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SUMMARY:Save the Date: Psychoanalytic Takes on Cinema: "The Backrooms": Alex Smith\, PsyD
DESCRIPTION:Discussion of the film “The Backrooms”\n2025 (110 mins)\nDirector: Kane Parsons \nAfter a therapist’s patient disappears into a dimension beyond reality\, she must venture into the unknown to save him.  \nFriday\, October 30\, 2026\n4:00 pm – 5:30 pm ET\nVia Zoom\n*Film must be viewed before event \nDiscussant: Alex Smith\, PsyD \nPresentation: Horror cinema’s infatuation with the motif of the “liminal space” reflects our personal\nexperience of the self at the precipice of disintegration\, the sense that the “I” is\nimpossible to define in the modern sociocultural void. The deistic Algorithm functions as\na mirror. Whether through rage-baiting vignettes\, or advertisements for a raincoat that\nyou don’t need\, (but could kind of imagine yourself wearing)\, the Algorithm provokes\nworship\, just as it induces dissonance. If the mirror is imperfect\, how imperfect is our\ngrasp of ourselves\, and the world? \nWhen the physical world is subjected to this same procedural generation\, it creates a\nliminal void- a monochromatically yellow office space running copy-paste routines of\nreality. This is the liminal space that Backrooms threatens. The self—and\, by extension\,\nthe world—is never fully ordered. It is fragmented patchwork in constant transition\,\nresisting ever being fully known. Parsons’ Backrooms depicts the “liminal space” and\nthe “I” as they approach a superposition. In here is a boundaried “me”. Out there is an\nimperfect copy waiting to engulf the “me.” As the backrooms iterate and metastasize\,\nour broken selves will leak into the transitory\, undefinable\, liminal field. Ultimately\, these\nsimulacra—reflections of self\, culture\, dream—may replace reality.\nAs a genre\, horror functions as a fantastical iteration of universal human experience.\nThe unthinkable and the unfeelable are depicted as just far enough into the woods (or\ndeep enough into the basement) to belong to the other. At this distance\, we are free to\nexamine these thoughts and feelings\, but never fully inhabit them. Together\, we will\nconsider Backrooms\, the function of the liminal space\, and their explanatory power in\nunderstanding the self in transition and in resistance\, as well as the universal fantasy of\nthe self and the world as orderly\, or at least once-orderly\, paradigms.
URL:https://www.wbcp.org/event/save-the-date-psychoanalytic-takes-on-cinema-the-backrooms-alex-smith-psyd/
LOCATION:Via Zoom
CATEGORIES:Continuing Education (CE/CME),Film Series,Public Program
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