Magic Hours (26 page)

 

A disinterested plot summary of
The Room
might go as follows: A kindhearted San Francisco banker named Johnny is caught in a love triangle with his fiancée, Lisa, and his best friend, Mark. Among those pulled into the orbit of the affair are Denny, Johnny's quasi-adopted ward; Claudette, Lisa's stingily calculating mother; and Peter, Johnny's psychologist friend. Although
The Room
opens with Johnny arriving home to a tableau of seeming domestic bliss, we soon learn that, because Johnny is so “boring,” Lisa no longer loves him. Shortly thereafter, Lisa seduces Mark, who at first cavils (“Johnny is my best friend”) but quickly caves. The remainder of the story is a somewhat inert game of cat and mouse: Lisa gets Johnny drunk on a peculiar mixture of vodka and whiskey (which
Room
fans have christened the Scotchka) in order to accuse him of hitting her; Johnny overhears Lisa admit she is having an affair, after which he begins taping her phone
calls; Lisa throws a disastrous surprise birthday party for Johnny in which her sundry deceptions are exposed, after which Johnny busts up their condo, somehow finds a gun, and exacts his revenge.

“So bad it's good” is the prevailing wisdom on why
The Room
has become such a phenomenon. In this view,
The Room
stands ineptly beside other modern paragons—
Showgirls, Roadhouse
—of the midnight movie. The first time you see
The Room
, there seems little in this position to quarrel with. Wiseau's osmium-dense, east-of-the-Carpathians accent, for example, which falls somewhere between early Schwarzenegger and Vlad Dracul, makes for an incomprehensible leading man. The dialogue, meanwhile, is interplanetarily bizarre. At one point, Lisa proclaims to Mark, “I'm gonna do what I wanna do, and that's it.” Pause. “What do you think I should do?” At another point, Johnny walks out onto his apartment building's rooftop in a state of savage agitation, having just learned that Lisa has accused him of hitting her. “It's not true!” he says to himself, throwing aside his water bottle. “I did not hit her! It's bullshit! I did not hit her! I did
not
!” He then notices Mark sitting off screen. “Oh, hi, Mark,” Johnny says pleasantly, having a seat beside him. “What's new with you?” Mark proceeds to tell Johnny a horrible story of a woman who was beaten and hospitalized by her cuckolded boyfriend. In response, Johnny laughs with ghoulish warmth. Later, when Mark presses Johnny for some business information, Johnny lectures him that such information is confidential and, without missing a beat, asks, “Anyway how is your sex life?”

This is not a frivolous question:
The Room's
characters enjoy hearty coital appetites. Altogether the film's quartet of sex scenes takes up almost 10 percent of its total running time. The first and longest such scene, between Johnny and Lisa, unforgettably occurs five minutes into the film. Much of it is shot through diaphanous white bed curtains and what appears to be a hotel-lobby water
sculpture. Whereas the rose petals Johnny picks up and decoratively drops onto Lisa's breasts and the adult-contemporary R&B soundtrack both come straight from the
école du
Cinemax, the vision of Johnny's strangely mispositioned alabaster behind pistoning up and down upon what appears to be Lisa's navel has no cinematic precedent.

Technically speaking,
The Room
is a difficult film to extol. Wiseau takes pride in the fact that
The Room
was filmed simultaneously with two cameras, one a standard 35-mm and the other hi-def. Wiseau's most mystifying decision was to shoot The Room's several rooftop vignettes against a panoramic green screen, against which a shimmering digital vista of the San Francisco skyline was later badly composited. Wiseau's unbudgeable insistence
⁷
on filming
The Room
with two cameras and preference for expensive technology that could have easily been done without are triple-play rarities in modern filmmaking: at once financially improvident, visually unsatisfying, and definitively unnecessary.

The Room
's narrative strategies, meanwhile, amount to one kamikaze after another. In one scene, Lisa's mother Claudette offhandedly mentions that she has just received some upsetting medical-test results. “I definitely have breast cancer,” she tells her daughter, with an annoyed little shudder. The dramatic impact of Claudette's cancer revelation, which is never mentioned again, is nicely captured by the scene's DVD chapter title: “Claudette and Lisa/Cancer.” Late in the film, during Johnny's surprise party, Lisa is confronted by an agonized, furious man who has just caught her canoodling with Mark. This man expresses his disgust for Lisa's behavior and speaks of his fear that what she is doing to
Johnny will destroy their friendship. We have never met this man. We have no idea who he is, why he is worried, how he knows Johnny or Lisa, or what he is doing at the party.

The centerpiece of
The Room
is a scene involving a character with the typographically striking name of Chris-R. A goateed thug and drug dealer, Chris-R finds Johnny's ward, Denny, dribbling a basketball on the green-screen-corseted rooftop. After a brief argument, Chris-R pulls a large silver handgun on Denny and holds it to his head. Johnny and Mark appear, intervene, and hustle Chris-R off camera. With that, Claudette and Lisa somehow materialize, and Lisa and Denny proceed to have this escalatingly hysterical exchange:

Denny's explanation for this worrisome turn of events is a logic sinkhole. As he explains to Lisa, he needs to “pay off” some debts. Which suggests that he was buying the drugs to sell them. Why, then, if he has already bought the drugs, does he owe Chris-R money? Is Chris-R running some kind of drug layaway program? Why does Lisa appear to believe there are different kinds of money? None of these questions get answered, or even addressed, because the matter of Denny's drug buying or drug abuse (or whatever it is) immediately joins Claudette's breast cancer in the foggy narrative beyond.

I have not mentioned the fact that
The Room
's male characters frequently play football while standing three feet apart from one another, sometimes while wearing tuxedoes; or that one character, for no detectable reason, collapses in pain in the middle of an otherwise procedurally sane scene; or that Johnny and Lisa have around their apartment several enigmatically framed portraits of spoons.
⁸

By now I have seen
The Room
at least twenty times. I know I will watch it again soon. I am probably watching it right now. “Bad” and “good” are incapable of capturing how I feel about
The Room
. Sometimes I think about Wiseau's thespian-berserker charisma. Other times I think, Why football? Why a rooftop? Why a drug dealer? Mostly I think about how everything that captures Wiseau's directorial interest flies straight into the lessons-learned headwinds generated by a century of filmmaking.

A collaborative medium such as film is structurally designed to thwart people like Tommy Wiseau—and, indeed, during
The Room
's production, Wiseau fired the entire crew four times over. Yet anyone with the know-how, perseverance, and fanaticism to not only conceive but write, cast, direct, produce, and distribute a film
should
be versed in the prevailing aesthetics of his time, if only to reject or subvert them. Wiseau tried to make a conventional film and wound up with something so inexplicable and casually surreal that no practicing surrealist could ever convincingly ape its form, except by exact imitation. It is the movie an alien who has never seen a movie might make after having had movies thoroughly explained to him.

As you watch and rewatch
The Room
, categories melt away: Is this a drama? comedy? joke? none of them? all of them? Every filmmaking convention across which it stumbles is sundered. Take
the convention of the exterior establishing shot. According to the grammar of film, such a shot is used to indicate the passage of time and a spatial relocation to another site within the film's world. That is not how things work in
The Room.
At one point, we are at Johnny's birthday party. Wiseau cuts away to an exterior establishing shot of what appears to be an office building. The viewer assumes—no,
believes,
given how thoroughly films have trained us—that the next shot will take us inside that office building. The next shot shows us that we are still at the party.

Wiseau understands the placement and required tone of certain conventions but not at all their underlying meaning. What makes him interesting is the degree to which his art becomes a funhouse-mirror version, an inadvertent expose, of a traditional film. He shows, however accidentally, that the devices and conventions we have learned to respond to do not necessarily solve or even
do
anything. More than any artist I can think of, Wiseau proves Northrop Frye's belief that all conventions are, at heart, insane. Or, as I overheard someone say as I left Cinema 21, “Maybe this is what originality looks like now.”

What does it say about contemporary American culture that the
Rocky Horror Picture Show
of our time is not a likeable exercise in leering camp and butt-shaking grooviness but a brain-stabbingly earnest melodrama distinguished by what it is unable to provide? Why are so many people responding to this megalomaniacal feat of formal incompetence? Is it the satisfaction of seeing the auteur myth cruelly exploded, of watching an artist reach for the stars and wind up with his hand around a urinal cake? Some viewers clearly relish this aspect of
The Room,
but others come away from the film strangely exhilarated. In an entertainment culture in which everything from quiet domestic dramas to battling-robot fantasias is target-audienced with laserlike precision,
The Room
is as bereft of familiar taxonomy as a bat from Mars. In an entertainment culture
in which bad and good movies alike have learned to wink knowingly at their audiences,
The Room
is rivetingly unaware of itself or its effect. In an entertainment culture in which “independent filmmaking” is more of a calculated stance than accurate accounting of means,
The Room
is a film of glorious, horrifying independence.

 

 

Tommy Wiseau is not, in any sense, an easy interview. I got in touch with him through his website, after which a man named John, the “administrator” of Wiseau Films, requested that I write up all the questions I intended to ask Wiseau during our interview. I emailed back a long and, I hoped, thoughtful email explaining why I did not work that way and why I preferred to meet and simply have a conversation. Unmoved, John, whose bludgeoned English (“Does your peace is for print or/and on line viewing?”) bore a telling resemblance to that of one T. Wiseau, emailed back a request to submit my interview questions beforehand. I made another, equally thoughtful argument as to why I did not want to do that. John responded with another, identical request to submit my interview questions. So I did. A few days later I was apprised of the time and place where Wiseau and I would meet.

Although the address John gave me turned out to be wrong, I managed to find the appointed Beverly Hills delicatessen. Wiseau, riding shotgun and exactly on time, pulled up to the deli in a silver SUV, a THEROOMMOVIE.COM decal on the rear passenger-side window.

His flyaway hair looked as though it had been soaked in printer ink and I had not seen skin so pale outside of Edmonton, Alberta, in February. His lips were nearly colorless, his jaw as large and square as a shovel. He was wearing a heavy green jacket that looked too warm for Los Angeles in September, dun-colored cargo pants with a complicatedly studded belt, and combat
boots. The overall effect was that of a vampire who had joined the Merchant Marines. Wiseau took off his jacket once we sat down, revealing a black tank top identical to one Johnny dons briefly in
The Room
.Wiseau had been in anatomy-model shape at the time of
The Room
's filming; he remained so today.

One of my first questions concerned the mysterious John. I asked Wiseau if he was “a young Hollywood-assistant-type.”

“You may say that,” Wiseau said. “He's doing... freelance. He has limited hours.” He laughed, all but admitting the ruse.

After some initial chitchat, I asked Wiseau if he had any friends he could put me in touch with. Someone, I said, who could help me fill out the personal side of Tommy Wiseau.

“I have dozens of friends,” Wiseau said. “But this is your job. It's not my job to suggest.”

“But I don't know your friends.”

“I'm not here to say ‘Talk to this person about me.' That's nonsense.”

This was, I told Wiseau, fairly standard procedure.

“I'm against that. You know, this is your... you're a journalist.”

“But I'm not a private investigator.”

“You don't need to be a private investigator. You can go to screening, you can talk to many people about
The Room
, about me, whatever.” He shrugged. “You can go in so many different angles, if you ask me.”

By this Wiseau meant one angle, as he refuses to answer any questions about his personal life. Nevertheless, I made a few anemic lunges. The intensity of the scorn the film heaps upon Lisa—and, it must be said, women in general—has led many to assume that
The Room
is Wiseau's revenge upon a former lover. When I asked about this, Wiseau replied with the same answer he had given many journalists—that
The Room
is a perfect mirror of human experience and that in everyone's life there are many Lisas
and Johnnys and Dennys, etc.—but he did claim that he used to be married and had once lived in San Francisco. That was as deep as he was willing to let me go.