Why Mark Duplass, Though?

A question I was wondering after Backrooms last night, but which didn’t fit into my other post, was why the movie included the subplot with Mark Duplass as a whiskery employee for a mysterious company.

This isn’t a deep dive on the movie, and it’s definitely not a complaint about Duplass. I tend to be pro-him, for his evangelism of indie filmmaking, and his support/promotion of Vidiots.

But it’s pretty hard to make the case that his character, and in fact his entire subplot, needs to be in this movie.

As I understand it, the company appears in the later shorts, so it’s a reference for fans. And the whole idea of a secretive corporate entity conspiring with the government to cover up a huge existential threat does fit perfectly with the 90s vibe of the movie.

The nice detail in Backrooms is that the movie takes time to establish that this is just a normal guy working for a company that used to be very normal. Having him as the face of the shadow organization helps it feel less like a fifty-plus-year-old cliche. It also puts the focus back on the Backrooms itself as the source of all the scares and existential dread, instead of having to split focus with a conspiracy. And reminds you that there aren’t black ops teams who know exactly what they’re doing; nobody understands what this thing is.

And of course, the purely commercial angle is that it’s another recognizable actor to add to a pretty fantastic cast. You can really tell that people devoted enough resources and talent to this project to try and do it justice, instead of treating it like I Don’t Know, It’s Slender Man Or Some Shit That Seems To Be Popular On Reddit.

But just in terms of the story, there’s nothing that the subplot does that couldn’t have been handled otherwise. They don’t ever become a real obstacle or threat, and really only exist to come in at the end and explain things. It could’ve worked well to make them a more significant part of the story, or just hints at a larger story, but as it is, it’s just a middle ground that’s not enough of either.

After all, just hinting at their existence can be pretty effective, as the shorts demonstrate. Security cameras, and lights and tripods with cables, appearing in the otherwise sterile environment. Footage of unidentified workers in clean suits, cryptically labeled as “archives” of unknown origin. Suggestions that people have been here before and attempted to figure out the rules of a space that seems to have none.

But I realized that there’s something specific to this movie, and this specific adaptation of the source material, that made the inclusion of Duplass and his subplot necessary. While the dinner scene was going on1, and the conversation was using so much of the language of therapy sessions, I started wondering whether the movie was going in the direction of saying that everything was happening inside Clark’s mind. Had the movie switched to a subjective viewpoint, after the ambiguous end of the POV segment? Was the movie no longer using the Backrooms as a metaphor for the characters’ psychological obsessions, and declaring that that’s what they were all along?

So by that measure, the movie needs to get brought back into the real world, to clarify that it’s a real place that exists in the movie’s universe, and not just some abstraction of the characters’ inner minds. And that just reinforced my bias against the approach this movie took with its adaptation.

I’m still a little frustrated that the movie not only felt the need to offer explanations, but that it felt obligated to make the Backrooms mean something. Or at least represent something. To its credit, it refuses to explain everything, and it makes a point of ending on a note of “we don’t understand it.” But it still feels as if they created a problem for themselves that they then had to solve, and at each step of that process, they got a little bit farther away from what makes the source material feel resonant and original.

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And on and on and on ↩︎

1 And on and on and on