I've been writing reviews for my 2025 book for the past few weeks. The proceedings have been pretty slow as of late, owing to a number of personal events including the death of my mother, but things are still proceeding, albeit slowly. In the meantime, I've been thinking of what to do with my blog now that I've primarily moved my writing offline. Heck, I'm not even writing on letterboxd that much anymore. It's part of an effort to ride into the sunset and retire by 2030. At least that was my original intent. Nowadays I've been thinking of writing some semi-regular, unedited ramblings on this page instead - mostly about cinema, but sometimes other things. Here is my first attempt.
One of those 2025 reviews is for the feature film The Four Bad Boys and Me. The film, apparently an adaptation of a Wattpad novel, hews from a familiar template that I've been talking about in this blog for years. The origin point is Yoko Kamio's 1992 Hana Yori Dango, whose multiple iterations have popularized and propagated certain storytelling tropes worldwide. In the Philippines, these tropes immediately hit it off, as we are fixated (one could say even obsessed) with these ideas: that of the affluent "bad" boy with a heart of gold falling in love with the working-class, plucky girl. These storytelling conventions tap into a rich history within Philippine film and literature, that most likely reaches back into the origins of storytelling itself.
Art can be iterative, variations on a common theme told endlessly. Places like Wattpad or AO3 or fanfiction.net are hubs where people iterate upon art, copying it and adding their own spin to established stories and characters. That's how stories evolve and propagate. But there's a difference between, say, a piece of oral history that survives though the generations, and a piece of generated text from an artificial 'intelligence'.
That's one of the things that popped in my head when I watched Kane Parsons' Backrooms, his take on the internet creepypasta that started as a 4chan post. That, too, is a form of iterative media: after the original post became popular, various people started their own wiki and created lore around the Backrooms. There are floors and levels and different kinds of rooms and different entities, some even tying it to other, larger (and sometimes completely divergent) fictional universes. They all draw from ancient labyrinth myths that have existed as long as man has told stories.
Parsons has a relatively simple premise for the backrooms in his interpretation, and to understand it, it helps to be familiar not only with his Backrooms web series, but also another horror web series that he's uploaded to his Youtube channel: The Oldest View. The Oldest View shares elements with his Backrooms series but it plays on ideas of memory much more concretely (is that a pun? than its liminal sibling.
Set in a large, uncanny recreation of a long-demolished mall, The Oldest View tells the story of a Youtuber who comes upon a curious passageway leading to this unnatural space. During his exploration of this space, he comes across an entity taking the form of an abandoned art piece that actually existed in the real life counterpart of the mall. At first, the viewer's impulse is that the entity is somehow malevolent, but an alternative explanation for this entity is that it merely wants to be remembered. Parsons intersperses his videos with real life footage of the mall's demolition and scenes of the mall in its heyday. The Oldest View is a film about memory as much as it is about a creepy interdimensional space, and that holds true for his Backrooms film as well.
Backrooms is a film about an unhealthy fixation with the past. I call it nostalgia, but it's not an entirely accurate term, and to be fair there are kinds of nostalgia that are healthy. In this case, I'm talking about an unhealthy, maladaptive nostalgia that prevents people from moving on. The one most guilty of this is Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect who is relegated to selling furniture in a run down shop. He blames his troubles on everyone but himself, and while he consults Mary (Renate Reinsve,) a therapist, about his troubles, she's not equipped to handle his dysfunctions (the film perhaps presenting a critique of the pop psychology establishment of that time period.) At the same time, thanks to flashbacks, we see that Mary grew up with a mentally ill parent, and she's been traumatized just as much as Clark has been, if not more.
In that sense, the Backrooms can also be read as a film about how people respond to trauma, and how they either retreat into the safety of a "nostalgic" past, or move forward into an uncertain future. It's telling how Mary symbolically performs the latter using a totem of her own past, breaking it in the process. It's uncertain as to what will happen to her from now on, but the future holds no promises. It is not an assurance of relief.
But even more interesting to me is how this reading and the one previous about memory can be extended to cultural memory. Parsons sets his version of the Backrooms (both the series and the movie) in the nineties, hovering around the events of the Cold War and Operation Desert Storm, whose events would eventually lead into the eventual War on Terror. The safety of malignant nostalgia creates complacency, even hubris, the kind that declares a Fukuyama-ish "End of History." Of course, decades after that declaration we see that neoliberal capitalism didn't shake out as well as its proponents initially thought, but that obsession with past glories remains.
In addition to that, the same kind of malignant nostalgia manifests itself in our media and our relationship to art. In Backrooms, the titular rooms are created by an imperfect misremembering of events, each iteration remembering less and less until only noise remains. The comparisons to generative artificial intelligence are apt, because generative AI is nothing more than weaponized, instrumentalized nostalgia. Its aims may differ, but the process of how it "creates" is arguably similar. It draws on nothing other than what it is given. It remembers imperfectly because it lacks the experience that accompanies memory - it hasn't lived those memories, so its output will always be an approximation, a caricature. In the words of Clark, "It's like describing a dog to someone who's never seen one, then asking them to draw one."
And that, in my opinion, is what sets apart iterative forms of art like The Four Bad Boys and Me and various forms of generated slop made by AI. In viral, memetic art, or in iterative forms of media (fanfiction, AUs, community-made lore), human experiences add to a growing body of art that evolves over time, where its storytelling conventions and tropes twist and turn according to the zeitgeist. On the other hand, AI cannot create anything objectively "new", it can only regurgitate whatever it is given. Over time, 'iterating' upon itself endlessly, it will never add - only subtract. It will take away and take away, until in the end, nothing is left.
