Photo: “Tommy-Wiseau-2” by Tommy Wiseau is a public domain photograph
By Alice McIntyre
“I did not hit her! I did not! Oh, hi Mark.” This is one of many strange lines of dialogue found in Tommy Wiseau’s oddball cult classic The Room, recently screened at the Capitol Theater by the Olympia Film Society. The Room is a romantic drama starring Wiseau as a banker named Johnny whose fiance, Lisa (Juliette Danielle), begins an affair with his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero). The film has been universally acclaimed as one of the worst movies ever made, with a 26 percent rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The Room, both in production and product, was so bad it required a James Franco flick about its supposed badness: The Disaster Artist.
As the Cooper Point Journal’s certified generator of Hot Takes, I’m legally obligated to be contrarian here. The Room is good.
Wiseau’s inverse masterpiece is not good in a conventional sense. The dialogue is stitled and often weird, plot threads are inconsistent, the overall story is yet another Boring “Romance” with a Sad Ending type of gig, and so on. Plenty of technical and content-based criticism has been made, and it’s valid. However, I want to detach The Room from its reputation, its director, and our conceptions of what film should be.
From that position of detachment, I consider The Room a psych-horror comedy about the mundanity of traditional, patriarchal, heterosexual relationships. Lisa wants to leave Johnny for a very simple reason: he’s boring. She doesn’t care much for the stability, the presents, the money, etc: and she shouldn’t. Yet she is under constant pressure from Johnny, her mother, and most everyone around her to stay with him, precisely for those reasons. The film variably describes the two as having been together for five and seven years, reflecting how time is distorted when one is stuck in a routine they don’t care for. Uncomfortable, softcore-adjacent sex scenes reflect the emptiness of both dispassionate sex and sex which occurs as a form of depressed escapism.
The film showcases Johnny’s descent into an emotional breakdown, in which he shoves Lisa, attacks Mark, monitors Lisa’s phone conversations, and ultimately kills himself. This behavior is relatively normalized by the film’s narrative, depicting it as a response to Lisa “tearing him apart.” It is also of note that the initial rumors Lisa spreads about Johnny hitting her are taken with little seriousness by most of the characters, reflecting how abuse is often normalized and women’s testimony regarding it is often dismissed. The film is a concentrated reflection of societal misogyny which, removed from hype/anti-hype, gives me vaguely David Lynch vibes.
When shoving Lisa back onto the couch during a confrontation, Johnny asks if she understands life. Lisa doesn’t answer. This can be interpreted as an expression of how, no matter how strongly we may grasp the mundane aspects of life (work, bills, housing, marriage) we still struggle to find meaning. Johnny has substituted the mundane for meaning, and Lisa’s ill-advised affair indicates that she can’t bring herself to do the same. It is Johnny’s wholesale acceptance of a soul-sucking, routine life and his fixation on buying the love of one particular person with presents and attention, not Lisa’s mistakes, which are ultimately responsible for his death: first spiritually, then physically.
Verdict: Tommy Wiseau/10. The Room is unquantifiable, an enigma.
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