I fully understood Clark's character
I keep seeing people say Clark dies in denial, that he never gets self aware, that "I don't think I want to change" is just him refusing to see himself. I think that's wrong, and once you catch what the movie is actually doing with the word "wired" it kind of reorganizes his entire arc. Bear with me. The whole thing is about who he blames.
In the therapy voiceover at the start he says "I hurt people... it's just the way I'm wired." People read that as self awareness. It isn't. Listen to what he's actually doing: he admits the hurting and then immediately hands it off to something else. The wiring. He talks about it like it's a separate thing acting on him, like weather. "That's me." It's not ownership, it's an excuse dressed up as a confession. Mary clocks this in the very first session but she never says it to his face. She waits.
Pirate Clark IS the wiring. The movie literally tells you.
The Backrooms "remember" things slightly wrong until the memory becomes its own separate object. It did it to Bobby's shirt, to the Still Lifes. It did it to Clark's defense mechanism too and spawned it as a body. Pirate Clark is the captain persona from his own commercial, the "empire of one" mask he built so he'd never need anybody. Now watch the scene where Pirate Clark attack Mary after she fell. What song plays? "Wired." The movie is labeling the creature for you. Pirate Clark is Clark's wiring made flesh, walking around as a separate person, which is EXACTLY how Clark has treated it his whole life. Look at the fridge scene:
He opens the fridge with Kat's head in it, the head that Pirate Clark cut off, and he says "I tried to help her." That's his entire life in one sentence. The wiring does the killing, and the "I" gets to be the guy who tried to help. He keeps them separate so he can always be the helper and never the harmer. But he keeps living with it, he just accepts it, the same way Clark keeps living with Pirate Clark despite him killing people.
Clark never once blames tying Mary to the chair on his brain. Mary is the one who has to say it for him. In the dinner speech she lists it: "You attack me and tie me up? Blame your brain!" She's not just insulting him, she's showing him the move he runs, laying it out as a pattern so he can finally see it. Then the thesis, plain: "YOU ARE YOUR FUCKING BRAIN, YOU DIPSHIT." And "but it's just the way you're wired, isn't it? Isn't it?" And he understands it, cause look:
Early Clark: "the way I'M wired." Separate. An excuse.
Final Clark, to the pirate: "It's just the way WE'RE wired."
The pronoun changes. I to we. That is the entire arc in one word. He stops holding the wiring at arm's length as some foreign thing and finally says: that's me, we're the same. If he died in denial the pronoun would not change. It only makes sense if he accepts it.
Clark was never in therapy because he wanted to change. The wife left, so he's "supposed" to fix himself. "Sure, why not, that's why I'm here." That's not desire, that's obligation. His whole life is duties he resents. The store he didn't want, the costume he hates wearing, the marriage he failed, the therapy he's enduring. Nothing he does is his.
The one thing he chases with actual hunger is the Backrooms. Why? Because it's the only place where nobody wants him to be someone else. The store wants a pirate mascot, Barbara wanted a provider, Mary wants a man on a new path. The Backrooms want nothing. For a guy buried under everyone else's expectations, that reads as purpose.
So when he asks "How do I stop doing that?" it's not hope, it's the reflex of a man who assumes being shown what he is comes with homework. Okay, diagnosis is in, now I have to go force another change onto myself, find another therapist, do it all again. Then Mary says "I can't help you, it's not up to me." No assignment. And in that vacuum, with nothing being demanded of him for once, he finds out what he actually wants. And what he wants is to stay.
He doesn't say "I don't want to change." He says "I don't THINK I want to change." He's looking down. He takes deep breaths. That hedge is a lifetime of doing what he's told. He can't even claim his own refusal cleanly because refusing is shameful. He's ashamed. Not of what he did, but of the fact that given the choice, he'd rather keep the wiring than do the work. The shame is real, it just isn't strong enough to move him, and he knows it.
The whole movie he keeps arm's length distance from the Still Lifes and the pirate. "Stay back." He recoils. He's even surprised when Pirate Clark walks in and picks him up. But in that moment, the moment he's accepted they're the same, he embraces it. His hand goes around Pirate Clark as he's lifted. It's the only time in the film he reaches toward the thing instead of away.
And Pirate Clark just does what it always does. It kills. Because it's not a person that can hug back, it's a degraded memory of a defense mechanism, a thing that can only run its one function. You can accept your wiring. Your wiring can't accept you.
Which pays off the very first scene. "I didn't say lonely, I said alone." Clark thought that was semantics, "I have employees, customers." But he finally has the one companion that's fully of him, the thing he never has to push away because it's already him, and it registers nothing and kills him. He dies in an embrace, the opposite of alone, and it's the loneliest shot in the movie. He solved lonely and it did nothing for alone, because alone was never about other people being absent. It was about there being no one home to meet.
He didn't die not understanding himself. He understood completely. It just didn't save him, because understanding and wanting to change are not the same thing, and he only ever wanted one of them.