The Room

[eggynack]

My brother made an awesome video analyzing the classic film "The Room". You folks should check it out. Such an interesting and dense movie, it's always been weird to me that there's not more depthy study of it. We could also just generally talk about The Room. Working on this thing with him has left me with a lot of The Room stuff floating around in my head.

[GAAD]

I did not watch that movie! That is boolsheet, I did naht. Oh hi OP.

[Rodin]

I'm not sure why there would be an in-depth study of a movie that's legendarily bad? I mean, it would like writing your college thesis on the hidden themes of Manos: The Hands of Fate.

Unless...

*whacks sarcasm detector*

Darn thing is on the fritz again.

[eggynack]

I'm not sure why there would be an in-depth study of a movie that's legendarily bad? I mean, it would like writing your college thesis on the hidden themes of Manos: The Hands of Fate.

Unless...

*whacks sarcasm detector*

Darn thing is on the fritz again.

Cause it's not just a bad movie. It's also a really dense and interesting movie. I could spend a ton of time talking about nearly any scene, aside from the sex scenes which are uniformly awful with no redeeming qualities. I don't think there's any valid argument that there was much intentionality behind all the cool stuff going on in that movie, but there is a massive amount of cool stuff going on in that movie anyway. I mean, jeez, it starts being awesome from that very first scene. You have these weirdly repeated lines, and the beginning of this background thing relating to Johnny's gift giving, and Denny acting in a way that's incredibly weird and difficult to parse. Even among bad movies, it's a film that is wholly unique, and it is even more that among more standard movies. It does things that no other film does, as ill advised as that might be, and that is worth analysis. Least in my opinion.

Edit: Compounding this, it also has this quality that I would usually consider unique to good or great films, where just about every time I watch it I notice something I never had before. Some theme, or line reading, or strange out of place moment. In the abstract, it's a movie with all the qualities we would associate with greatness, which is kinda odd in and of itself, because it also has all the qualities we would associate with awfulness. It's consistently entertaining, it rewards repeated watching and close analysis, and, in many regards, it's thoroughly original. I wouldn't necessarily ascribe all those qualities to other so bad it's good movies.

[An Enemy Spy]

Just because something is poorly made doesn't mean that you can't pull meaning from it. Even if(or sometimes because) the creator didn't mean for there to be anything deeper. Also, it's fun to try and apply serious analysis to something incredibly incompetent.

[eggynack]

Just because something is poorly made doesn't mean that you can't pull meaning from it. Even if(or sometimes because) the creator didn't mean for there to be anything deeper. Also, it's fun to try and apply serious analysis to something incredibly incompetent.

There's something I find deeply innovative about some "bad" movies. Most average movies, even most great movies, hang out in these really safe and established spaces. Maybe it's a thing most the case for great movies, every moment crafted to perfection, where perfection is partly defined by what we've seen before, or by what we see in our own lives. Even when these movies innovate, they frequently play it safe. Breaks from the norm are carefully considered and surrounded by more normal things meant to contrast with that weirdness. And few reasonable or better movies are going to break with the essential grammar of film making.

"Bad" movies, the kind I'm talking about, are bad precisely because they break with that grammar. And unlike with written grammar, where the rules are well known and more or less objective, the grammar of film is murky, broadly unknown, and highly subjective. The grammar of narrative is that way too, because that is also a form of grammar these films often reject. These movies make us ask questions we wouldn't ask otherwise. Is there value in repeating the same scene four or five times? How about the same line? How can we play with the timing and structure of a scene? What can we gain of having it feel like every character is having a completely different conversation? Is it worthwhile to introduce ideas, stories, even characters, that are basically dropped? What do we even do with a character like Denny? Even looking elsewhere, at, say, Birdemic, we have to ask questions about the utility of just really weird and screwed up audio and special effects.

These are real and meaningful questions, I think. Most present some kinda tool that is largely unused by film, because, jeez, why would you even want to do some of these things? But these films raise one question that's perhaps the greatest and most important. These movies are funny, entertaining, and interesting, however they reached that point. Film makers frequently want their movies to be funny, entertaining, and interesting. Is there thus not something to be gained by trying to make your film like these films, in some broad sense? We occasionally see films trying to pull this kinda thing off, and they usually fall flat, I think because they come off as insincere. But isn't that weird? What is The Room accessing that I cannot access? It's not like sincerity or lack thereof has clear representation within the film itself. Analyzing these movies, The Room especially, is so interesting as a result.

Halfway separately, I was being serious when I suggested that near any scene has a ton of stuff to discuss. We could talk about a scene at random (maybe apart from a sex or weird interstitial cut scene, though there is a bit of weirdness to explore there) if anyone's interested. My brother and I did a bunch of interesting note time tags in the lead up to his construction of the video's script, and them tags got mad dense.

[Mauve Shirt]

I hope he's read The Disaster Artist, a book about the making of The Room written by "Mark". It's a good read and kind of explains a lot.

[eggynack]

I hope he's read The Disaster Artist, a book about the making of The Room written by "Mark". It's a good read and kind of explains a lot.

Yeah, he has. As I recall, he thought it was pretty interesting but didn't have that much utility for this more "Death of the Author" oriented analysis. There's definitely some stuff in The Room that I think is simultaneously interesting and likely intentional, but most of the cool stuff seems like it was very much unintentional, which means that there are some serious limits to looking at it through that lens. Doesn't help that everything Wiseau says about the movie is a ridiculous and non-sensical word salad.

For external texts, what I've been really interested in lately has been this possible earlier script. I have at least one amazing reason, everything that happens on page 34, to think it's fake, and a bunch of tiny reasons, the way it's written, how the changes from the film aren't what I would expect from a fake, to think it's real apart from that page. If it is real, it feels like it changes so much.

There's some stuff in there that conflicts with known "canon", but that is nonetheless somewhat illuminating, like Denny originally being Lisa's gay brother Billy who into prostitution instead of drugs, who is into Johnny instead of Lisa, and who was disowned by Claudette before the events of the film. There's this one really interesting line change on that basis. The film has Denny telling Claudette, "You're not my f'ing mother!" which always seemed weird and out of place. The script has, "You*are*not*my*f'ing*mother*anymore!" which obviously makes a ton of sense. There's also something that makes some more sense of existing "canon", like how Mark owes Lisa one because Johnny saved his life and Lisa told him to do that, or a lot more narrative surrounding the breast cancer thing. Hell, they even have Lisa tell Johnny that he hit her, thus fixing the weird plot hole that it makes no sense that he'd find out she said that. Who even told him off-screen in the movie? Frigging Michelle? The claims online regarding its authorship seem largely like conjecture, which is annoying.

[eggynack]

First trailer for the movie is out. Seems pretty sweet. It looks like my initial feelings on the idea were pretty accurate though, that no one, even James Franco, would be able to match Wiseau for his sheer Wiseauness. Wiseau's performance in that scene is so uncanny and weird, and Franco captures only some of that. I really liked Dave Franco as Greg.