(Quinn Nachtrieb • The Student Life)
A few years ago, when I was just a baby Arts & Culture columnist and not the beloved, widely respected mind-shaper I am today, I wrote a little article about a film called “Hackers” where I said I liked the movie even though it was bad.
The article is fine (the movie is much better), but in the time since writing it my thoughts about the subject have changed — and since I was lucky enough to attend a screening of “The Room” earlier this month, the concept of a “so bad it’s good” movie has been on my mind a lot.
So, I am here now to right my wrongs: Not only is “Hackers” not a bad movie, but the concept of a movie being “so bad it’s good” is flawed at its core. I’m going to prove it and “The Room” is going to help me.
“The Room” is a low-budget 2003 drama film written and directed by Tommy Wiseau and widely considered to be one of the worst films ever made. Everybody knows that. It’s first-grade stuff. “Crash” (1996) is better than “Crash” (2004), “North by Northwest” is the fifth best Hitchcock movie, “The Room” is the worst movie ever made: film’s fundamental truths.
The movie’s been talked about enough that it feels utterly redundant to describe “The Room” and all its faults, so I’m not going to. The numerous reasons why “The Room” sucks have been reiterated enough that the prospect of being the umpteenth-thousandth internet nobody to say “The acting and writing and editing are bad” makes me want to quit writing altogether.
Nonetheless, I make my pittance hawking milk-warm contrarianism for a student newspaper, so here’s the part where I blow everyone’s minds by saying that “The Room” is actually good. If I am not scorching and topical, then I am nothing.
The thing is, “The Room” is good, though. It’s really good and it’s really good for really special reasons.
It’s incredibly funny, of course, and funny in a way that most films aren’t. “The Room” is, at its nucleus, a melodrama about a successful, widely beloved and devilishly handsome banker (played by Wiseau) whose cruel fiancée decides to cheat on him and frame him for domestic abuse (for no reason other than the fact that she is a fickle, hateful woman).
It’s a patently absurd, laughably misogynistic male victimhood fantasy that would be repulsive if it weren’t so hard to take seriously at face value. That’s part of the brilliance. It desperately wants to be a serious portrait of a tragically virtuous all-American guy brought low by malicious feminine wiles and yet, the final film paints this mindset as something that can only be laughed at.
A lead performance dripping with awkward, ugly sincerity. A lumbering B-plot fistfight against a sinister drug dealer. Five sex scenes set to full-length R&B tracks. Most films have the judgment to omit these peculiarities, but the value of “The Room” — both as a piece of entertainment and as a work of art — hinges on them.
“Nonetheless, I make my pittance hawking milk-warm contrarianism for a student newspaper, so here’s the part where I blow everyone’s minds by saying that “The Room” is actually good.”
It’s a misshapen reflection of the film it wants to be: an unintentional parody of its central ideas and a scathing one at that. It lays its strange, flawed worldview completely out in the open and then utterly and entirely neuters it. That’s special. That’s fascinating. I can’t, in good conscience, call a work of art that interesting “bad.”
It’s a legitimate triumph in naivety and hubris, a funny, captivating, endlessly dissectable piece of media that could never be replicated by people who knew what they were doing. That is magnificent. That is inspirational. That is a type of high art.
All discourse around the goodness (and badness) of “The Room” kind of revolves around the assumption that art is only good when it’s good on purpose, when it lays out its goals and achieves them and when the goals it sets out to achieve are good goals.
We like to pretend that the rubrics we create for art are steeped in some kind of objectivity. It’s not true, but we like to think it is. Movies are good when they look professional, when their acting is believable and when the editing is seamless.
“These are the qualifiers,” we tell ourselves. “These separate good films from bad ones.”
This is the wobbly half-truth that “The Room” (and movies like it) topples over. These films work, not because they succeed within some pseudo-authoritative, weakly-defined metrics, but because they break apart our systems of defining quality all together and they do so without even trying. By most criteria, the pieces of “The Room” shouldn’t function and yet, the final work is deeply enjoyable and original and interesting.
Would “The Room” be a better movie if the acting was stronger? If the story was more traditional? If the shots were never out of focus? I certainly don’t think so. There are a million movies with decent acting, stories and camerawork and most of them aren’t a fraction as fun or memorable or thought-provoking as “The Room.”
A sliding scale from “bad” to “good” doesn’t accommodate “The Room” very well. It’s not 90 percent bad and 10 percent good, nor is it the inverse. It doesn’t fit on any part of that spectrum. It just highlights its cracks. That is worth examining. That is valuable.
I’m not saying that all films are created equal. I think there are good movies and bad movies, and I have my own strong beliefs about many, many films. But “goodness” and “badness” can be limiting concepts, especially when we try to come up with “objective” (blegh) metrics for them.
Subjectivity is uncomfortable. We want our beliefs to be based in things that are inarguable and quantifiable. We want to separate our own beliefs and opinions and histories from the art we feel strongly about. We say silly things like “Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ is objectively better than Lynch’s,” or worse, “The Room sucks, but I like it anyway.”
These grasps for infallibility are a fool’s errand. Even if some ineffable measure of artistic goodness could be metrically outlined (a nauseating hypothetical), what good could it possibly fulfill if it prevented us from getting to explore the strange Mormon overtones of “Twilight” or the delightfully off-base board-room trend-jacking of “Howard the Duck?”
That is a world I wouldn’t want to live in. That’s basically Hell.
God bless “Hackers,” God bless “Twilight,” God bless “Howard the Duck” and God bless “The Room.”
Gerrit Punt PO ’24 is a pretentious contrarian dipshit. He believes in fake things like “subjectivity” and he only likes movies that are really, really bad. He also once got a really, really awkward photograph with Greg Sestero.
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