For those not in the know, The Room is an independently produced, low budget American romantic drama film that has gained a participative midnight movie screening cult audience, not unlike The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Vanilla Sky. Except the whole “cult phenomena” thing never happened to that piece of shit second film and rightfully never will. Why it happened to The Room is beyond the comprehension of anyone, living or dead, ever, in the history of this or any other universe and is possibly the result of Satan worship, international bribery and/or telepathic brain manipulation. The frightening billboard Wiseau maintained off an LA highway might have something to do with it as well.
ALRIGHT. FUCK! I’LL GO!
Listed among wikipedia’s "List of films considered the worst" (not a long list, by the way), nearly anything that can be said about The Room has already been written, so I’ll briefly address some of its main points. At face value, The Room is the age old story of a man betrayed by his best girl and his best friend. He also kills himself at the end, so there’s that too (lolSPOILERALERT). How anyone manages to kill themselves with an Airsoft gun, though, is incomprehensible. Admittedly, sense is not the domain of The Room. Pretty much everything about The Room raises the bar for the term “suspension of disbelief”. Subplots and characters are introduced and dumped quicker than Jennifer Anniston at a lame horse auction. The music sounds like everyone who was ever rejected from an O-Town audition smoked a bunch of shitty weed and covered an unreleased Nsync album. Dialogue is… uh… you can’t call it that. It’s not dialogue. It’s basically moonspeak. And when the not-dialogue isn’t moonspeak, it’s like someone who had only a rudimentary understanding of a non-existing gibberish language made up of mangled aphorisms and folk wisdom phrases plugged several of those phrases into Google Translate and then farted at a piece of paper to fill in the blanks. What characters The Room does decide to chronicle, it does so in such an unbelievably amateur way as to render them zero-dimensional. I know that’s hard to grasp, zero dimensions, but it’s imperative that you don’t give it much thought, lest The Room win and your mind be assimilated into whatever unearthly force is making Tommy Wiseau’s left eye lazy to the point of being indicted for unemployment fraud. What I’m saying is that The Room is a difficult film, though it isn’t challenging in any cinematic sense like, say, Begotten or Possession. The Room is more like an endurance test, like trying to play QWOP with one’s fingers stuffed up one’s own ass. I’ll take a juice break while you attempt the aforementioned feat, just make sure to wash your hands before you return to the keyboard.
Directed by Tommy Wiseau.
The creators of both QWOP and The Room clearly intended to produce something of creative value, but failed miserably, somehow inspiring car wreck decapitation levels of rubbernecking at their colossal missing of the mark. That missing of the mark is what delivers us to the midnight screening cult phenomena of The Room. Reportedly the result of a word of mouth, “OH GOD I CAN’T STOP WATCHING THIS” campaign, independent of the director’s actual advertisement campaign, the film spilled out of its LA “Friday Night Is All Anal Hardcore Night” theater confines and people were soon ridiculing the film internationally. However, Canada will watch anything and post-modern irony is still a good twenty years away from their collective conceptual understanding, so they actually think it’s a good film. I’m just playin’ witchoo Canada, we cool.
I can no longer remember how I was introduced to The Room. Wiseau has clearly taken over the part of my brain that controls why anyone would think it’s a good idea to actually watch The Room, but I think it was the aborted child of my love of shitty cinema and drunken, late night internet trolling. I acquired a copy of the film, watched it… and then watched it like three more times. All totaled, I’ve probably seen The Room about fifteen times, possibly more. When I heard The Room was playing at Cinema 21 in NW Portland, I was oddly compelled to go. The thing about The Room is that it’s much better to watch with other people. I should know. I’ve watched the film alone at least three times and I’ve wanted to commit suicide by pellet gun myself each time. When there are others present with which to commiserate your shared agony, it seems there may be hope and light in the world. But then, for some idiotic reason, you watch it by yourself again, drunk at 3 AM and it’s the filmic equivalent of consuming an entire bottle of aspirin and chasing it with a bottle of extra strength own brand Draino.
I didn’t really expect there to be as many people as there were, but there were a fuckton of people there. The line was around the block. Wiseau was late, but when he showed up he gave everyone in line a high-five, stopped to cavort and play “football” (a Room in-joke) in the middle of the street with a few attendees and got scolded by the cops for doing so. Indoors, Wiseau had set up a merch-table pretty much directly in the entrance of the theater and a small crowd gathered to collect autographs and interact. Interacting with Tommy is fucking bizarre. I get the impression that no one has any idea what that man is talking about, ever. Asked for advice about success or some such topic, Wiseau said “Always give twenty percent. Never one hundred. It goes twenty percent, forty percent, sixty percent.” I did the math in my head later and realized that’s 120 percent. What the fuck? In the Audience Q&A before the screening Tommy claimed to be from Mars, insulted the theater for lack of preparedness even though he was fifteen minutes late, and improvisationally mock-directed a skit loosely based on his film with a group of people who had come dressed up as characters from the film. He made absolutely zero sense until dropping the line “The Room is about expressing yourself.” At that moment, I realized Tommy Wiseau was actually insane.
I didn’t really expect there to be as many people as there were, but there were a fuckton of people there. The line was around the block. Wiseau was late, but when he showed up he gave everyone in line a high-five, stopped to cavort and play “football” (a Room in-joke) in the middle of the street with a few attendees and got scolded by the cops for doing so. Indoors, Wiseau had set up a merch-table pretty much directly in the entrance of the theater and a small crowd gathered to collect autographs and interact. Interacting with Tommy is fucking bizarre. I get the impression that no one has any idea what that man is talking about, ever. Asked for advice about success or some such topic, Wiseau said “Always give twenty percent. Never one hundred. It goes twenty percent, forty percent, sixty percent.” I did the math in my head later and realized that’s 120 percent. What the fuck? In the Audience Q&A before the screening Tommy claimed to be from Mars, insulted the theater for lack of preparedness even though he was fifteen minutes late, and improvisationally mock-directed a skit loosely based on his film with a group of people who had come dressed up as characters from the film. He made absolutely zero sense until dropping the line “The Room is about expressing yourself.” At that moment, I realized Tommy Wiseau was actually insane.
Solely on the merit of his film being mocked and publicly ridiculed has Tommy Wiseau achieved success. He refuses to tell us about his past. Funding for the film’s six million dollar budget may or may not have come from child labour. His film is considered one of the worst of all time. And I asked for his autograph.
And I posed for a picture with him.
He refused to have buttsex with me though.
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