Hey U Guys

Before September 23^rd 2009 I liked to imagine that I knew something about film. I was a minor expert in some areas I told myself, with a lifetime of viewing and close reading to my credit. But I knew nothing. As the sun tip toed on the horizon the following morning, almost embarrassed to rise like a child appearing at the family breakfast table just hours after walking in on its parents humping the night before, everything had changed. I’d seen The Room and once you can say that there will always be two epochs in your film viewing career - before and after.

Watching The Room is like crossing over to a counterfactual universe were the rules of film grammar and screenwriting have been written by Dan Brown. As a critic it’s almost impossible to know where to begin. We arts folk – simple people who don’t have a vocation or skill of our own and so must earn our sheckles pontificating on those that do, consider our principle mission to disseminate good work from bad so you don’t have to. But Tommy Wiseau, the creator of this photochemical monster, has invented a technique that acts as blue touch paper to bad notices, overpowering the reviewer’s critical faculty with magnificent ineptitude. The challenge Wiseau issues is simple – “describe theeaat!” It’s a brave critic that picks up the gauntlet.

The Room introduces a new dimension to movie criticism, similar to that of war reporting. Occasionally, a journalist will be asked to describe something so inhumane, so wretched, that no form of words seems equal to the task. How to make sense of being the first writer on the scene after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen? How to sum up the atmosphere at Ground Zero as the dust began to settle? These represent challenges to both one’s humanity and one’s craft. Events trump language in such moments. Every adjective seems simplistic, every sentence blunt, as though you’re trying to keep hold of a fist full of water. As the credits roll on this thing of morbid beauty – a movie that puts storytelling innovations back 2,000 years, attempting a second hand account seems almost absurd.

Still, I’ll give it a go.

Wiseau, who probably developed each reel of film in addition to writing, directing and producing the piece, is its star and a leading man like none before him. If you’ll indulge the celestial metaphor, and frankly even if you won’t, he’s more than a star – he’s our sun 10 billion years from now – on its last legs but all consuming. His co-stars are mere satellites in orbit around him, reliant on his guiding light for sustenance but slowly, and heartbreakingly from the audience’s point of view, he expands across the frame and destroys them. Every scene in this film is like a watching the death of a civilisation. You imagine the incalculable loss – of knowledge, of imagination, of culture. It’s almost unbearable and the tears stream down your cheeks.

What’s it about you ask? What a pertinent but self-defeating question. There’s no answer I could give you that would be worth a sovereign. Ostensibly one might call it a melodrama, but then it neither sings nor effectively dramatises. There’s less a plot, more an ethereal impression of one – like the thought was trapped in the space between membranes and just hung there – lacking real form and therefore irretrievable. Wiseau tried to make sense of his flashes of twisted genius but English is such a crude instrument. There weren’t the words. Frustrated he tried to lay some of them down regardless. Some were laid down. Many of the best lines died in the attempt. This isn’t a story you could write. No man could have got close. All he knew was that women were perfidious, inherently evil creatures, though the breasts of an 18 year old were nice. The public had to know.

Then there’s Wiseau himself. At the Bad Film Club screening I attended, a monthly surgery specialising in celluloid abortions (still illegal in Ireland and some American States), host Nicko was joined by a trio of commentators, Peter Serafinowicz, Graham Linehan and Robert Popper. All were Room fans and tried to make sense of it but all were at a loss to do full justice to the man who’d conceived this impossibly shapeless confluence of bad sex, misogyny and senseless ball play.

Serafinowicz suggested that his plasticised Gunter Von Hagen approved torso resembled “a boiled horse.” Linehan noted that it seemed like “a condom full of walnuts.” But describing Wiseau, whose character, in what one imagines is a significant departure from real life is betrayed by his girlfriend and friends alike, prompting despair and a shaken fist at an unappreciative world, would have frustrated G.K Chesterton. He’s like a random ejaculation from a vintage Roger Corman movie – the body you’ve seen a thousand times with a cloth covering its face in every grisly on screen autopsy from Cracker to From Hell. Once revealed it's a face that looks as though it were sculpted from clay in a primary school arts and crafts class. The long black hair coupled with this ghastly visage gives Wiseau the appearance of, in Serafinowicz’s words, “a goth caveman.” He looks like Megan Fox if she’d taken a sip from the wrong grail at the climax of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, only for someone to knock the cup from her hand before she could swallow the lot and decay to nothing. But what kind of sound emanates from such a face? Apparently a voice recording of Arnold Schwarzenegger with the battery running down. Imagine such a voice delivering lines like “I did not hit her, it's not true! It's bullshit! I did not hit her! I did naaaht. Oh hi Mark.” Imagine.

What of the other dialogue? Get a book out by script guru Syd Field and he’ll tell you that screenwriting is about concision, economy and subtext. But Field was a false prophet in a pre-Wiseau era. Every auteur breaks the rules but Tommy Wiseau took Field’s writers bible and publically urinated on to each page, inviting open mouthed scribes to pick it up afterwards. Who’d dare? Exchanges flirt with your expectations and then undercut them, making you feel ridiculous. You’re silly putty is the Director’s horribly veined hands. When Johnny’s fiancé Lisa (Juliette Danielle) is lamenting her mother’s interference over his affair with Johnny’s best friend Mark – a man who looks exactly like Ewan McGregor’s Attack of the Clones action figure, she asserts that “She's a stupid bitch. She wants to control my life. I'm not going to put up with that. I'm going to do what I want to do, and that's it. What do you think I should do?”

Said mother has breast cancer but assures her daughter that “It’s okay, I’ll probably get better” and then never mentions it again. You can imagine old hands like Douglas Sirk looking on in wonder, applauding from the grave. Mark (played by line producer Greg Sestero) may look as though he’s escaped from a Mattel warehouse but his character is invested with a gift for rhetoric that would have humbled Peter Ustinov. “Keep your stupid comments in your pocket” he tells one character and in one of many memorable roof top encounters, tells Johnny/Tommy that “I used to know a girl, she had a dozen guys. One of them found out about it... beat her up so bad she ended up at a hospital on Guerrero Street” only for Johnny to reply, “Ha ha ha. What a story, Mark.” Would-be raconteurs take note.

The philistines amongst you will already be bleating like a bunch of gannets about how inappropriate some of this sounds. But a true cinema of engagement is one which directly challenges the preconceived ideas of its audience. It puts one muddy boot on to their comfort carpet and says ‘What you are going to do about it?’ The Room is such a film. The introduction and constant reintroduction of Denny (Philip Haldiman), the man-child acolyte of Johnny, is a photochemical hand fondling your genitals with the other making a “ssshh” motion to its mouth. Denny, who occupies that indeterminate age territory once the sole domain of Gary Coleman from D’fferent Strokes is innocent but also sexually curious and it isn’t clear that Johnny knows where the boundaries lie, as walks the difficult tightrope between role model and friend. Denny is gently herded away from the pre-marital bed but only once he’s engaged with proto-sexual horseplay with both Johnny and his nubile bride to be. Johnny took him under his stringy wing, Lisa explains and he’s free to come and go as he pleases. He’s a lucky boy.

Luckier still are those fans for whom the film has become a Rocky Horror style ritual, complete with its own set of viewing conventions. Denny’s frequent entrances and exits are accompanied with a cry of “Hi Denny!” and inevitably “Bye Denny!” The frequent appearance of a framed picture of a spoon on Johnny’s mantelpiece has dedicated viewers hurling said utensil at the screen. The aftermath of a well tooled audience screening can therefore resemble an explosion in a cutlery factory. The male characters tend to congregate for incomprehensible bonding chat in which an American football is tossed between participants and consequently you’re invited to bring your own. Many do.

I wouldn’t commit so unequivocally when invoking lesser titles but I make you this promise. Though you’ll see better films in your life – more coherent, better performed, more imaginative and less oriented around the relationship failings of its director and leading man, you will never sit through a more jaw dropping movie than The Room. Its 99 minutes that will change your life. That’s 3 minutes shorter than 9/11 but not one bit less reality skewering for all that. Don’t believe me? Well as one character memorably put it “you can just fall off the face of the Earth. And that's a promise!”

The Room is scheduled to screen at The Prince Charles Cinema in London on October 3^rd and occasionally thereafter. Bring spoons.