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Recently I watched the backrooms movie, and not long ago I had also read the book 'After Dark' by Haruki Murakami, and I felt that they had something in common - The lack of a definitive ending.

The movie and the book did end after running out of time or pages ofc, But the story felt like I had just watched the first episode of a TV show with at least 7 more episodes to go. Except this wasn't actually a series and just a stand alone entry.

In both cases, there were so many supernatural things left unexplained, and by the end it felt like I was observing through a cctv camera of something bigger at play, enough to know something was up, but left hanging with no more leads.

and for some, thats their point. In both the backrooms and the book 'After Dark', they aren't praised for the conclusive ending or sometimes even their story, more so on about how it made them feel (and something about the shape of the prose, or the cinematography without talking about the story behind it).

To me its the equivalent of appreciating a picture for the way they had taken it rather than the content itself. Making a picture look straight out a disposable camera is super cool, but if you use it to only photograph a pack of chips that doesn't really say anything to me other than "a bag of chips if it would've been photographed in the 90s".

To some it might invoke the feelings of nostalgia or give them a certain "vibe" or "feel" that I'm missing. Because to me Its just a 90s looking picture of a bag of chips.

If it had instead been the same disposable camera picture but of teenagers in the 90s on skateboards with walkmans and tamagotchis strapped to them with a scene of them exchanging mixtapes, a culture that only really existed for a small portion of time, now that tells me a story. Kind of like those renaissance art pieces which can be analyzed to actually mean something.

Maybe then it would have been obvious to me that "oh- this person has tried to depict how it would have felt like to be alive at the time, and almost like a portal into some culture in the eyes of a camera from that time, how nice"

but if you expect me to get all that with just the vibe and not the content, I'm sorry - perhaps I'm just not at the level to appreciate art from just the way the words are put together or the cinematography of how it makes someone feel. Rather than the bigger meaning behind

typing this out makes me feel like a kid unable to appreciate stories without a simple moral. Life is filled with events that do not have a definitive ending to stories and "just are the way they are" which I completely get.

I'm even a fan of many "slice-of-life" media - but they all have something in them - a bit of comedy, sadness, complexities of being human alongside a world building, a journey which makes the ending that much more meaningful.

but what happens when the journey is the destination, and its all about world building and intricacies which put deliberate story writing like comedy and romance aside. Sure it's a more 'natural' world building with no forced elements. But if I wanted to just see things unfold, I'd go out and touch grass.

Anyways, I will probably hugely regret posting this "rant". I still whole heartedly believe that its me who is too dense to appreciate such organic media rather than a fabricated story, but who knows, maybe someday I'll come back to this and snicker at how naive I was

I really need to add a comment section, until then, feel free to text me about this or otherwise. Thanks for reading :)