A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

The Room - 2003

Directed by Tommy Wiseau

Dear Tommy,

Perhaps The Room isn’t a success in quite the way you envisioned. The movie is highly lauded in some circles, but with mock applause and snickering and not with a sense of tragedy and purgation, which is what I think you wanted. At the risk of being presumptuous, I take it The Room is something close to an autobiography. I take it you wanted The Room to destroy the one who broke your heart. The Room has the unmistakable tone of a spiritual confession, as if you were blanching your soul so you could end your suffering and perhaps transfer your suffering to others. I’m not saying the movie provides the same state of grace as anything written by St. Teresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross, but if nominations come up for secular sainthood my ballot gets your name on it.

Tommy, The Room is the one film I can show to everybody I know and not have them hate me for it. Everyone understands it. They stick with it until the end. That’s a very rare quality in a movie. In fact, I don’t know of any other movie that has such a universal quality. Avatar may be the highest grossing movie of all time, but I know at least twenty people who found it as simplistic and hackneyed as I did. What you’ve done with a fraction of the budget and an atom of the technical talent is amazing and gives me hope for the future of filmmaking.

People say The Room is poorly written and badly acted, but don’t believe them when they say it, Tommy. And even if I tell you the same thing, don’t believe me when I say it either. People say it to hurt you because The Room has hurt them. The Room doesn’t just cut to the bone, it cuts through the marrow. The Room could cut through a three-hundred year old oak tree and expose its hidden life and reveal the events it didn’t want to reveal. That’s the real reason why people love The Room, Tommy, because it is a private exhibition made public, and we love confessions and we love gossip because we’re too timid to make a confession ourselves. We’re really without depth and breadth, and when something towers above us, Tommy, we wonder how something could possibly get so high.

But that doesn’t mean The Room doesn’t provide a healthy amount of laughter, Tommy. Much of it is warranted and some of it less so. Why this is so I don’t really know. Perhaps the laughter has its roots in a form of uncomfortable recognition. Who of us hasn’t done or said something stupid that one regrets? The Room is full of misogynistic asides which sneak in through a literary sleight of hand: they are the hidden lines of a man who has truly been hurt and betrayed. If I had written them I would have edited them out, not because they were really bad but because they would reveal too much, and my ego would never let itself go that unprotected, not even in the guise of a fictional character. Don’t regret any of the lines you have written because people laugh at them, Tommy. They laugh simply to protect themselves.

Forgive me for saying this, Tommy, but I’m not entirely certain The Room has anything to say about the nature of love. No matter how many times I see it I’m never convinced that anybody in the movie really loves another person. I don’t think you intended this. I don’t think you intended to make a movie where the characters seemed devoid of love. I do, however, think The Room at least offers a glimpse into the nature of jealousy and obsession. It’s a strange ambiguity, Tommy. The events in The Room are driven to destruction because of a love that mutates into some sort of multi-tentacled hentai monster that sticks itself inside everything and clutches everything everywhere. Love may be buried somewhere deep inside its dark heart. Or maybe I’m just blind to the innards of love. Maybe I’ve been hurt bad enough and been sad long enough not to see that love is laying in wait for me, but that’s a big maybe, Tommy.

If I have one regret about The Room, Tommy, it’s that you won’t be able to make a movie like it ever again. I don’t know what fame is like, but they say once you’ve had it you can never be the same person again. In a different age, when it was easier to go unnoticed, perhaps you would have been given the chance to make another film, with your directorial innocence still uncorrupted. It’s all impossible now. The Room was an event that can never be replicated.

And so I ask you, Tommy, where can you possibly go from here? Do you make another film as if The Room never happened or do you make something self-conscious like Fellini’s 8 ½ and react to the success of The Room? The next step won’t be easy.

Tommy, I wish the world would have left you alone so you could remain alone and make innocent movies.

Sceptical Inquirer

INSIDIOUS - 2010

Directed by James Wan

The movie begins with some promise: stills of a domestic interior creep by and you’re at once impressed by the tastefulness of the decor, and underneath these Good Housekeeping images the Bernard Herrmann-ish score slashes through all this tasteful banality and counterpoints them with a bit of malice. Score and image are at first opposed, but they slowly begin to entangle each other, and gradually the images get agitated and gather a bit of malice themselves, apparitions begin to appear in front of the couch and behind the windows. Now sound and image are of the same amplitude, and they combine to spew the word INSIDIOUS onto the screen like unwanted barf, and the image of it swallows up the breadth of your vision, the sound of it shrieks at you like a banshee, and then it all drops off into silence and darkness, but the stink of it still lingers. As far as opening gambits go, the movie goes all in from the start, but experience tells you that these opening credits are just bluffing.

            After such agitation, Insidious settles down far too easily after the opening credits. The plot is familiar to anybody who has seen any of the Amityville or Poltergeist movies, so one shouldn’t feel too bad about spoiling it. A family moves into a new home and strange things begin to happen. A boy falls from a ladder and goes into a coma. Medical doctors are unable to rouse the boy from his coma and so the family takes him home. More strange things happen. The family moves into another home. Still more strange things happen. Desperate, the family consults a trio of paranormal experts. The leader of these experts, a reasonable middle-aged woman, then divulges the entirety of plot: It isn’t the houses that are possessed, but the comatose little boy. And he’s not in a coma or really possessed, really he’s an astral traveller/projectionist: his soul is capable of travelling outside of his physical body. Trouble is his soul has travelled to a realm that Rand McNally doesn’t make a map for, a forbidden realm full of sidetracked phantoms called The Further. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the various phantoms are jostling to possess the boy’s earthly body (the phantoms just really want to live again you see).

            And it’s a good thing this medium shows up to explain the plot too, because up until her appearance the movie has no way of resolving the problem it has created for itself, so as far as mediums or phantoms go she’s more of a deus ex machina. Medical science is unable to help the boy, so the only alternative is a medium capable of resolving things. But her coup de grâce is the revelation that the hapless father of this family is also an astral projectionist, and in order to rescue his son he too must also travel too far this side of paradise.

            Insidious, being a horror film, of course has every right to call upon a quack to resolve its issues, but there is something quite insidious about the way the movie resolves itself. The set piece of Insidious is a séance in which the medium tries to guide the boy back into the realm of reality. It is quite a tense and terse sequence; it happens through a spate of screeches and flash bangs, and in the darkness visions of the uncanny splash onscreen, and this dark song and dance beats you about your eyes and ears and all of sudden all sensation bursts. One thinks this ruse would impress Houdini or Hitchcock it happens so convincingly. But before this séance starts we are convinced not to believe it. The medium puts on a gas mask anchored to a what’s what of doohickies and bleeping things, her assistants are presented as buffoonish hucksters, and so you are more than prepared for these junior ghostbusters to be exposed as frauds. The movie convinces you it’s about to debunk itself, but in order to abide by horror conventions and the framework of its own questionable logic, it goes all in again. These people aren’t frauds, the séance turns out to be real, and the movie tells you The Further really exists and tries to sell you on more silliness, and then you realize you’re not a world weary moviegoer but an easy mark, and the entire movie is just a confidence game and you’ve been fleeced 14 dollars by the movie’s producers.           

            The father strays into The Further, an unimaginative place where empty space is low budget black and footsteps shiver and everything is just a simulation of things that appeared before, except it has no sun and it has ghosts that don’t do a lot except pose. The Further is such a bland realm that you wonder why anybody would want to astral travel around in there, so it’s no surprise that all the ghosts are scoping for a vessel back into the world of the living.

            The movie ends with a twist that is as commonplace as The Further. Let’s just say that one of the astral travellers picks up a hitchhiking murderer.

            In The Demon Haunted World, Carl Sagan wrote a true thing about The X-Files: that for its pretense about science and investigation, it never debunked a damned thing, all it did was increase our belief in spooks and conspiracies. Hollywood, for all its claims of liberalism and being bright in the dark, is a place just as demon haunted as any state drenched in red. Mixing red and blue just makes dark. And so they all go, all into the dark.

            Before Insidious started a trailer played for a movie called Apollo 18. It is about some sort of bogeyman or gremlin that terrorizes astronauts on the Moon. The tag line is something like: Find Out Why We Never Went Back! And so again science and reason are trumped by some shadowy manifestation of evil and ignorance, and you wonder when Hollywood will stop projecting their fears into the darkness of the Moon or in the darkness of the cinema. You can keep people in the dark with fear and religion. You can also keep them in the dark with sorcery and movie magic.