Toxic rooms

The Room (d. Tommy Wiseau)

From 2014.

I finally went to see the midnight movie The Room last night and read the film seriously despite the hoots and talk back from the audience. It is a bad film in a sense that director/writer/actor/producer takes cliches sincerely from bad objects like soft-core porn movies, meaning to say a) he seems to have learned his cinematic language from marginal sources and b) that part of the movie’s appeal is the audience feeling superior to the director’s obliviousness to mainstream cultural markers.

There was a bro-ness to the atmosphere of the crowd that is fed by the film’s misogyny. The lead female character is a mess of character motivation: she’s sexy, blonde, and disloyal. It’s only the director who seems out of place with his stoic Nosferatu-like expression and unconvincing line delivery. In fact, I would argue, The Room is an immigrant’s cri de coeur. The underlying fear is that of alienation from a society that is not one’s own which explains the director’s lack of self-awareness of the various elements in the film such as how bad his acting is. The obvious use of green screen with its foggy and gauzy view of San Fran shows that the film is about his fantasies: an improvised American family, a group of friends, and a go-go-go career. And yet, all of these things fail him. The film attributes his failure to the woman who cheats on him with his BBF. How lazy and sexist is the representation. (Check out the same kind of woman that appear in current bromances.) The best friend is shown to be a young, blonde-haired babe and he is meant to be the archetypical American boy next door. Their dalliance represents the immigrant guy’s a) insecurities by being with a blonde American woman and b) fears that folks close to him will choose their own kind or what is familiar over his dark hair and cryptic European accent.

While the audience laughed at the seemingly inept and incongruous cross-cutting with scenes of the city, especially towards the end, I found myself sympathizing with the director’s sense of un-locatability. He tries to master the cityscape with his own gaze but the gaze is not returned by anyone. The final shot indicates that he blames society for his failures and that the same society can only accept him if he just disappears. The movie is not unreal, there’s some thought to this movie unlike a lot of H-wood films, but it’s that America, even for a white immigrant, can be an unreal place.

#2014 #June