Trigger Happy
PERSPECTIVE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
Liminal was once a word mainly reserved for literary critics, so I’m happy for it that it is now a buzzword for a whole movement in indie films and videogames. Deriving from the Latin limen (‘threshold’, ‘entrance’), it means a place of transition, an in-between place. So a ‘liminal space’ can be an airport, a border, or a crossroads. Or, of course, it can be a vast labyrinth somehow contained within the walls of an ordinary house, or an endless yellow maze of abandoned offices discovered beneath a discount furniture store.
The sound design is one of the creepiest aspects of the movie Backrooms, with the weird throbbings of distant aircon or the cruel buzzing of fluorescent lights turned up to hyperreal volume so as to demonstrate the unnerving, stress-inducing qualities of such audio environments in real-life places. Of course, the viewer suspects something is off right from the film’s pre-titles, which are bizarrely miskerned (the spacing between letters is all wrong), long before we see a ship’s wheel, or office chairs, or shoes somehow embedded in floors and ceilings. This realm is repetitively banal but off-kilter. Space, here, is not carved at its natural joints.