Room, The (2003)

Well, fuck me.

I finally got around to seeing the "Rocky Horror" of the Gen Z or Gen AA or whatever the brainless, tattooed technophile youth is calling themselves these days and I'll be darned if they're not as cinematically lame and derivatively unhip as I had imagined.

For some reason, known only to the gods of "what passes for awesome" in the new millennium, Tommy Wiseau's The Room has become a cult phenomenon of sorts; likened to such high camp favorites as Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, Manos: Hands of Fate and Mommie Dearest for the unintentional guffaws and ridicule heaped upon it by its postmodern audience of hipsters and trash acolytes.

But this ain't your daddy's Showgirls.

The Room is a spurious grail of camp for a collection of youthful cinema enthusiasts (deadened by the current culture of American movies) that want desperately, longingly, to have some unbearably awful shit to call their own. They grew up with older siblings and parents who spun tales of Reefer Madness, Bedtime for Bonzo, Glen or Glenda, Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S. and The Creeping Terror. Of course they are searching for some identity breaker to become whole as appreciators of the cine d'merde.

But The Room isn't the movie and Wiseau isn't the guy to deliver it. Sure, he's a remarkable tool; absolutely full of the required narcissism to fulfill the role of insufferable auteur. He wrote, produced, directed, edited and starred in this testament to ineptitude. He probably even catered the wrap party and cleaned up afterward. He's that slimy, questionable, entrepreneurial type who somehow cobbled together an alleged $6 million for the project from his own money that had to, from looking at the guy and hearing him speak, come from some Slavic white slavery ring or a shrewd investment in the Serbian equivalent of Haliburton. He reeks of shadiness and hubris. I imagine the $6 million figure to be greatly exaggerated, as anyone who takes a gander at the production values could never say, "it's all up there on the screen". The film has the look of a slightly more upscale John Water's set from the early days.

Which is not to say that the limitations of the project and the absurd, clueless self-importance of Wiseau do not easily lend to a camp classic. But The Room lacks the contemptuous gall of say, Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (a film which simply hated every member of its audience) or the outright insufferableness of Gigli. What is missing from Wiseau's Citizen Kane of crap is an overt horribleness to coincide with its meager budget. Yes, the acting is decidedly sophomoric. The script is leaden. The insights into love, relationships and emotional deception are beyond childish. The drama is unbearable. The staging is ludicrous. The soundtrack is vile. The characters are stunningly unlikable. But the production, particularly the editing and pace, does not suffer the gaffes and unprofessional incoherence of something like Robot Monster. The Room, for all its flaws, has the look, feel and ambitions of many small, widely accepted independent productions making the rounds at second-tier festivals nationwide. It sucks, surely, but it just doesn't suck really well. In other words, it's not the right kind of bad to merit midnight screenings and projectile filled free-for-alls in the theater.

The ever hilarious Joe Queenan coined a phrase for this kind of malaise in Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon; a gut-busting catalog of contemporary cultural awfulness. He called the phenomenon scheissenbedauern, stating that there was no appropriate term in the English language to describe the feeling one gets when experiencing something that is nowhere near as god-awful as one hoped it would be. It translates to "shit regret".

And The Room certainly fits into this rubric. 

Wiseau is guilty of many misdeeds. He initially released the film as a labor of love, believing the melodrama to be deep and insightful. Then, as the laughter and harsh criticisms began pouring in, he shifted gears and claimed the film was a black comedy all along, deliberately terrible in all its campy glory. It was with this brand of marketing (and Wiseau is certainly a shrewd promoter) that the auteur of this heap of junk became the new king of bad cinema.

Watching Wiseau's disturbingly goofy titters and hearing lines of dialogue like "Everybody betrayed me! I fed up with this world!" may be annoying and worthy of some sort of cult status, but it doesn't hold a candle to seeing the Oscar winning Faye Dunaway, face greasy with cold cream, scream "No wire hangers, EVEEEEEERRRRRRRRRR!!!".

Now, that's how you go camping.