When I was in high school there was this kid. Let’s just call him Tommy.
He had to have been borderline retarded although nobody knew for sure. He was
blissfully overweight, spoke clumsily, and carried a ridiculously amount of
keys on his belt. You could always tell when he was around what will all that
jingling of the keys and the labored breathing and the sweating. Boy, could
that kid sure sweat up a storm. But he was nice enough I guess. He never was
mean. But make no mistake he could be really annoying to talk too. He had
seemingly no capacity for self-awareness and was completely unable to pick up
on social cues.
There were two ways to deal with Tommy. Most people tried to ignore him.
Since I went to a rather nice high school, the technique for this was pretty
harmless. Tommy would waddle on up to your group with intention to be friendly
and all that. To get him to leave as quickly as possible your group would act
like the most boring people on the earth. Every question would be answered with
yes or no answers. No questions would be asked in return. This would make
lengthy conversations impossible. If asked what you were up to, the answer
would be nothing or we don’t know or somebody else has a thing but we’re not
sure how that’s going to turn out or if we are even going. The point vainly
trying to get across was: Can’t you find a group of more interesting people to
hang out with?
Then there was this group of guys who instead of ignoring Tommy, made
fun of him. They would give Tommy humiliating missions to accomplish and then
laughing up a storm when Tommy, always eager to please, would actually do them.
Most of the time these things were intertwined. The group of guys would
convince Tommy that those trying to ignore him (most likely some girl or group
of girls) would enjoy whatever antics they made him do in front of them. I’m
not sure how Tommy took all of this. He actually may have been too stupid to
understand. I hope so. Two things are certain though: The guys got a great kick
out of it and everybody else just thought it was a terrible terrible thing to
do to a borderline retarded kid.
And then invariably some righteous girl would confront the group of guys
and berate them about how mean it was to make Tommy do all these stupid things
and then laugh at him. To which one guy in particular (and this surprised me
because I thought he was the type of guy who did not have the ability to say
things profound) had perhaps the best retort he could have: “Nobody else is
even willing to hang out with Tommy. Yeah, we make fun of him, but we’re the
only friends he has. You just wish he didn’t exist.” Which was completely true.
This righteous girl like everyone else in the school was courageous enough to
insist that this group of guys not make fun of Tommy, but there was no way in
hell she was going to hang out with him herself.
So I ask you, dear reader, who do you think were better friends to
Tommy? Because I think the answer to that goes a long way in explaining why it
is okay for a group of supposedly mature adults to gather in a theater at
midnight for the express purpose of ridiculing the painfully sincere efforts of
a borderline retarded writer/director/lead actor/producer named Tommy Wiseau.
I’m of course talking about his one and only movie the 2003 so-bad-it’s-good
masterpiece, “The Room,” which can be found at Landmark Sunshine Theaters in
SoHo at midnight on the 2nd Saturday of every month. The experience
comes with a large and rowdy crowd armed with plastic spoons that are
encouraged to yell as many disparaging comments they can think of at the
screen. If you are lucky there will be an overweight drag queen in a very
important red dress to guide them all.
The plot for “The Room” is as such: There is this couple called Johnny
and Lisa. They live together in a small duplex in San Francisco. Johnny is a
super guy. Almost every character makes a point of talking about how Johnny is
such a super guy. He is a banker, so you know he makes a lot of money. He buys
his girlfriend Lisa a dozen red roses like everyday. He pays for the college
tuition of an orphan boy named Denny who lives in his building. At night he
makes sweet passionate love to Lisa and he’s really good at doing that too. He
cracks “jokes” that people in the movie laugh at and is quick with platitudes
like “If there were more love in the world, it would be a better place.” He
loves Lisa so much he is going to buy her a house. What a great guy.
Unfortunately Lisa is a manipulative bitch who is intent on destroying
Johnny and their relationship. She thinks Johnny is boring even though she
loves him and thinks he is a great guy because buying a house is boring and she
doesn’t like him and is toying with him because she’s a woman (i.e. not a good
person). So she seduces Johnny’s best friend Mark (who repeatedly tries to fend
off Lisa’s advances with the line “But Johnny’s my Best Friend!”) even though
Mark obviously likes Johnny better than Lisa. After many many scenes where
basically the same thing happens over and over again and other characters
inexplicably show up without introduction before talking about things that have
already happened, things that have been said before (i.e. “Why are you doing
this to Johnny? He’s such a great guy.” “Because I’m a total bitch and I do
what I want” ad infinitum….) or other things so vague they literally can’t add
anything to the plotline, Johnny and Mark get into a fight at Johnny’s surprise
birthday party, make up, and then get into an identical fight about the same
thing, this time without making up. After the party Johnny confronts Lisa with
evidence that proves an affair that everyone in the movie already knows that
everyone knows about. Lisa has been telling everybody about it pretty brazenly
even Johnny. Lisa finally leaves Johnny who proceeds to tear up his house (in a
fashion that weirdly reminded me of Orson Welles trashing up his palace in the
best of movie of all time “Citizen Kane.”) Johnny exclaims in a tone that
surely means to come across as either passionate or despairing but does not
really get to that level, “the world is hell. Everybody has betrayed me.” He
then takes out a gun and shoots himself in the head. Lisa, Mark, and Denny come
into the room and cry over his dead body. Roll Credits.
It’s shameful how often and how loud I laughed during this movie. And I
think it is important to explain why, because so many movies purposefully try
to emulate this type of movie only to end up in the pile of “so-bad-its-bad.”
So if “The Room” is so bad, then why is it so good?
First of all, and this is very important, this movie is not intended to
be a comedy. It is a serious drama and as a drama it is seriously bad. The main
problem is that it is so incompetently made in almost every scene that the
suspension of disbelief needed for an audience to take a dramatic story seriously
cannot occur, ever. There are huge technical problems all over the place. The
director has a hard time keeping camera shots in focus, he has no idea how to
block a scene with any more than two actors, and so many of Johnny’s lines are
dubbed over that most of the time his words do not match his lips. There are
huge problems with the writing. Subplots are introduced that are completely
forgotten a conversation later. One character flippantly expresses that she has
just been diagnosed with breast cancer. This is forgotten a sentence later and
never brought up again, even though the character has quite a large role going
forward. Then there is the inexplicable scene where a man we have never seen
before puts a gun to the head of Denny threatens to kill him if the money is
not delivered. Denny says he can get the money within five minutes. This period
of waiting is not quick enough for the drug dealer who proceeds to putting a
gun to the frightened boys head. Denny’s drug problem, the drug dealer, or the problem
of money was never mentioned before this scene and after this scene ends is
never mentioned again. Characters
do not sound different from each other. At one point a psychiatrist is
introduced, but he does not talk like a psychiatrist, nor does he say anything
new about the situation. It is as if the writer wanted a character to have a
certain amount of wisdom or expertise so he made him a psychiatrist but has no
idea of what a psychiatrist actually does. Finally there are huge problems with
the acting itself. Now it is kind of hard to fault actors for not persuasively
reciting lines that do not make sense, but one person here is especially bad,
and to no surprise, it is the writer-director himself, who speaks in a weird
accent, apparently thinks it is normal for bankers to have long stringy hair,
and must think he is attractive in a hugely erroneous fashion given the fact he
has chosen to write and direct himself into several long sex scenes in which he
is fully nude and looks like he is doing it wrong.
Okay, so perhaps you can get an inkling of why this movie is funny. But
then, why is it impossible to laugh at movies that are purposefully bad? A good
example of that this year was Will Ferrell’s “Casa De Mi Padre,” which also has
bad acting, huge technical flaws, and stupid writing.
Hugely generalized, a tragedy follows this structure. You have a
character in conflict that deserves to overcome but because of a tragic flaw in
character, dumb luck, evil of the world, etc. this character is not successful
in overcoming his obstacles. A comedy is the opposite. You have a character in
conflict that does not deserve to be successful but because of character flaws,
dumb luck, evil of the world, etc. this character is successful in overcoming
his obstacles. Think Hamlet or Macbeth as opposed to Happy Gilmore and the
Super Troopers.
“The Room,” works as a comedy because its incompetence combined with the
star performance of its writer/director/producer makes the real story so
transparent. We don’t go to see “The Room” because we think the movie story is
great, we are much more interested in the true story of how a borderline retarded
person named Tommy Wiseau somehow raised a few million dollars to make
unsuspecting actors recite ridiculously stupid lines and perform awkward sex
scenes. A few comedic points go to the blatant egotism and immaturity that
shine through the story unbeknownst to the maker. It is so obvious that this
Tommy had a bad break up and decided to make this movie as a sort of revenge (or
perhaps given the ending, a guilt inducer that could win the girl back). But he
stacks the deck so heavily in his favor and does it so incompetently that with
much irony it becomes startling clear that his real-life inspiration was
probably extremely justified in leaving him. If you want to see basically the
same inspiration in a great movie I suggest “(500) Days of Summer.”
Okay, okay, but aren’t comedies supposed to have happy endings. In the
end of this movie, Tommy kills himself. Yes, but that was just the ending of
the movie. The story we are interested here is the story of the movie itself.
And in these cases of the “it’s so bad it’s good” genre it is the audience
itself that supplies the happy ending. This movie had every reason to fail and
should have failed and been forgotten immediately. Instead, almost ten years
later, I am seeing it in a packed auditorium crammed to the gills with a crowd
that is immensely enjoying it. This is a happy ending brought upon by
ridiculous plot twists of the story of this movie. And for $11, you too can be
apart of it.
This is why “Casa De Mi Padre” is not funny. The story of that movie is
of a bunch of rich successful people who purposefully made a terrible movie
even though they had all the skills to make a good one instead. If you paid $11
to see that movie, you wouldn’t part of the happy ending in a comedy; you would
be a sucker in a con game. The laugh is on you. In essence, for a
“so-bad-its-good” movie to work it needs that relationship between the group of
guys at my school and the endearing borderline retarded kid. He can hang out
with us sure, but we get to make fun of him. Will Ferrell is one of the rich
cool kids. When he tries to hang out with us, it’s just confusing and weird.
There is also a part of me that believes some of the enjoyment in these
underground midnight showings comes from the genuine subversity of it People do
not like being dictated as to what kinds of movies they should like best. So
when a movie made by a person who tried really hard but still failed
spectacularly comes along the opportunity to raise it on high and provide it a
happy ending (like Ed Wood’s “Plan Nine from Outer Space” or the more recent
“Snakes on a Plane”) is also a scornful rebuke of all those in successful high and
mighty society. You know all those critics and assholes at the Academy that
insist depressing garbage like “Million Dollar Baby” or jerkoff fantasies like
“The Artist” are the best movies of the year. This is why you send the borderline retarded kid on missions to annoy the cool kids. Fuck
those cool kids. They think they are so much better than us.
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