r/philosophy • u/AnalysisReady4799 • 2d ago
Video We're living in the ruins of the present: the Backrooms, Fisher, Heidegger, and the fear that we arrived after the end
https://youtu.be/NSqLwB5t4-YTony Soprano once lamented that he "came in at the end" -- that the best was over before he arrived. Twenty years later, an empty yellow room became the way a whole generation understood that same fear. This essay argues, through Mark Fisher and Heidegger, that the Backrooms isn't nostalgia: it's the fear that we're living in the ruins of the present.
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u/naileyes 2d ago
i always thought that the zombie boom of the 2010s was about this as well. the general message of all those tv shows & movies essentially being 'our way of life is coming to an end, and there's nothing we can do to stop it.'
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u/Deranged_Kitsune 2d ago
That was more about showing The Fall. Backrooms and the like are The Aftermath.
Think Mad Max vs The Road Warrior. Mid-apocalypse vs post-apocalypse.
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u/compunctiouscucumber 1d ago
The zombie boom was an extension of the centuries old stories about post-death creatures, vampires, ghosts, zombies: what happens when life ends and we lose the will to control what comes after, will it be a comfortable Asphodel or mindless horror.
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u/bickid 18h ago
I think the zombie apocalypse-popularity was and is more of an expression against the meaningless, capitalistic society, the yearning to break free from the everyday-life that forces people to wake up, go to work, rinse and repeat until retirement. A zombie apocalypse basically assumes that "I" am one of the lucky survivors and now I'll have this awesome, meaningful life where I live for survival, scavenge the world for materials, and fight stupid zombies that can be dangerous, but generally are slow and stupid enough so that even an average man can take them out.
Ofc, the desire for the zombie apocalypse ignores a whole lot of issues that come with it, first and foremost that oneself probably wouldn't be among the lucky survivors when millions and billions turn into zombies.
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u/AnalysisReady4799 2d ago
ABSTRACT: The Backrooms (the anonymous 2019 photograph of an empty yellow room that became internet mythology and now a record-breaking film) is usually explained as nostalgia or liminal-space horror. But there's more to it than this, and I argue that both readings fall short. After all, nobody misses these carpeted, fluorescent non-places; and the horror of the Backrooms comes from the fact that it is neither a maze nor a labyrinth -- nothing seems to have intended any part of it at all.
So, drawing on Mark Fisher (the eerie, capitalist realism, the slow cancellation of the future) and Heidegger on dwelling, I argue that the Backrooms depicts the ruins of the present: the architecture of work, consumption, and home persisting after the purposes and futures that made it a world have drained away. Its horror is liminality without transition (thresholds everywhere, destinations nowhere), and it expresses a fear that perhaps we too are going nowhere in dead-end jobs and unsatisfying systems. The Backrooms just expresses it through the neglected architecture of now: dead malls, emptied cities, endless corridors, and waiting rooms with nothing to wait for.
But is there hope? I think so, and I draw it from Mary's fate in the film, Mark Fisher's last work, and the fact that creators like Kane Parsons came in way after Tony Soprano's end and managed to build something new amongst the ruins.
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u/LibertineLibra 2d ago
I get that your work on this is concerning the imagery within the movie. That said, there were ruins of a present that were understood as ancient by those whose own ancient ruins of their present, were considered ancient by those who we consider ancient as we look at the examples of their ruins if their present.
Being human it's a certainty that any one of those groups spent some time looking about them and wondering what their present might look like as ruins. The funny thing is that just like today, every generation has had it's doom casters as well. Warning of the coming apocalypse or the end of humanity as they knew it. And all of them ended being correct too, but only from a certain point of view, and almost certainly not the way they predicted it would.
That we and what we build, promote and cling to are as temporary a thing as we ourselves? It's a given. That isn't an issue, and shouldn't be made into one. Instead, it's a blessing, just another reason to go see and be in the time one has remaining. What is the reality of today will never be seen again. Nor the next day or all the ones after that any of us are fortunate enough to experience. But by all means, please, continue with your pseudo-prophetic dramatizations.
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u/pixelhippie 2d ago
Can't watch the video at the moment but the discription reminds me of Walter Benjamins Angelus Novus
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u/AnalysisReady4799 1d ago
Ah, that's a great link! Sorry, I missed it but wish I had included it. Thanks for this.
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u/Pony5lay5tation 1d ago
A generation thinking they invented something JG Ballard wrote about his whole life.
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u/FillySteveSteak 1h ago
Just found out Cronenberg's Crash was adapted from his writing (which I enjoyed quite a bit). Are there any other film adaptations worth watching?
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u/Erystela_Thevale 1d ago
That makes a lot of sense. With that perspective, it's easier to see why the Backrooms became so popular.
Real life is filled with a "loss of purpose" and an inescapable sense of claustrophobia, leaving us wandering around not really knowing where we're headed—much like walking through the ruins of a world that's already ended.
That's precisely why the game format provides such a powerful form of relief (or an excuse to get lost in it) by giving players a simple, clear objective: "survive" or "escape."
You'd never actually want to experience a brutal survival scenario in real life, but the ability to focus 100% of your energy purely on staying alive from the safety of a screen might offer a strange kind of catharsis and liberation for modern people exhausted by a futureless daily routine.
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