alt title(s): White Void
THX 1138's imprisonment.
"I plan to spend a lot of time dancing weirdly in front of a white background."
I'll wait in this place where the sun never shines
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves
—Cream, "White Room"
A featureless white room. So featureless, in fact, that you can't even tell where the walls, floor, and ceiling end—they all blend seamlessly together under the uniform light, so the chamber looks more like a white void than a room. Sometimes, the only indication that it's
not a void is the fact that the characters have something solid to stand on.
As literal white voids represent some "other realm"—usually a result of a
dream or crossing over to
another universe—physical rooms that replicate this visual effect will have the same connotations. They make excellent cells for imprisonment or interrogation—the absence of visible exits (or any sign that the outside world exists at all) implies
no possibility of escape. Or, the white can represent sterility, making these rooms suitable for otherworldly hospitalization. Or, it can represent the limitless possibilities of a blank canvas, so this room could be a currently-inactive
holosimulator, or some other place where literally anything can happen.
Occasionally, there are a few pieces of furniture (color is optional) in the room for the characters to sit down and have a discussion.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Carmax
had a series of TV commercials with people standing in a completely white room. Cars would appear and disappear in response to their description of what vehicle they wanted to buy. (The original ad bore an uncanny similarity to the "We'll need guns. Lots of guns" scene from The Matrix, below.)
- A great deal of car commercials actually take place in the void.
- How about those Progressive commercials? It's a white "store" filled with only empty boxes labeled with policies, and people in white clothing are employees there.
- The setting of most Apple Computer ads since the introduction of OSX, including the testimonial-based "Switch" campaign, the Jason Long-John Hodgeman "Mac vs. PC" ads, and more recently the iPhone ads. The notable exception is the iPod ads, which lean more toward the opposite extreme.
- This PS3 commercial.
- Those late-'90s Gap ads that everybody's forgotten by now, as referenced by the page quote.
- One of the more famous "Got Milk?" commercials involved a man who dies and wakes up in an empty white room in what seems to be heaven. Of course, then it turns out to be the other place.
Comic Books
- X-Men has the White Hot Room, which is sort of outside the universe and mostly seems to exist so that various wielders of the Phoenix Force can have conversations with themselves.
- Invincible has a room that isn't actually a white void, but drugs in the water supply have mind-control ingredients that make everyone see it that way. It's for the super-soldiers.
Film
- THX 1138 (pictured) is the Trope Maker, if not the Ur Example.
- In The Matrix, the Construct appeared like this when its users aren't running simulations. It could also be used to procure supplies to take into the Matrix, such as guns. Lots of guns.
- The Architect's lair would be this if he didn't stick a bunch of TV's to the wall.
- Men In Black has some, specifically the Deneuralizing Room. Eventually, we come to realize that it's basically a large toilet bowl.
- In Bruce Almighty the Supreme Being invites the protagonist into a white loft.
- The Vincenzo Natali film Nothing is mostly set in a white void.
- The Made For TV Movie Mr. Stitch (Sci Fi Channel, mid-1990s, basically a very weird retelling of the Frankenstein story) featured a white room with minimalistic furniture, as the space where the titular creation spent his first several weeks of consciousness before escaping.
- The detention room in Sky High detention room was this plus desks. The room turned off a student's powers, by the way.
- The "Midnight Radio" song in Hedwig And The Angry Inch.
- The center of the Torus in Epoch.
- The ending scene of 2001: A Space Oddyssey.
Literature
- There's a SF novel called House Of Stairs where the setting is just a big white void... criss-crossed with stairs.
Live Action TV
- In Angel, the "White Room" that connects Wolfram & Hart's terrestrial office to the Senior Partners was one of these, with a creepy little girl serving as the Conduit at first. Later, a large black panther assumes the role, and then, an evil doppleganger of the visitor. It's not a nice place to visit.
- For a really obscure example: A 1990s Comedy Central sketch-comedy show called "Limboland" was entirely set in one of these.
- Penn And Teller Bullshit takes place in one of these.
- The Eyewitness series of science/nature documentaries feature an opening sequence in which the camera zooms through a kind of Mishmash Museum with animals of all sorts running about; the walls also have screens and picture frames depicing various images from the natural world.
- The museum itself is shown as being like this throughout the documentaries themselves, with video clips being introduced by the camera panning to the screens and picture frames. It also had the added strangeness effect of the pictures depicted being different every time, because they would be related to the subject matter.
- Doctor Who featured an early example in "The Mind Robber" serial, as the Doctor and his companions find themselves trapped in the land of Fiction. Ths being Doctor Who, you actually could see the edges of the walls, but the cast never did...
- Used a few times in Star Trek, albeit they're not so much "rooms" as actual white voids:
- In the episode "Tapestry" of TNG, Q brings Picard into such a place to speak with him after he dies from the failure of his artificial heart.
- In the DS9 episode "The Visitor", a white void is used to represent the "subspace vacuole" that Captain Sisko is trapped in.
- Also used in DS 9 when Sisko speaks with the Prophets.
Video Games
- Castle Oblivion from Kingdom Hearts may count as an entire building made of White Rooms if it weren't for the revisited levels from the previous game, and the tiny decorations in the rooms. Even the revisited levels themselves are described as White Void Rooms that have been magically reshaped by Sora's memories, and in Kingdom Hearts 2, Namine gets a similarly blank white room of her own in an otherwise dark, dusty mansion. The room's in-game name is, appropriately enough, "The White Room".
- The white room behind the mirror in Super Mario 64 DS. It has in it just one star.
- The Rakatan prison in Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic.
- In Super Paper Mario, when Sammer's Kingdom is destroyed, the door that led there now leads to a vast, empty landscape.
- The original Hitman game ends in one of these; a later release, Hitman: Contracts starts off in that same room.
- Several appear in the original .hack games, sparsely furnished and frequently falling apart due to corrupt or deleted data.
- The map gm_construct has one of these, until you change the color of its walls.
- Fun glitch-make the walls in that room transparent. Enjoy the trippy!
- When transitioning between areas in both Assassins Creed games, Altair/Ezio are placed in a room like this until the area fully loads.
Web Animation
Webcomics
Web Original
- Mr Deity is set primarily in one of these.
Western Animation
- One episode in Teen Titans titled "How Long Is Forever?" has a seemingly insane Bad Future version of Raven being held in a white room, apparently for her own protection.
- Invader Zim's Room... with a MOOSE!!
- There was a Spongebob episode where Squidward was on a Time Machine that went haywire and ended up in one of these.
Real Life
- Some CIA interrogators "break" detainees who won't confess by making them spend time in a featureless white room that's brightly lit all day and air-conditioned enough to be uncomfortable.
