The Room Analysis: Introduction

Once again, for the sheer fun of it, I take it upon myself to give an analysis of some form of media that’s considered the worst. To begin, I’ll say that no matter how bad you think the worst movie you ever saw was, you never saw anything like this before.

Welcome to the analysis of ‘The Room.’  A movie so bad that it has actually been used in film classes as an example of everything to not do when you are making a film. So great is its infamy that it has once upon a time been referred to as the ‘Citizen Kane’ of bad movies. And yet, that’s exactly its draw. A certain mystique exists around this movie, where people who watch it cannot look away for the awestruck stupor it puts them into with its whitewater rapid stream of plot holes so big that you could drive a truck through them, dialogue that seems to have been written by a third-grader who could only read backwards, a title that makes no sense to anyone but the director, characters who have the depth of a dinner plate, and what seems to be a complete lack of any real story. That is not a joke or exaggeration. Like, nobody is truly sure of what this movie is supposed to be about. Certain things happen that hold some semblance of a plot, but that’s about it. And even that there is a plot is questionable, because nothing that happens between the 20:00 timestamp and the 1:16:00 timestamp has any effect on anything. And this is in a movie that is one hour, thirty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds long. That’s an entire fifty-six minutes of pure insanity that the film’s star/writer/director/producer had squeezed out of his headmeats in an effort to create what he was absolutely certain was going to be a masterpiece of a film.

A word about the director himself. He is a man named Tomasz Wieczorkiewicz, and he was born in Poznan, Poland sometime in the 1950s. At some point in his life, he decided to call himself Tommy Wiseau, and moved to the United States, where he became independently wealthy by means that he does not make known. In fact, much of Wiseau’s life is a blank, because he refuses to tell anyone the truth. He claims constantly to have been born in the US, but when he was called on this, he then claimed that he was originally from Estonia. The man lies constantly about his age, claiming to this day that he is only in his thirties, when his ID says that he was born in 1968. And he most of all will never confess to how he earned such an exorbitant amount of money that allowed him to fund a movie completely by himself. At some point during his time as a student in acting school, he decided that he would make a movie. But not just any movie. Driven by his love of legendary films like ‘Citizen Kane,’ ‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ and ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ Wiseau believed that he was going to make a film that was going to go down in the annals of history, and be remembered for decades to come. To his credit, he succeeded.

When I concluded my previous analysis of what is regarded as the worst book ever published, I mentioned how my dad had taken an elective course in film analysis during his college days. My dad’s favorite kinds of movies are the ones that every time you watch them, you notice some new detail that you never had before, and then you can build off of the other stuff that you did notice from previous viewings. Some of his favorite examples of this are ‘Master and Commander,’ ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, and anything that Jim Henson was involved with. ‘The Room,’ follows the same principle of being a goldmine of things that you will discover every time you watch it. Each time you gawk in appalled awe at this perversion of all things cinema, you find something new that never should have been. And so, as I analyze this film in roughly ten minute segments, I dedicate this entire project to my dear old dad, whose sanity I will spare by not making him watch it with me.

A quick word of warning. This movie involves copious amounts of unnecessary sex scenes. If you are offended by such things…grow the hell up. I’m not going to treat you like a child as I conduct this analysis.

That being said, have fun with this. You can look forward to updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, starting tomorrow.