Director's Notes - Episode 224: Liminal Spaces

I learned about the word liminal while in college studying religion. It's a word that comes up a lot in religion, looking at those moments that are between our world and another. 

Liminal is one of those words that, when you learn it, you want to find a reason to start using it. At the time, I was going through a break-up, and I remember writing a personal essay which contained the sentence "we had become liminal but refused to transform". I was unreasonably proud of that sentence.

So I get why The Youth has become obsessed with the word just as I was. I share Cecil's confusion about what exactly they mean by it, since a lot of the photos and videos that are shared as "liminal" don't seem to have a lot to do with the meaning of the word liminal as I understand it. They mostly seem to be using the word "liminal" to mean "eerie". Which is fine, words change meaning all the time. I would only argue that liminal has such a specific, interesting meaning that is not shared by any other word, and so it would be a shame to lose it. 

This episode came out of me watching a number of backrooms videos on Youtube. There are so many really talented young people making short movies there, the most famous of which is the 17 year old Kane Pixels who just got a movie deal out of his videos which are heavy with Lost-esque lore. (There is definitely a lot to say about how this generation, raised on ARGs and serialized television and cinematic universes, needs everything to have a dense lore in a way that previous generations, raised on video games that's entire plot could be summarized in a single sentence, do not.) I enjoy these videos, although the least interesting parts of them for me are the "entities", which tend to be simplistic monsters straight out of any internet jumpscare video. Instead, I love the spaces, the architecture of fear, the sense of a familiar space half-remembered. One video maker includes no people or monsters, only long silent tours of imagined spaces, and artistically I think that their videos are probably the most interesting.

When thinking of a story to pair with the backrooms phenomenon, it made sense to me to continue the path that Jeffrey has been taking over the last few years, poking gingerly at the minefield that is Cecil's childhood. It fit well for me, because Cecil's childhood was, as the kids say, very liminal.

-Joseph Fink

ps I made a post while writing this episode asking for non-plot segments people wanted to hear again, and the overwhelming winner was the Children's Fun Fact Science Corner, so here it is, by popular request.