Why Are Americans Obsessed With Escape Rooms?

An “Escape Room” or “Escape Game” is a live-action performative mystery solving game that requires individuals to collectively solve puzzles so that they might get out of the room or rooms within which they have become imprisoned. They were first developed in Asia, but became increasingly popular within the United States and Europe. In other words, Escape Rooms are most popular in places where neo-liberal capitalism has structured the social bond.

What is most interesting about the escape room is the ambiguity of the situation. Individuals obtain some pleasure in voluntarily locking themselves inside of a room, knowing nonetheless that they are safe (although there have been reported deaths and injuries). What therefore occurs within the escape room is a subjective confrontation with his or her own ambivalence: the desire to be locked away converges with the desire to be liberated.

In psychoanalysis, we have a name for this subjective structure: perversion. The pervert is the one who is unable to fully separate from the objects of his environment — fundamentally, from the maternal Other — and therefore plays an endless game of iteratively separating and reconnecting. This becomes symptomatic for the subject as he increasingly confronts ambivalent love/hate relationships with the objects and people in his environment.

When the subject has not adequately separated from the maternal Other, that is, when the subject has not integrated the law of the father (a law of separation from the enjoyment of absolute connection to objects), he ends up desiring the law itself. Is it any wonder, then, that the Escape Game consists essentially of discovering or inventing the laws through which some degree of freedom might be attained?

Finally, it is disavowal that structures the subject’s relationship to knowledge. The subject knows very well that he is free but acts as if he is not: at any point, the game can come to an end, and yet, nonetheless, the subject will perform his or her own imprisonment.

And is this not the precise problem with American socialism today? The movement to elect Bernie Sanders — noble as it is, and I do support it — nonetheless attempts to escape from capitalist oppression precisely by entering the confines of the Escape Room.