Ross Morin, whom I’ve known since we were 14 years of age, is a professor of Film Studies at Connecticut College, and the person who coined the phrase “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” when referring to The Room. He’s the go-to person when talking about Tommy Wiseau’s tour-de-folly. You’ve got a question, he’s got an answer. He first presented the film to me—as the “worst movie ever”—in either 2006 or 2007 when his friend and creative collaborator, Evan Clar, came back from Los Angeles after being confronted by Wiseau’s giant mug on a billboard hanging above the L.A. freeway. This was before the movie was available to stream on Netflix. They had to actually, gulp, buy the DVD to watch it. When Ross sat me down, I honestly didn’t know what to expect. We’ve all seen bad movies. How could this one be any worse?
I don’t know why, but I pictured a bunch of dude-bros with a shitty mini-DV camera who desperately wanted to film a Wedding Crashers Xerox. This was not the case. Instead, I got a crockpot of overzealous and solipsistic filmmaking with lines of dialogue that had to have been written by the Zucker Brothers. Surely, this had to be the case. It wasn’t… and don’t call me Shirley. The whole kit and caboodle was corralled by a creature known as Tommy Wiseau, who looks a lot like Peter Steele’s burn-victim brother and has the strangest of accents that, even to this day, not one person can pinpoint its origin. I can assure you that never in a million years would my brain have ever created the image of this man, let alone his naked body, which will be burned into my retinas for eternity.
But calling it the worst movie ever made is a sort of injustice to the film. I sometimes think people are overly sensational with their words for my taste when talking about this or Plan 9 from Outer Space. They’re both so welcoming of an active spectatorship (that in most public appearances of Wiseau’s film, spoons are literally hurled at the screen), reminiscent of Rocky Horror screenings, and the rifftrax we all came to love in Mystery Science Theater 3000, play a major role in its popularity, too. What I mean to say is, it’s camp. It’s the reason we’re able to watch reality shows like Jersey Shore or any number of the “Real Housewives” incarnations. And with the advent of the internet, we can now watch and appreciate camp at will with things like Tay Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain” and Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, and, from a few years ago, that darn blue/black/white/gold dress debacle. And, yes, that’s camp—the viral phenomenon as well as the dress itself. The Room is no different. The cast of characters’ blunders are infectious. We love to revel in their next-level irrationality.
In Susan Sontag’s wonderful piece, “Notes on Camp”, she defines such things as “the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience”. There’s a loudness, obnoxiousness, a sort of “hey, look at me” aspect to camp that separates it from A) those items we love because they are competent, honest, well-revered; they affect us on deeper levels, both intellectually and emotionally, and B) those we do not love because they are subpar; we detach any sort of emotional affiliation we would have with it and save it for something more deserving. If we don’t love something, either ironically or truthfully, we banish it from our minds. There’s no need for it anymore. It is the “love of the unnatural”, “of artifice and exaggeration”, Sontag explains further, that comes when watching William Hung sing “She Bangs” for the umpteenth time.
There’s another level to all this, something I’d describe as “Hollywood Babylon-ian intrigue”. People—us normal citizens, or “muggles”, if I were to borrow the term from Ms. Rowling—love to hear about celebs’ “private lives”. Kenneth Anger (who knows a little sumthin-sumthin’ about camp, I might add) had his hand in what we now know today as the “gossip magazine”. His historical bible on the scandals of Tinseltown has become somewhat modernized, though completely déclassé, in the form of US Weekly and People magazine, and, vomit, TMZ. At any rate, this is the sort of thing that fuels us at our 9-5 jobs when swarming around the water cooler. “Did you hear about so-and-so?” “Drug rehab!” “Again?” “You guessed it.” The Room is such an instance. Because Tommy Wiseau is so, how do I put it, bonkers, both visually and audibly, his “Oh hai, Mark” was the shot heard ‘round the world. “Who is this person?” we all thought. “What would compel them to make this mess?” It is a mystery, and the theories we create to fill these voids bind our love for the esoteric. The fact that Wiseau could possibly be an extra-terrestrial, or YIKES! that he’s actually been self-aware this whole time, give The Room new meaning, and new fans.
This brings me to the film that started this essay altogether, a film that I really can’t say I want to view in its entirety ever again. And for good reason, too, because unlike The Room, this is a film that serves you better if you don’t watch it. It’s kind of like that tape in Ringu: watching it would prompt immediate death or insanity. Even my buddy Justin Rice at the now defunct Briarwood Entertainment (who released some so-bad-it’s-good treasures via his distro company) said to me, “I hope you didn’t watch it alone. If you did you’re more of a man than I.” Well, I didn’t. And I’m glad. The notorious film in question is Things from 1989, directed by Andrew Jordan, written and produced by Jordan and Barry J. Gillis with a modest budget of about $400,000, and starring Gillis and Doug Bunston.
To say this film is an endurance test is putting it lightly. Upon initial viewing, it would be hard to synopsize the film as I’m not entirely sure what happened, but I’ll give it a go. Jordan and Gillis work within a very bare-bones structure, leaving much to be desired; even the title’s use of the word ‘things’ is vague, as it simply refuses to identify anything about the story or its conflict. Basically, though, Doug Bunston plays a husband who desperately wants to have children, but cannot, and becomes so consumed with his own infertility that he hires a doctor to experiment with helping to impregnate his wife. This all goes awry quite fast as large cockroach-like monsters explode from her womb. Surprisingly, though, this is the least of their worries.
Things is its own personal hell: characters confined to one space for the entirety of the film (lit by a non-diegetic red light) seemingly walk in and out of the same doorway and in circles for no reason, and speak nonsequitors; they were for the most part going insane and so was I. Even at face value, if you want to assign Things any bit of subtext, you might say that the film embodies anxieties about Doug’s virility, or that it’s depicting the pangs of child birth as an aberration. But I’m going to totally dispute those theories and say it actually has nothing to do with that, that the film is doing something completely and utterly different.
I first encountered the volatile Canuxploitation film because I fancy myself a collector of VHS paracinema, and it kept popping up in my travels. Now, I’ve seen my fair share of Z-grade movies (like the sordid Nail Gun Massacre, Mausoleum, or The Last Slumber Party, to name a few), but Things flat-out nauseated me. I don’t mean to sound hyperbolic when I say this because I intend, in the literal sense of the word, that it made me sick. This has less to do with the gore, which is pretty tame by lo-fi standards of the late 80s, and more to do with the fact that I felt like I was watching the visual representation of listening to a broken record.
For Halloween one year, I asked my friend Wayne if he wanted to give Things a shot. We pressed play, sat back and attempted to have a relaxing evening together. This fell short, unfortunately, because the entire time we were watching the movie, there was a strange beeping sound in his apartment that seemed to be coming from an undisclosed place, inside the walls. We were racking our brains trying to figure out what it was and where it was coming from, to no avail. His dog whimpered and barked at the damn thing and wouldn’t stop until he found out what it was. At first, we’d pause the movie, get up, search for about ten minutes, come back to the couch and press play. But once the beeping started up again, and consistently without fail throughout the night, we ceased ever pressing the pause button again. So, as the movie played on, our own lives began to mimic the characters in the film: we were walking in and out of doorways, in circles, mindlessly, like zombies, meandering about while an unknown entity drove us to the brinks of our sanity. It was hellish, indeed.
This event is something of a postmodern spectacle, one that Fredric Jameson calls “schizophrenic”[1]. The spectators’ domestic environments, needs, and distractions begin to bleed into their own movie-going experience. Home viewing is still a new tradition, believe it or not, as I write this in 2015, considering, in the grand scheme of things, VCRs started to infiltrate our homes in the mid-to-late 1970s, while the first commercial film ever to screen in a theater occurred in 1895. The concept of a fragmented and unengaged spectator is nothing new, however. In the 1950s, surrealists André Breton and Jacques Vaché would make a point to jump from theater to theater, neither showing up on time nor staying until the end of a film, thus refusing to be passive viewers, as described in the former’s essay, Comme dans un bois. They created their own movie, based on the disjointed segments of their impromptu itinerary.
In her essay, “Medium Cool: Video Culture, Video Asthetics”, Joan Hawkins posits that each spectator may have wholly different experiences with the same film, just based on the individual’s surroundings.
“Armed with a remote control, the viewer can replay selected bits of a film, fast-forward through unsettling sequences, watch the film in installments, watch parts of it frame by frame, or stop it altogether. She can also create composite cinematic texts by alternately viewing two films or by crosscutting between a movie on the VCR and the six o’clock news. That is, she can become a truly active viewer, one who creates her own texts, one who feels free to disrupt the narrative flow.”[2]
This was also an act of defiance that many cinephiles deemed sacrilegious and antithetical to the very definition of cinema. Home viewing was disrespectful to the medium, a medium which now diverged into two separate modes of categorization. One was “high art”, which meant that we are to look at Picasso’s painting by way of museums, in person, whereas “low art”, or “lowbrow”/popular culture, “kitsch”, produces replicas of his paintings on poster paper for your bedroom walls. Sontag touches upon this in a separate essay, “The Decay of Cinema”: “You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie — and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. The experience of ‘going to the movies’ was part of it. To see a great film only on television isn’t to have really seen that film. […] To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.”
The fact that Things never made it to the theaters (not that it was ever intended to) and invited you to watch it within your home with the understanding that you may fast-forward through scenes out of sheer boredom is the ultimate blasphemy of cinema. This was a film that could never have found theater time. It can only exist on a medium that allows for a person to enact their own diegesis into the film, to substitute its meaning with their own, to edit the film to their liking. This is not cinema. This is an experience. The video boom of the 80s allowed filmmakers instant visibility without having to ever set foot in multiplexes, giving them much leeway with movie-going consumers. It is something Joan Hawkins identifies as “[…] a spectatorial mode that presupposes not an informed, engaged viewer but a fragmented and distracted one.”[3]
Home viewing is an avant-garde occurrence, and sometimes what you brought home from the video store guided that particular practice. For instance, in the 1990s, the only copy of the “Weird Al” Yankovic film, UHF, that I could get my grubby little hands on within a 50 mile radius was a VHS at a video store called First Choice Video. The tape was completely worn out, causing multiple sections of lines on the screen—“scramble vision”, as we used to call it growing up. This was the first time I had ever watched the film, and subsequent screenings of it were always on this specific tape. When I finally watched the film in college on DVD, I found myself disconnected, as I had not seen the actors with such clarity before.
For me, Things was a harrowing experience. It might seem laughable, but I feel as though its origins lie in the Theater of the Absurd. I am certainly far from thinking that Andrew Jordan and Barry Gillis were inspired by Edward Albee, but the way in which these characters were so distantly removed from the “real world” broke down any simple communication they tried to have with each other. Most of what they did in the film was meaningless; even when the horror starts they didn’t seem to be all that frightened (this might be due in part by the fact that neither Gillis nor Bunston have much acting experience outside of this excursion). Things also shares some similarity with Sartre’s No Exit—it is my belief that these characters are dead, in Hell, and being punished for not understanding themselves as an object in the universe; after all, “Hell is other people”. The difference is that No Exit, of course, triggers its audience to question and investigate their existence, whereas Things forces you to watch a very unfounded narrative, leading to a psychological breakdown or sorts.
This “breakdown” is not one of clinical diagnosis but rather a discombobulation of the mind; in fact, its severity will vary with each passing audience member. What Things does, though, is transport you to a figurative “other dimension”, similar to the scene in which Fred, played by Bruce Roach, gets lost in a portal inside the TV he’s watching. The insanity displayed in the film will begin to, in some lesser ways, create such a mindset for the spectator. It’s kind of like trying to sleep when there’s a jackhammer chiseling right outside your bedroom window; the good news is that you can actually put a stop to it, or accelerate to the end.
And though it might be tricky to reference Barbara Hammer in context with this film, I do like her sentiments about participating in an “active cinema”, which she describes as “a cinema where the audience is engaged physically, involved with a sense of their bodies as they watch the screen.”[4] Passive cinema is just the opposite: it’s letting the director take you on a journey while you recline and let it happen “by drugging the sense of self.”[5] In some ways, the ability to challenge the director’s vision makes your own personal engagement with it worthwhile. And though it won’t always pan out the way you want it to, the flexibility to tailor it to your liking is freeing.
[1] Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991
[2] Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde, 2000, p. 35\
[3] Hawkins, Cutting Edge, p. 39
[4] Hammer, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, p. 128
[5] Hammmer, HAMMER!, p. 128