There seems to be a debate as to what kind of film Tommy Wiseau originally intended The Room to be. In my mind, there is no doubt that in 2003 he released a melodrama that he hoped would hit the big time. Instead, the film found more success in recent years after being discovered by a cult audience, and is now viewed as both a riotous comedy and the worst movie ever made. Kudos to Wiseau – who funded, produced, wrote, directed and starred in the film – for cheerfully running with this drastic change in marketing.

Above: “We call ‘Evil Man,’… my face, my image, one eye is blinking a little bit. This is a provocation. Otherwise people will not talk about it…” (Tommy Wiseau, from an interview with the A.V. Club)

I went to see a late-night session of The Room at the Nova a few weekends ago. Plastic spoons were distributed outside and the atmosphere was bustling. But nothing quite prepared me for the phenomenon of cinematic hysteria that followed. The host of the evening said the Nova hadn’t ever experienced anything as loud as The Room audiences in their hallowed halls. It was an infectious night of whooping, spoon throwing, ball tossing and booing. Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I haven’t seen a cult film audience interact so rabidly with a movie since the mid-90s.

The Room is one crazy film brimming with strenuous over-acting, aborted storylines and plenty of soft porn with a generous strewing of rose petals. Is is about a love triangle and the sabotage of trust between friends and lovers. Wiseau’s character Johnny is a decent hard-working banker who falls victim to evil scheming and sexual betrayal. His world is inhabited by larger-than-life family members, zany, fun-filled friends and the daily dramas that touch us all. It soon becomes very clear that Wiseau has produced a Not Quite Right simulacrum of Hollywood’s vision of American life.

Therein lies the key to explaining why The Room has received so much raucous attention from mainstream comedians and cult audiences alike. Wiseau’s bizarre take on Hollywood’s vision of American life is so abhorrent and freakishly conceived, it has triggered a kind of bourgeois hysteria in the face of the carnivalesque.

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White originally conceived of this term in a way which relates specifically to European traditions and signifiers. The term bourgeois might seem archaic now, but it can be used here to signify an audience with a shared cultural understanding of what is acceptable or unacceptable. As Stallybrass and White put it, our common language encodes “all that which the proper bourgeois must strive not to be in order to preserve a stable and correct sense of self.”

Why would an audience such as this be moved to displays of hysteria at late-night screenings of The Room? Stallybrass and White take their examples from Sigmund Freud’s work with hysterical patients. When confronted with culturally transgressive images, they would freak out. Freud set about re-framing these images of horrific Otherness as comical. Wondrously, his patients calmed down and were no longer frightened. I don’t think Freud was the first to do this; I’m pretty sure it is an age-old function of comedy to laugh at that which horrifies us. Tim and Eric from Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show: Great Job! were amongst the first mainstream comedians to alert us to the work of Tommy Wiseau. We all followed suit because these fine purveyors of dodgy video graphics actively celebrate, and render hideously funny, the weird, creepy, NQR and unsuccessful elements of American culture.

Tim and Eric

Mikhail Bakhtin is best known for his literary theory of the carnivalesque, which has a long tradition in European culture and thought. Bakhtin sees the carnivalesque as a populist, utopian vision of the world as seen from below. His understanding of how these visions function in the eyes of the beholder still has some currency:

This laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives.

We have long accepted low-brow and trashy cult films into our repertoire of cinematic pleasures. We love them precisely because they violate the strictures of acceptability within society and fail to conform to notions of quality cinema. But as with Tim and Eric, these works are often often made by knowing and ironic artists. It is important to remember that there was apparently no irony intended in the creation or execution of The Room. While some of us (hysterically, ambivalently) celebrate the freakish and apparently misguided cinematic vision of Tommy Wiseau, others are truly disturbed by the implications of Wiseau and his byproduct.

In his recent interview with Wiseau, Crikey film critic Luke Buckmaster reveals a distinct lack of humour in his push for the ‘real’ story behind the man.

Buckmaster rejects Wiseau’s insistence that he is an American, insisting he reveal where his Eastern European accent comes from; he implies that drugs were involved in the film’s financing and that Wiseau was constantly drunk on set; and he rudely demands to know why the film is such an excruciating train-crash. In a final fit of desperation, Buckmaster says:

LB: Tommy I have a crazy theory about The Room. Do you want to hear my crazy theory?…My theory is that you guys deliberately made a really bad movie with the intention of marketing it as one of the worst movies of all time. That’s what you did, isn’t it?

TW: I will 100 percent disagree with you because again The Room is based on my work. 12 years of work. Very intensive research. I studied psychology. My background is partially psychology, partially film production. There is certain symbolism and without the symbolism within The Room you would not have The Room.

You will have to watch the film yourself to decide for yourself if it is for real or not. Just remember though, hundreds of terrible films are made in America every year. As my LA correspondent Yana Apostolopoulos reports, “LA is a circus. He’s one of many just like him in LA. They are at every cafe sitting with their laptops, plotting their scripts and their futures and fortunes. It’s a city full of crazies.”

And in a final inversion, Tommy Wiseau looks refreshingly normal compared to these two.