Backrooms 2026: Capitalism

I only recently realized how intrinsically tied to capitalism backrooms are.

More i think about it, while my mind palace is the backrooms of my mind, it unhooks from a capitalist-centric view of memory, and goes to the base of immaterial simple pleasures or music. Backrooms and liminal spaces similar to it is very material, the things that appear are all bought and sold. Theyre all very rooms indeed. Devoid of nature aside from the animal that strays into it, or maybe some foliage but those are usual as house plants.

While theres nonsense and wrongness and “misremembering” in the backrooms that gives it a sense of abstraction, the mind palace I think up ends up feeling a lot more abstract and bare bones. The elements i add to it like videos of petals in the wind and the sea arent commodifiable, only imitations may be like in the form of pools. Backrooms and similar liminal spaces are entirely artificial, imitating only the manmade.

Backrooms and the like is a capitalist labyrinth, depression hole, sanctuary and nightmare.

I’ve also read from others how the backrooms is the modern gothic horror: dying malls as the present equivalent to olden times’ empty, decaying castles and mansions.

While much of the world runs on capitalism, the USA especially harbors a culture of individualism fostered by its inherently competitive nature:

• The expectation of one therapist being a one stop shop. Choosing to be alone. The stress of being sole provider for one other person as she pursues her education but failing to achieve your own dreams.
• Being only with your mother, your mother only having you.
• You have your employees, but they’re just there out of obligation. And you only use them for your own benefit. It’s not a community.

Capitalism not as an added social commentary but as the undeniable presence of it in everything. It is the foundation whether you recognize it or not. It is a root of much turmoil whether you recognize it or not.

Ownership of property and providing for someone and your childhood home being demolished and business competitors and boss and employee and paid time for therapy

Transaction transaction transaction

How could your mind operate in a way other than in terms of consumption and deprivation

All this is aptly put by a thread I saw on twitter.

“Backrooms” is about the Gen Z experience of living amid the cultural detritus of the 1990s, faded photocopies of a decade that - at least aesthetically - never ended.

The uncanny reality of a 20-year-old witnessing Oasis reunions, “Frasier” revivals, “What’s Goin’ On?” memes.

the more I think about it I really feel like the backrooms does a genuinely excellent job of detailing the human cost of our decaying economy and society. housing becoming more transient for generations, the anachronism of banal commercial real estate design from decades ago +

living in a furniture store and the connection w mary also being displaced from her home at one point, the uncanny visual multiplicity of kat and bobby’s place, it creates this feeling of distance between not just us and our memories but our own ability to feel at home in a place

really goes the extra mile to enforce and bring into focus this unrelenting perspective of every interior space and everything in it as commodity. your most sacred interior self, your most cherished memories, your childhood home was made of products, walls, windows. all for sale

Individualism

Backrooms and Thunderbolts are a series to me. If theres one thing ive learned in this life it’s that a heart isn’t meant to be carried by one person

This tends to happen when the bearer lets only one other person bear the entirety of it for them. They are stuck bearing their whole own and the whole of the other’s (Mary and her mother.)

This also tends to happen in isolation (clark, bob reynolds)

(Sidenote: in Clark and his wife’s case, I’m not sure if the word heart can be used here. But it’s still a lack of community and support system in their case)

Additionally, while I wouldn’t consider that Mary carried Clark’s heart entirely, as their exchanges were limited to relatively brief, timed, money-costing sessions, there was still somewhat of an expectation that she would carry the burden of fixing him entirely, or with him. Either way, it’s still her and one other person only.

When looking at behind-the-scenes photos of Backrooms where there’s a whole crew of people in it, the fear of the backrooms goes away to me. I was never one for games where you run around trying to escape a monster in the backrooms with other people. I felt like that lost the specific kind of eerieness the backrooms brings via isolation and vastness. (I know the original idea was that there is a monster. I can like a different version of the idea without liking the original.)

The backrooms as a depressive birdcage protecting against others is what really hits for me. So when a bunch of people are in it, it starts to look like the beginning of “being lived in.” That is, like a housewarming. That is, community.

Consumption

Inherent to capitalism is deprivation and comsumption. Nobody is free of this, and we see Clark suffer especially for it in this movie.

Clark as consumption, use, gluttony, not only in alcohol but in how he views the whole world

Clark as deprivation and consumption….clark as deprivation DUE to consumption…..clark as consumption due to deprivation………….his OURO IS BOROSING

It calls to mind Captain Clark, the monster, literally consuming him in the end.

The dehumanization of people in his life as tools to be used, people to be consumed, or people that consume him, or being used like a tool

Clark sends bobby off into the unknown instead of himself. He uses, consumes bobby first. Kat runs off to bobby, instead of following her, clark turns around and runs away to save himself. He only brought them there to use them for proof, he consumed them.

Partially copied from my Tumblr blog.