruction (red). Clark wanted his glory and honor back so hard he lied and lied, destroying meaning and truth all the way to the bottom of the backrooms where he found his own destruction. Notice how his shirt shifts more and more to red.

- The Async Institute project is both highly unnatural and a constant failure they try to hide.

The reality is a mix of blue (hope/will) and destruction (red). They wanted to keep the old system working (the pursuit of infinite growth on a finite earth) so they destroyed the spacetime fabric to create the artificial abomination they named "the complex"

Since then their minions just fuck around being killed and whatnot, while gathering useless piles of knowledge about a meaningless place.

What's violet actually?

Violet is the opposite of purple. It's truth and inspiration. THIS fits more the higher end of the spectrum than whatever the fuck Clark and Async are doing.

But you can never truly see it in the film, by definition. Even the whites we see in the film are the McVersion of real sunlight.

Sunlight is the "color" Parsons wants us to look at

Parsons wants us to touch grass. He wants us to find some real violet. You can see it in its pure form in the rainbow or in some flower species for instance.

Truth and inspiration is out there. It's not in AI, it's not in commodified culture, it's not in the backroomified parts of our societies. Ultimately, it's not in the film either.

It's out there in sunlight, in nature, in our human nature. You can try to control it, buy it, sell it, but you'll only get a lie.

This lie is the sun in splendor found in the backrooms : the sum of all colors, except the violet is actually a purple. A grotesque and failed attempt at recreating sunlight, yet a beacon for those who are stuck in the backrooms. Maybe Parsons thinks about inspiration when he's asked about his sun pin at the Backrooms première and says : "The sun told me to wear it. It talks to me"

When there's actually green on the screen, it seems there's always this idea of creation or constructive force.

See this green flicker?

It's exactly at the moment Mary has an epiphany and manages to get out of her loop and get closer to exiting the backrooms. At the exact same frame she cast the first hit, another green flicker. At any moment where the plot isn't moving forward, the lights just turn off faster from white to dark so this isn't a coincidence.

What are the other occurences of unambiguous green on the sceen?

• The hobo recycling green bottles. He's further away from the backrooms than anyone else because he's someone who creates (see my other post about that). Creation (green) is what gets you out of the backrooms/stagnation (yellow), and destruction (red) is what gets you deeper.
• The only plants that are bright green are the ones we take care of. In Mary's office, in Clark's store, in the collective spaces... Every other plant is dull. The nature out there is dull because it's neglected by people.
• The green Async suit is the only one that doesn't fuck things up and actually willingfully helps Mary out. I suspect this character will come back as a goodie in the next episodes. Is it Phil maybe? This makes sense in the color theory (Async drone yellow + hopeful Phil blue)
• Of course there is the main theory about the green lights in the series, giving birth to new things and momentarily disrupting the stagnation of the backrooms
• What else? Please help!

Or at least, Clark is making it more red than it is.

EDIT : Clark is making it more red but the script, as found by airport-cinnabon, tells us the initial idea was her to be redhead IRL. Thanks, now my title looks like clickbait!

So, why is it bright red in the end?

In the color symbolism of the film, red represents destruction.

• The red store signs, destruction of Clark's dreams
• Reversed stop signs (the backrooms seduce Clark toward autodestruction)
• Clark's shirt (it starts from light purple to red purple in the scene where he's almost done destroying himself)
• Blood (once the last bit of hope is destroyed, Pirate Clark destroys Clark and gets red on its costume)

Furthermore, we know that the backrooms is influenced by the subjective memories of Clark... and in Clark's mind, Barbara is guilty of destroying their marriage.

That's why the christmas tree is red, displays a destroyed family, and why Barbara still life is present in this scene.

Barbara's still life's hair is clearly red, like red red.

But IRL Barbara having such red color is a hoax Clark want you to believe so you think she's guilty of destroying his marriage.

I like this bit. It adds to the vibe of the film and gives flesh to the outer world.

But I know there's more, as almost nothing in the film pops in out of nowhere merely for vibe's sake.

What's the story? What's the symbol? What themes does it flesh out? What contrast does it give to the other elements of the film? Solitude? Decay? Maybe not exactly...

My preferred take right now is that the only people that can maintain themselves in the outer world (the world which holds complex, human and societal meaning) are the ones that give meaning to our collective society. By recycling the residues of a decaying society, that bloke gives meaning to something that lost meaning. He gives a social/collaborative purpose to trash and a personal reason to live, even in relative solitude.

EDIT : As Electronic_Potato166 pointed out in the comments, the shopping cart looks like a building. It's like his own place he built. That's how you keep away from the backrooms. You build a place that does the opposite of the backrooms (which creates meaningless stuff from meaningful places/objects)

As a result, we see him from below. This hobo hoisted himself to heavens and he is doing better than us backroom plebs stuck wandering in hell's loops.

What about the others dwelling outside? The electrician : a meaningful social collaboration giving meaning to something purely material. Kat and Bobby : artists in a normal ass relationship and they challenge/give collective meaning to the world (ex : anti-apartheid t-shirt)>!only lured into the backrooms by Clark, appealing to Bobby's curiosity and abusing his power over Kat!<

Everyone ending up in the backrooms or stuck at the threshold are completely alone or unable to create personal/collective meaning or unable to challenge existing meaning : Clark, Mary, Async.