Enter ‘The Room’
I love bad movies. In order to enjoy a good movie, you have to know how to enjoy a bad one. In fact, I think that any film appreciation class you take in college should not focus so much on Eisenstein and Welles as they should on Wood and Corman. It doesn’t hurt to have had Mystery Science Theater 3000 on television when you’re a teenager, either. But tonight, on the eve of my 27th birthday, I do believe that I have now seen the best bad movie ever.
Thrill at the empty stare of Tommy Wiseau!
If you know a thing or two about bad movies and the Internet, then you may have heard about The Room. If you haven’t, then it honors me to inform you. Long story short, the film was released in Los Angeles in 2003 and quickly became one of those LA inside jokes that fascinate me. I just don’t understand what makes Los Angelenos tick. Anyway, it was written, produced, directed, and starred in by a strange, foreign man named Tommy Wiseau. Wiseau is most likely French, but like all great eccentrics, his true origin is unknown. And that’s just the beginning. There are plenty of mysteries to be found in The Room.
The story is like something Tennessee Williams would have written in junior high. Wiseau plays Johnny, a San Francisco resident who seemingly has it all: a fiance, some kind of a bank job, a parade of friends who may or may not have names, an apartment with a rooftop to hang out on, and a lot of hair. Things seem to be going very well for Johnny, until one day his fiance, Lisa, decides she no longer loves him and decides to start an affair with his best friend, Mark. All of this while lying to everyone she knows, saying that Johnny hit her. Mark seems to constantly want to call off the affair, but he is written badly enough that he goes ahead with it anyway. The story essentially follows Johnny’s downward spiral as Lisa’s antics continue.
This of course, is only the main storyline, and is really the only one that is followed through to its completion. Several subplots are created and then never revisited, such as Johnny’s “adopted” “son” Denny, who lives in the building and owes a drug dealer some money. After an encounter on the roof with this dealer, we never hear about it again. Or Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer. And in a later house party scene, we are left scratching our heads as to why an as-yet-unseen (and unnamed) character should have the moral compass to tell Lisa to come clean to Johnny about her infidelities.
The best part of it is, The Room takes itself entirely seriously about 90% of the time. Wiseau has gone on to say that the film was always intended to be a “black comedy” as it took on cult status as a midnight favorite in LA and New York. The cast and crew said otherwise, but you have to wonder if indeed, Wiseau was pulling a fast one on everyone involved. There are moments in which the film switches gear from super-serious to improvised hilarity in seconds flat. Watch it and you’ll probably agree. Sometimes true genius can be unassuming.
So why do I love The Room so much? There’s plenty of reasons. For one, it suffers from an identity crisis: is it a melodrama or a so-called comedy? Or maybe it’s a San Francisco travelogue, thanks to all of the lingering shots of the skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge. Another key to success is quotability. Any movie that has a line like “You can keep your stupid comments in your pocket,” or an impassioned “YOU’RE TEARING ME APART” is a surefire classic. And don’t forget to watch it with someone you love, because you’re in for not one, not two, but FOUR of the creepiest, most awkward, and unsexiest love scenes ever committed to film (or HD video, whichever Wiseau felt better about).
If midnight showings of The Room do not make their way to Boston, I’m going to have to raise the funds to bring it to Worcester myself. I have to see this with a roomful of people. You probably should, too.
