The Room at 20: It’s Time to Retire So-Bad-It’s-Good Cinema

For the unindoctrinated, The Room tells the tragic story of banker Johnny (played by writer-director Tommy Wiseau), whose best friend Mark (Greg Sestero) cucks him with Tommy’s cruel, salacious fiance Lisa (Juliette Danielle). The film, with its scattershot structure and endless plot cul-de-sacs, feels like it’s been assembled out of unused footage from a different film, leaving out more information that it leaves in.

It’s a confounding watch for first-time viewers, but gold dust to those tuned into its unintentionally comedic wavelength. Twenty years after it was released unto our world, The Room dominates cult pop culture no longer, but even its diminished status raises questions about the ways we engage with terrible trash, and leads us to consider that, yes, it might be time to bid so-bad-it’s-good cinema a bittersweet farewell.

The Room awoke a hunger in audiences for trashy films made by demented, controlling auteurs, but it wasn’t so clear to those who grew up with the cult how much of an oddity the film was. Unlike most cult films, it wasn’t a genre picture like horror, action, or musical, but a straight drama, and its self-seriousness only caused a larger gulf between intention and result. It was also clearly the brain-child not of hack producers trying to make a cheap buck, but the passion project of an outsider, a foreign national with too much accessible wealth and a complete inability to collaborate with industry professionals.

It also looks… okay. I mean, Wiseau’s visual palette and shot composition won’t get him compared to Wes Anderson anytime soon, and the green screen scenes are, um, noticeable, but most so-bad-they’re-good movies made in the digital era look unimaginably crap; this has unfussy, robust camera placement and blocking. It looks enough like a real low-budget drama, and that’s what renders the complete nonsense coming out of characters’ mouths so starkly humorous. What made The Room iconic to the post-MST3K generation was also a curse; nothing that followed it could ever live up to its uniqueness.

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When The Room first premiered in a few LA cinemas, it found potentially its first proponent in 5 Second Films’ Michael Rousselet, whose regular visits to see the film amassed its first crowds and founded its most basic rituals—throwing spoons whenever a framed picture of spoons was in frame, or playing football along with the characters in the film. Anecdotes like this have a charming, LA-specific preciousness, a commitment to goofiness that many people instinctively want to feel included in. Rousselet’s “private Mystery Science Theater” set the tone for the 14 year dominance of The Room on the global midnight circuit. Every time we shout out something watching The Room, we are on some level auditioning for Rousselet’s club, we are all voicing a desire to be included in something bigger than ourselves.

If we were to point out where the tide on The Room’s popularity shifted, it would be James Franco’s The Disaster Artist, which adapted Greg Sestero’s account of the film’s production and his friendship with Wiseau. The book is a complex, morally grey story of fame, prestige, and having to settle with whatever success you’re granted; the film is a vain and flat attempt to become Wiseau’s friend for “the meme,” where Franco assembles his friends to recreate their favorite scenes shot-for-shot. By this time, the joke had run out, and The Room’s chapter in the history of pop culture had come to a close.

But even reflecting on its heyday brings up probing questions about the culture that nurtured it. How much of The Room’s rituals were actually funny? Undeniably people enjoyed them, and there’s no doubt you had to be present to understand the experience. This isn’t to stomp on anyone’s fun, but a healthy movie culture involves routine, thoughtful consideration to the ways we watch media.What was actually happening when people were laughing at The Film, cheering the iconic lines, joining the throngs interacting with the film’s eccentricities?

The way fans, myself included, watched The Room was in some way a dynamic of power, a demonstration that the film, by being bad, had a lower intelligence and wit than the audience member. Heckling and mocking it proved you were smarter and funnier than the text. No matter how genuinely funny you find The Room, verbalizing it in a darkened room with other people feels in some way like a protestation, as much for the people around you to like you rather than share good cheer and humor.

“Everybody’s shouting out their wee things,” comments absurdist comedian Limmy when watching recordings of midnight screenings of The Room. “I’ve got something funny to add! I can make this better!” But we’ve reached a cultural moment where irony has become exhausting, where snark and derision has dulled our critical faculties and we ache for something sincere and earnest. We owe it to trash cinema to value it on a level that doesn’t centralise our own presence. If you really love it, then really love it.

Why must a movie be technically and dramatically conventional to be considered good? Performances, dialogue, structure: every filmmaking element in The Room we have designated as awful doesn’t get in the way of a sincere emotional affection and admiration for the ways it entertains us. This is not to undermine the powerful sense of connection midnight screenings foster, but it’s clear any proper discussion of The Room has been drowned out by a culture that purports to be inclusive but is really just static. What opportunity has The Room had to be reappraised as something compelling and likeable while crowds jeer at it? What about the many actors who make frequent appearances at screenings to rapturous enthusiasm? Are they constantly aware that they’re only valuable to these audiences so long as they are bad at acting?

Compare the culture surrounding The Room to those around queer cult movies: Showgirls, Glen or Glenda, or The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The way audiences have enthusiastically engaged with these films is diametrically opposed to fans of The Room; Showgirls fans are undermining the critical panning the film received upon release, connecting with the intended themes and meanings in a heightened but still radically sincere way. Glen or Glenda was tarred with writer Michael Medved’s brush of being the worst filmmaker ever, and no part of the point-and-laugh bad movie culture allows for the nuanced assessment that Ed Wood was a struggling trans filmmaker who made authentic and legitimate trans art during a very punishing time.

The Room belonged to an era where outsider cinema could only reach mainstream appreciation if it was watched by audiences who thought they were better than it. Regardless of The Room’s inadequacies, is that a position any film deserves to be placed in? If we want the midnight cinema culture to thrive, B-movies must be given a fairer chance at finding an audience, meaning we need to encourage a less didactic, inflexible way of appreciating all things trashy. A new mantra must be adopted, not for The Room, which has now been laid to rest, but for the future of cult cinema. The Room is good because it’s funny; it’s funny because it’s good.

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.