It’s Such a Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever

Friday night, I fulfilled one of my cinematic dreams: to see The Room live with its director, writer, producer and star, Tommy Wiseau. That this wish ranks somewhere with seeing a true 70mm print of Tati’s Playtime in a theater and meeting my favorite director, Martin Scorsese, strikes even me as odd. By my count, this was my eighth or ninth time seeing the film, and the second in a theater. Each time, I watched it with a different group of friends or a few converts as we spread the Gospel of Wiseau around the Southeastern United States setting up churches devoted to the vaguely Teutonic Jack-of-all-trades (or fight clubs; people react to The Room in different ways).

For those who somehow found this page on a geek-oriented web site and still don’t know what The Room is, I don’t know that words can help you. Clearly meant to be a personal, maybe even psychological, drama about a man whose life falls apart before his eyes, The Room features such bad acting, such inexplicable dialogue and such unnecessary special effects (such as using CGI backdrops of the San Francisco skyline despite being filmed in San Francisco) that even its creator began to sell it as an intended dark comedy when the first reviews hit publications. The only way to assign any meaning at all to the film is to argue facetiously for its stance as an auterial work of hidden layers, as I once did for a laugh.

Wiseau certainly figured out his role in the inevitable snowball of bad-press-as-good-press long before he showed up in Atlanta last night to present the film in-between negotiations with Cartoon Network for a new show. Not only does he sell that bullshit about the film’s “intentional” comedy; he also appears in the flesh – for lack of a better term – to bask in the dubious love of crowds of hipsters who have come not to praise Tommy but to bury him.

After a meet-and-greet, Wiseau held a half-hour Q&A, during which he insulted some questioners, hugged others, led a singing of “Happy Birthday” and even dumped plastic spoons – the faithful will understand – onto a willing fan. When Wiseau deigned to answer a question, his answers only heightened confusion and uncertainty, each response an ouroboric, self-annihilating cycle of incoherent logic and halting English. He responded to one individual’s question of the significance of cancer in the film by promising to “educate” the young lad, only to spiral into unexplored lingual territory before finally telling the kid to just Google “cancer” to get the answer. Then, a guy asked what it was like to work with Jessica Alba on some small project, to which Wiseau creepily and mysteriously replied, “Which Jessica Alba, the real one or the funny one?”

The crowd ate it up, paying more attention to him than their high school and college (if more than 10 percent of the people in the theater were old enough to be out of college), and the actual screening was an uproarious experience, the usual electricity of a live show amplified by Wiseau’s presence. Seasoned pros had dialogue and action down to the second, engaging in spot-on countdowns and shouting the lines as they were said, while neophytes basked in the mad insanity of it all.

As I sat near the front, pelted by plastic spoons thrown with wild abandon and screaming and laughing my head off, I devoted some time to wondering, as I always do when I sit down with The Room, why I do this. We’ve moved firmly into the summer block of movie releases now, a time of year only slightly improved over the cinematic wasteland that is the first financial quarter of the year. I spend my summers at the movies typically setting aside the five or six big releases that I get some measure of entertainment out of – from passive enjoyment to the one or two releases I rave about – from the wave of derivative franchise films and failed attempts to launch new franchises that stem primarily from a source material or from so many clichŽs and tropes that the word “original” does not automatically come to mind.

Why then, spend my time with films that go beyond the unremarkable and passively offensive detritus of the mainstream into the realm of true tastelessness? There are plenty of great films being made in this country, to say nothing of the rest of the world, on a yearly basis, and I could be devoting more time to tracking down limited distribution and belated DVD releases than returning over and over again to the casual misogyny of The Room and Manos: The Hands of Fate or the staggering inanity of Night Train to Mundo Fine. What grabs me?

Well, for one thing, I’m not typically disposed toward tearing apart independent artists*, as everyone deserves the chance to mess up and learn through error at first, particularly those working outside the studio system. With the term “indie movie” having taken on the same meaning as “indie rock” – that is to say a definable aesthetic over a true lack of mainstream distribution – the ambition it takes to go out and raise the money and the crew oneself should be acknowledged even if the finished product should be put in a safe and then dumped in the sea.

But that does not account for why I can so ardently get behind these movies. The most obvious reason, and the most perversely poetic, is that these bad movies**, hallmarks of everything cinema shouldn’t be, bring back a communal sense of the theater. The practice of shouting out lines, be they jeers or made-up dialogue, stretches back to the medium’s beginning, when patrons of silent films would make up conversations between title cards and vociferously offer their opinion of the movie as it unfolded. Now, long after cinema has established itself as the seventh art and produces masterpieces and moving baubles for cheap consumption, the embrace of pure, unmistakable garbage somehow brings the medium back to the nexus point of its divergence between entertainment and art.

As such, nearly everyone who attends something like The Room in a live setting enters with the intent to watch it “ironically,” to cheer and jeer before leaving with an ego boost, assured that even the poorest life decisions won’t turn out that bad. But those same people leave with a genuine, however twisted, appreciation of the film. As sarcastic as it may sound, the film really does bring people together, a deliriously fun experience that even the quality blockbusters cannot elicit. It’s no wonder, then, that midnight movies take up residence at arthouse theaters: they engender an earnest cinephilia, linking the intellectual, the pretentious and the mundane into one hollering carnival.

Edward D. Wood, Jr. The King of Crap

Also, to return to the independent angle, a number of these films show a passion lacking in “proper” movies. Take the most famous example of bad-good filmmaking, Ed Wood Jr. Wood’s initial work ethic and optimistic ethos, immortalized in Tim Burton’s biopic on the director (and his most human work), believed in the power of movie making. Wood wanted to make it, to be sure, but the excitement evident in his films, seen most clearly in his satisfaction with every first take no matter what mistakes occurred, gives the impression that the simple act of making a film gave him such pleasure that critical and commercial success could not have elevated it a great deal. (Only after people got wise to how bad he was and shut him out did Wood give in to a more bitter and defeated outlook.)

I would venture to say, though, that Wood’s films contain more than just passion,; many have surprisingly progressive ideas, especially in the push for acceptance of alternative lifestyles put forward by the transvestite director. The stiff acting that mars his films grates on the nerves, but it also breaks from the more melodramatic delivery of contemporary film. Bunny Breckinridge’s performance in Plan 9 from Outer Space, in which he was ironically the only professional actor (save the footage Wood took of Bela Lugosi before his death), is so brilliantly deadpan that he practically opened the doors for anti-comedy in the movies. Hell, he could have fit in the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose ennui-filled art movies stand at the opposite pole from Ed Wood’s sandbox. Burton clearly understood this by casting Bill Murray, one of the great deadpans, to play Bunny in Ed Wood, allowing audiences to see just how thin the line separating Wood’s ineptitude from talent really was.

Perhaps this is all an effect of the majority of cinema falling almost by definition in the middle, the sheer mass and size of the average obscuring the extremities into one horizon. But I can recite more of The Room’s script than I can of any of my 10 favorite films, and both of my live viewings of the film (and some home screenings with friends) trump any other theatrical experience for sheer pleasure. Ultimately, in a country*** increasingly typified by mediocrity, from its entertainment to its government, there’s something appealing about trying and failing spectacularly. None of these people made a film with tax write-offs in mind; they put everything on the line to do something they loved. Regardless of how terrible (and terribly funny) the finished product is, who can’t respect that spirit?

*The second main criterion of bad films taken as comic brilliance is that the film cannot be intended as a comedy. Comedy cannot fail and be subsequently taken as comedy, at least not without a cavernous sense of schadenfreude. This also explains why The Room almost certainly could not have been originally a comedy.
** The original midnight movies – the anti-Western El Topo, David Lynch’s debut Eraserhead, John Waters’ pictures and The Rocky Horror Picture Show — all had darkly comic moments and a tastelessness that attracted audiences of dubious character, but each of these films contains working elements, and some of them could be taken as high art, separating them from the bad dramas working their way through cultist hands today.
***Cult films do tend to be a curiously, though not exclusively, American province; only recently has The Room ventured outside the country, and even the British rock opera Rocky Horror enjoys more success here (though a theater in Germany is modeled after the film).

–Jake Cole is a 20-year-old journalism student at Auburn University who hopes to become a critic. He constantly updates his blog, Not Just Movies, where he garrulously spouts about film, television and whatever else strikes his fancy. In his considerable free time, he wonders what it would be like to know how to talk to women.

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