The Room’s nonsense finds resonance in Bollywood

At first I thought The Room was a great movie I had never heard of. The signs were all there. My brother, who is usually calm, was excited to the point of hysteria. He talked about The Room all afternoon and then a few hours before the show he dashed into a grocery store to pick up plastic spoons. Why plastic spoons, I wondered. You’ll find out, he said. A week into my first trip to the US, it was my second evening in San Francisco and I was painfully discovering that ‘you’ll find out’ answered a lot of questions in America.

The plan had been sudden. My brother was showing me his neighbourhood when we passed a movie theatre called Clay and my brother happened to notice that the once-a-month show of The Room was scheduled that midnight. I had never seen a midnight movie show before. 

By a very conservative American estimate, The Room is the worst movie ever made. In Hollywood they call it the Citizen Kane of bad films. Yet one Saturday a month the film plays to a packed house in San Francisco. According to my brother, the Clay has been running the show for almost five years now. In Los Angeles The Room has been running once a month to packed houses for almost a decade.

We went into the theatre a little before midnight just as the crowd was trickling in. Every now and then some people came in with balloons but most members like us were armed with plastic spoons the significance of which was still a secret to me.

Two minutes into the film I realised I was watching a work of art that had crossed the realm of mediocrity and fallen into the depths of an intellectual gutter. Like all great movies of its kind The Room has been written directed and produced by a single creative genius: Tommy Wiseau. The film was intended to be a drama but when the director realised the impact of the unintended comedy upon young hipster moviegoers he began calling it a dark comedy with every single quirk worked out.

Like all great movies The Room too has its moments when the director appears to be transcending the medium to have a direct one-to-one with the audience. Tommy Wiseau achieves this effect by the generous and often jarring use of spoon imagery.

A spoon of some sort inspires every artwork in the movie. “Spoon spoon,” people shouted as soon as the first spoon appeared on screen and threw spoons in the air. Some spoons thrown by people sitting behind me fell on my head but I did not mind. When the birthday party scene came people threw balloons in the air and clapped ferociously. 

There is no point talking about the plot of The Room because it lacks one. There is no point talking about the acting because there is none. There are scenes when characters are seen talking to invisible people and there are characters that walk in and out of scenes like they were invisible rooms. The film is so bad that it is tough to imagine it being the vision of a single human being.

When we walked out of the theatre my brother’s friend asked me if I had enjoyed myself. No, I told her. She was quite surprised. When was the last time you saw a film that made absolutely no sense? I thought about the answer. I thought of telling her about Mumbai, about the 100-crore club, about my life as a struggling screenwriter, about intellectual idleness and its impact on Indian cinema, but for some reason I kept silent and walked on.