Intertwixt 31: Lost in the Backrooms

I started sorting through old board games to get rid of. I’m not happy about this process. Games are promises of experiences to come. I collected so many, some deliberate, some accidental. The kids get older. The games don’t get played. The playroom, now piles of boxes and bags, is overwhelmed. There are too many things everywhere. Too many promises. I have to get rid of some. I have to clear my mind somehow.

I finally saw Backrooms this week. It unnerved me. It lingered. Not the horror of the endless unknown, exactly. But, the familiarity of the mess. Backrooms as mind clutter. The endless bad mirrors of unresolved things.

It’s good to get lost. Sometimes. I’m reading Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon, right now. Pynchon is all about getting lost. A rambling character digression continues, now we’re deep in it, now that digression has a digression. Have we laid a proper breadcrumb trail? Are we going to get out of these backrooms?

Pynchon does get us out, mostly. He skips us forward and finds a way. Or if you pay good enough attention he lays a structure. Will we get out, though? What if getting lost has no way of getting unlost?

I read House of Leaves during the pandemic in 2020, another big book I had always meant to read. I truly read the whole thing. It is the embodiment of being lost. There doesn’t seem to be an escape. The design feels unable to be completed. 

I make messes a lot. Email, stuff scattered everywhere, projects incomplete. What gets me forward is my to do list, my small selection of breadcrumbs. They don’t remove the mess but they make my mind focus on the path running through the mess. I move forward. Not everything matters. It can’t all matter. I have to pick. I let stress and deadlines prioritize the focus. That helps. When I don’t have those, the path becomes fuzzier. It’s easier to get lost again. Quiet moments are actually the worst. In Backrooms, those quiet moments are pretty bad too.

I just saw The Odyssey, too. Not in IMAX, because I didn’t have time or patience to hunt. A local theater, good enough. No one else in my family wanted to go with me. I had to go it alone. That’s how I used to see most movies, years ago. Alone, during the day in California, somewhere remote, theater maybe half empty. 

The Odyssey is a piece of clarity, maybe overly so, but in those clear pieces, there is an unknown. A very tangible magic to be wrestled with. A journey full of its own holes. Time losing meaning. A journey that, to me, is haunted by the lack of belief in the mission. The end of the film, of Odysseus’ journey, made me wonder…why.

I felt pretty depressed this weekend. Unclear as to why, maybe summer, maybe the transitional nature of all things, the chaos, the overamplified feeds that feel like they’re everywhere, the little devices I wear that sometimes work and sometimes fail and keep having updates to download. In Vineland, everyone is obsessed with the Tube, TV, but as an entity that seems to generate endless haunted content, movies that seem to have never existed (and often don’t). 

We have that Tube now. And many more. They give us everything, and can make anything else. All things can exist. All pathways can be traveled. You can get lost down any branch, grow more branches, follow forever.

To make good decisions, you must select. Say no to others. You can’t follow all paths. All the books I have can’t be read. Or all the movies. Or all the games. But I also love getting lost in the possibilities. Owning a thing I may never truly finish. I guess JJ Abrams calls that the Mystery Box. 

I feel lost in my own mess. My plays are starting to explore this. But I also need to find my own clear path.

But to search for something you don’t know how to search for just brings up endless paths. That search box will just let you go anywhere. The feed will continue on and on. If you’re lost, you can keep following. But there’s no exit.

Liminal horror like Backrooms works because we’re full of unresolved echoes everywhere.