Photo Essay: Rage Against the Room

I am in the back room (of the back room) of Stormbreaker Brewing in St. Johns, wearing an industrial jumpsuit, a safety helmet with a big clear plexiglass visor, and one gardening glove. David Tate—who also goes by “Thor,” and told me that since leaving the military he has done everything in his power to wear shorts and tank tops as much as humanly possible—is standing in the middle of the room, which is divided by a large movable wall, giving a speech to a similarly dressed group of young adults and a middle-aged woman charged with a teenager.

“When you’re throwing glass, throw it at the wall or the ground,” he says. “The big bottles are best hit with a baseball bat or crowbar, while the plates and cups are better for throwing at the wall. If you’re gonna be swinging a bat, make sure the other person is near the door. No throwing things up and swinging it… just for safety reasons. We’re here to have a good time, but we’re here to be safe as well.” 

Tate closes the divider and leaves his clientele to it. I remain on the side of the room with the young adults, camera in hand. All of a sudden, from the other side of the room, behind the divider: a loud crash, breaking glass. 

I knew this was coming, of course. This is the purpose of the Rage Room, an enclosed space stocked with breakable objects, bottles, cups, televisions, pyrex pans, and more, so that, for roughly $35 an hour, customers can break shit with abandon—and without facing any consequences. But the sound of shattering glass in the other room still triggered something in my deeper programming. I was, for a second, and beyond reason, shocked. 

As the people in my room took to mowing down their provided glass bottles and mugs with sledgehammers, crowbars, and good ol’ fashioned wall-hucking, I acquiesced to this environment—but never in totality. Shattering glass is an alarm in every other context of my life. It’s an extremely loud signal that something has gone terribly wrong, and it would take weeks of exposure to re-adjust my feelings about it. Also it’s just really, really loud.

Tate, the regional manager of Celtic Axe Throwing, operates axe-throwing concerns around the Portland metro area. This is the company’s first Rage Room, a grand new frontier in controlled, violence-based entertainment and a natural extension of their previous business. “It’s interesting. The people you get, they’re different. They’re here to get rage out, have fun, smash.”

Why rage rooms? “It seems like the new thing,” says Tate. “Axe throwing was big for a few years, and now rage rooms are popping up. Everybody has a little bit of rage to get out at some point in their life.”

“It’s elating,” says Tate of his own rage room excursions. “It releases the endorphins… allows you to just breathe a little lighter after sweatin’, throwing, and..,” Tate adds with a slight salesman’s lilt, “smashing.”

Rage room operators make some therapeutic claims about their product, and today’s clients were vibing with that. Tate told me, as I looked over the chaos of the previous client’s rage, that these visitors were having some family troubles and had some “stuff” to get out. As they exited, I overheard the adult, who was supervising the teenager, ask if they felt like smashing televisions helped them exorcise some of those negative feelings. 

For his part, Jesse Beckman, a truck driver, is packing around “a lot of pent up rage” from his time in the seat. “It’s almost like, you go through life with training wheels—with set rules and everything.” But in this room, he says, “it goes from that to ‘yeah, fuck it… now I can just rampage’.” 

I won’t pretend to know if this actually works. Psychology—as a science, an art, a discipline—is littered with the corpses of theoreticians who sought to truly understand the nature of catharsis… that moment when our sublimated tensions and contradictions find release. The rage room is a place where people might seek to take their contradictions, place them in a different container, and smash that container against a wall. But what happens next? Does the perceived trouble then seem smaller, weaker, beaten up and sprawled bloody in the residue of the glass? Or does it come back, unharmed, maybe even stronger from the attempt at its demise? 

Only one way to find out, I guess.

The Rage Room is located at 832 North Beech, in the heart of St. Johns. Thirty-five dollars per person per session, appointment only. Book a session here.