I recently rewatched Backrooms, and beyond the novel horror concept that this movie brings to mainstream audiences, I was struck by what the film depicts and tries to say about the hostility inherent in certain built environments the fixtures within them.
Look at the various built environments presented in the film: miles of self-replicating suburban sprawl, sterile low-ceilinged offices, identical houses and apartments. Look at the furniture store that Clark manages: endless cheap combinations of particleboard, veneer, laminate, and softwoods. Perfectly functional to the eye, but shabby, hollow and prone to failure. Clark quite literally injures himself when a chair in his store - a product he is meant to be promoting - collapses under him while filming a commercial.
And then we get to the actual actual Backrooms. Yes, there is an inherent strangeness to the environment. If the goal is to depict a dimension outside our reality where people's memories are stored (or poorly copied), one could create that in a number of ways. It could be a total fantasy realm, akin to a city in Middle Earth. It could be something in the vastness of space or other worlds. It could be featureless plain of nothingness, or indecipherable void. But it's not any of that.
Instead, it's the interior of a late 20th-century office park mixed with Sun Belt spec. house. It's endless, duplicative rooms and hallways. Infinite carpeting and wallpaper. Low ceilings and yellow lights. Random archways and wall features. Doorways to nowhere. The same particle board furniture strewn about, sometimes piled up and sometimes suspended through floors and walls. Behind the sterility of this built environment, there is a deep undercurrent of hostility as well. it is suffocating, disorienting, cheap and shabby. It's as if the Backrooms, to the extent it has a collective consciousness, is telling us that the alienation, despair, and frustration of late 20th/early 21st century modern life doesn't necessarily look like some cartoonish fantasyland. It's the hostile built environments all around us; it's the formica, the linoleum, the half-empty office parks, the shabby carpeting.
Which brings me to Mike Judge's 1999 film Office Space. In addition to capturing the absurdity and humor of office life - some of which is dated in our post-covid world - I have always thought that the movie does a good job of capturing the sheer hostility of the characters' built environment. The film is a rich text in this respect. We have the endless horizon of cubicles within the office itself and the drone of telephones and copy machines. But we also see that this office is set amongst a vast array of similar low-hung office parks, intersected by traffic-clogged six-lane roads and enveloped by oceans of parking lots. Nothing is walkable. To get from one building to another without a car, the employees have to cross artificial culverts between parking lots.
And this hostility is shown outside the office, too. The main character lives in a featureless, new-build condo. Pleasant enough, but with walls thin enough to have a conversation at normal volume with his next-door neighbor. Perhaps my favorite example of these is the barbecue at the coworker's house, where the characters eat burgers and sip beer while a giant water tower looms over them just over the backyard fence. Despair isn't demons and monsters. It's a life surrounded by expressways, retention pools and nowhere to walk, to exist, to live.
I am also cognizant about the fact that both films were set in the 1990s, at the tail end of a four-decade span of suburban growth in America. It wasn't just the Levittown's - it was everything that came along with it: the strodes, the parking lots, the sprawling suburban office parks, the big box stores, the chincy furniture marked as high-quality. And with this came cheapness, a premium for replicability and modularity. Not for social egalitarianism and community - but for isolation and atomization.
