Some people like to slow down on the highway to get an eyeful of grisly car accidents. Lots of us will stare transfixed at photos of spectacular train wrecks. The peculiar fascination of these real-life disasters is only rarely approached by anything on the movie screen, but when it is, a transcendent moment of terrible beauty is born. I like to call it vile cinema.
It’s not enough for a film to be incompetent, tedious, or painful to watch; to be truly vile, it must conjure the devil himself – it must cast an unholy spell that makes it impossible to pull your retinas away. It must bring a contradictory phrase to mind: “so bad it’s good.”
To make a vile film, a filmmaker has to be sincere. Parody and camp can fail, but they lack the air of innocent tragedy that make vile films so compelling.
Case in point: a few weeks ago, I attended a screening of The Room (2003), part of the Movies Under the Drop Ceiling Series sponsored by Jersey City’s Art House Productions. This film is often called “the worst film ever made” and “the Citizen Kane of bad movies.”
It is indeed a bad film in every respect – amateurish acting and dialog, continuity flubs, ham-handed editing, poor dubbing, pointless stock footage, etc. The story revolves around the relationship between Johnny (Tommy Wisseau), a long-haired “banker” with an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent, and Lisa (Juliette Danielle), a bleached-blonde “sociopath” who looks like a cross between Courtney Love and Britney Spears. The two are engaged, but Lisa is “bored” with Johnny and initiates an affair with Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero), who looks like a male model. The sex scenes, which are long and embarrassing, are accompanied on the soundtrack by cheesy R&B songs.
There are many tangents involving minor characters (they all seem to live in the same San Francisco apartment building), but these subplots are quickly introduced and then abandoned. Lisa’s mother, for example, very casually drops the news that she has breast cancer, but this is never mentioned again. A young friend of Johnny’s is revealed to be involved in drug deals, but after a single dramatic scene, this detail is ignored. Several times, the story comes to a standstill as the male characters go outside to play catch with a football. People behave and speak in idiotic ways, and the plot moves in circles until the “tragic” ending.
Most of the film takes place in a single set: Johnny and Lisa’s living room, which has framed photos of spoons on the walls and a TV set placed behind a sofa. Perhaps as an homage to Seinfeld, the characters come and go as they please, walking in through the front door without knocking.
Tommy Wisseau served as lead actor, director, producer and executive producer for the film, which he (no surprise) self-financed. In interviews that can be found on the Web and in the extras section of the DVD, he seems to think he’s made a good, even important film; he comes across a sincere, innocent – and vile. He has been quoted as saying the film explains “what not to do.” He’s commenting on the way the characters treat each other, but he might as well be referring to the entire production.
The saving grace of the film is that it is, as you may have gathered, not only vile but unintentionally hilarious, which is why Art House Productions showed it. The audience threw popcorn at the screen and talked to the characters throughout – which, with a film of this quality, is entertaining rather than annoying.
Perhaps not surprisingly, The Room has developed a cult following similar to that of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s been a midnight movie in many major cities, including New York. At these events, Wisseau often sells T-shirts, DVDs, and soundtracks to fans – proving that the spectacular failure of the vile can sometimes be as profitable as success. –Michael Gates
(Michael Gates can be emailed at gatesmichael@verizon.net). Want to submit an essay? Send it to editorial@hudsonreporter.com and include “Midweek essay” in the subject head.