The Monsters of the Backrooms Are Us
This film made over $118 million dollars worldwide on its opening weekend. But lets try not to get distracted and end up lost, wandering the financial labyrinth of Hollywood receipts.
The concept of backrooms has existed since humans learned to communicate with one another. Maybe those rooms-in-the-back started as meeting places or open forums. The Greeks sure liked to kick around concepts in their day. Concepts lead to discussions, leapfrogging into knowledge and the politics of who gets to questions how humanity works, plays, governs, and pays. This rapid (rabid?) descent eventually spurned the questioning of the power construct itself.
In today’s America, this is enough to get you a visit from the Justice Department, locked up or deported, regardless of your status as an American citizen or not. Ask Socrates. He taught the youth and was rewarded by being executed by the state. Plato pontificated about the general populous only seeing the shadows of the world. In short, all of us are blind to some great truth (alien origins, living in a simulating, being light bodies trapped in biological ones, etc.). Really and truly, we humans are prisoners simply because of our vantage point in this current life time. {Takes deep breath, lights a marijuana cigarette.}
Realizing an open seminar space was dangerous to absolute power, corruption locked up decisions about everything, ranging from your rights to pursue your dreams to what you can say about anything, behind closed doors. And just like that, the first significant backroom of the Western world was established. Keep the eggheads out of power because their only wish is to give it away. The poor stay poor. The sick get sicker, The wealthy whine about taxes on their multiple properties whiles your rental space falls apart with your mental health. Are you still with me? No bother if you’re not. I’m going to finish this joint and hop down this open rabbit hole. Yet another set of rooms to get lost in.
In the back of a cave, apartment, house, mansion, skyscraper or underground bunker exists an enclosed area carved out and developed into a chamber for talk. A small group gathers there to plan, party and profit without distracting input of the rabble. This star chamber, quite opposite of the town square, evolved in secrecy for one purpose: to judge and to rule. Why? Well someone has to quell the mob and if the riffraff knew where decisions come to fruition, they’d want in to have their say. So make the room as inaccessible as possible. Acting as animate walls and borders, the gatekeeps, guards, soldiers, police are put in the way. Make the cost of free speech a club to the head while you finger your drink at the country club. A hundred bullets to dodge on the way to the polls to vote. Now the the room is set, hardened and protected. So fire up your cigars because backrooms used to be smoky before those health nuts banned smoking inside buildings. The only task left: rule the world. Similar to the film The Backrooms, indeed there are monsters lurking there to be feared. Some of those monsters are us and we are them. Choose your tribe.