There are few fan bases so perplexing as the cult following dedicated to The Room. On the surface, they are worshipping an absolute disaster of a movie. Dig a bit deeper and… well, it’s still a disaster.
Plot lines are introduced and immediately discarded. Actors sloppily deliver lines that feel weirdly out of context. In any other movie, a scene as simple as ordering food at a café would be succinctly conveyed. But in the strange mind of director-actor-producer-writer Tommy Wiseau, not only does this action deserve such a lengthy amount of screen time, but so do the orders of all the other random people queuing up.
But who is Tommy Wiseau? And why has there been so much fuss about his famously terrible movie?
Well to begin with, he is an enigma. If you believe some of his interviews, he’s 100% American. According to others, he used to live in France. Of course, this is all in spite of his vaguely Eastern European accent. Also, his age is a mystery. And so is the source of his immense wealth, which he used to fund the $6 million catastrophe back in 2002.
Despite all the secrecy, Wiseau is quite an outgoing character. He craves the spotlight, and yet he also displays a bizarre kind of obliviousness to what constitutes normal human behaviour. During the filming of The Room he rubbed his entire cast and crew up the wrong way, ignored their exasperated suggestions, and often inadvertently caused safety issues on set.
But this is what sets The Room apart from other cheap, B-grade movies. As a director, Wiseau had everything he needed to make a decent film – the money, a dedicated crew, cutting-edge technology – and yet it was his own incompetence that led to the creation of a film so bad, that it has been dubbed “the Citizen Kane of bad movies.”
The fame of Wiseau and his movie exemplifies a niche style of art and celebrity culture that glorifies the irony of tastelessness. Broadly speaking, The Room fits into the category of B-grade cinema with other movies like Sharknado or Birdemic. Audiences can appreciate these movies with some irony, and most of the time the films themselves recognise how completely ridiculous they are. But in The Room, irony is scarce. It is oblivious to its own glaringly obvious flaws, completely void of any self-awareness.
Yet, somehow, it is also so watchable. It is a hilarious, beautiful, quotable train wreck of a movie, and as journalist Tom Bissell elucidates:
It’s like a movie made by an alien who has never seen a movie, but has had movies thoroughly explained to him.
The Room isn’t just a bad movie – it is a bad movie that tries so desperately to be a good one, and yet spectacularly fails in almost every way imaginable. Over a decade after its release it is still shown regularly in cinemas across the world, inspiring fans to attend screenings dressed up as its characters, shout its most quotable lines, and even throw around plastic spoons (one of many in-jokes born from its cult following).
Most recently, the making of The Room was chronicled in the film The Disaster Artist, directed by and starring James Franco as Tommy Wiseau. Based on the book of the same name written by co-star Greg Sestero, it follows the development of The Room from its beginnings as an ambitious idea between two eccentric friends, into the critically panned yet well-loved cult phenomenon it is today.
The real question is, what happens to The Room’s indie cult following now that it has been exposed to mainstream audiences through Hollywood? It is possible that its value as an in-joke shared between only the most avid movie geeks will slowly peter out. But based off its boost in popularity in recent years, it is more than likely that audiences’ appreciation for The Room will grow over time, educating the masses on the challenging craft of filmmaking. After all, failure is often just as good a teacher as success, and can easily be much more amusing.
One Comment