Keep your comments in your pockets

When it comes to art, I enjoy complicated failures, an unintended consequence of all those years spent studying the unpublished fringes of New Zealand modernism.  When first I heard of it, therefore, I knew that The Room would likely be well up my street.  The opportunity to see it in a theatre at this year’s film festival was too good to pass up, and so it was that it became the first (and thus far, only) outing for which a babysitter was required since the birth of the harvestbaby.  I left her in the care of her grandparents and joined my lady-date, Wellington’s knowing cultural connoisseuse, at Hoyts Riccarton.

Does anyone want spoons?  Because I’ve got shitloads.

My worry that the local audience would be unfamiliar with the viewer conventions and thus look uncool in front of my visitor from the north was unfounded.  Robyn’s offer of the hand-gathered spoils of the Paramount screening was eagerly taken up by our fellow adventurers in viewing.  One or two had come in costume as the mysterious Mr Wiseau, which added to my sense of anticipation.  (There was also a sense of passing regret that my choice of career, together with the fact that a senior colleague and her partner were sitting just behind me, make it largely impossible for me to say “shitloads” to an audience of strangers.  Still, that is what friends are for.)

To what can I compare the viewing experience?  In some ways it reminded me of seeing the remastered 36th Chamber of Shaolin at the Wellington festival six years ago with Faith and Gee.  Faith and I loved it but also laughed all the way through, a curious combination of “at” and “with” in the viewing (and that film is generally considered “good” not “bad”).  When we left, Gee pointed out we were largely the only ones laughing.  In The Room, the levity was the same, but shared by the whole audience.  Ms. Gallagher was the master meta-narrator, interjecting regularly with the asides of the experienced viewer — “Meanwhile, back in San Francisco…” — that both delighted those around us and goaded them, occasionally, to try their own.

Why is @harvestbird awesome? Because she used her ESL education knowledge to analyse Tommy Wiseau’s unusual phrasing in The Room’s script. #

I don’t want to attempt a comprehensive analysis of the film, primarily due to baby-brain but also for two other reasons: because, as @adzebill remarked when we ran into each other the next day, “there’s a lot in it” but also because I think its analysis is being well done in the cloud already, partial considerations coming together to form a conversational whole.  As well as Robyn’s essay linked above, you may also wish to read Danyl’s notes at the Dim Post and John-Paul’s essay at Man of Errors which also links to this valuable (pdf) article.

One key, I think, to understanding why the film plays in the way that it does is to remember that the screenplay is by Wiseau, the auteur, himself: clearly a man who has learned English as a second language, possibly as an adult.  Many of the film’s lines are not-quite-idiomatic, but performed by native speakers, such as when Mark, on the phone, says he’ll be there “at noon” rather than midday.  The differences are not great enough for the broken idioms to be obvious (as they often are in Japanese advertising, for example), but rather closer to what one might find in the English-language captions at Maru’s place, for example.

It’s part of a wider mise-en-scène that charms by unintentionally missing the mark every time, a mode of storytelling that is disconcertingly close to the mainstream, yet still works in parallel.  What makes this different from other (tragic) love stories with a mysterious foreign lead, however, is that all the players are caught inside the second-language-speaker’s idiom.  The unknown origins of Mr. Wiseau (which might be uncovered if anyone knows the language in which the title of this post is an expression) mean that the skewed tone cannot immediately be placed: it’s not, say, Engrish or Franglais, but it is something.  In some ways, he is the genuine object of which a character like Borat is elsewhere a ridiculous parody, but with the difference that his origins are effaced.  You can imagine Wiseau, like his alter ego and romantic lead Johnny, turning up at the YMCA with no money in his pocket.

I don’t agree with the contention that Johnny’s faithless fiancée Lisa is a tabula rasa.  As others have suggested, her character seems a composite of (mostly) types of femme fatale with agents of hurt in Wiseau’s past.  She is a cipher, for sure, but it’s of a story that’s missing rather than readable, an impression assisted by Juliette Danielle’s cheerful performance that seems at odds with the effect her character has on Johnny.  She is styled to look like a secondary character on the original Beverly Hills 90210 or one of the cool girls at a suburban high school c. 1989: thick dark eyebrows, blonde crimped hair, lots of eye shadow.  Plump and largely passive in the face of Johnny’s textbook ardour, the actress needn’t — as I have read — be worried about the nudity in these scenes.  The naivety of the erotic direction means that she looks like genuine lover rather than a soft-porn player.  Her betrothed’s disconcertingly angled performance above her leaves her looking patient and pretty, the visual cliches of such scenes failing to objectify her because of the way in which Wiseau, even naked on a bed, chews the scenery and monopolises the gaze in every scene he’s in.  And why mock Johnny’s repeated shedding of rose petals all over the prone Lisa?  Don’t lovers repeat for their partners their favourite moves again and again?

I liked too the way in which the film’s notorious failure to tie up its loose ends means that the boredom that fuels Lisa’s infidelity is never explained except in the expository way in which she declares it near the start of the film.  The backstory that Danyl passingly infers above concerning other characters I longed to know for Lisa, whose decision to set up house some years ago with a strange man much older than she invites the imagining of a whole hidden psychology (although her mother’s continuous histrionics and declaration that she never loved Lisa’s father might provide some starting points).  But this is Johnny/Tommy’s story, not Lisa’s, in all its offputting nearly-there-ness and stylistic collapses.  To watch it is to see storytelling through a glass, darkly, and to take, should you wish, pleasure in the sincerity with which it misses the conventional mark.