Interpretations, themes, and influences
Tommy's life study of human interaction had been put into a Final Draft blender and sprinkled with the darkness of whatever he'd been living through over the last nine months. The one thing Tommy's script wasn't about, despite its characters' claims? Love.I had a sobering, sad, and powerful realization: our friendship was the most human experience Tommy had had in the last few years. Maybe ever. The happy news was that whatever Tommy had been running from, he'd managed to turn and face it down in his script. Instead of killing himself, he wrote himself out of danger. He did this by making his character [Johnny] the one spotless human being amid chaos, lies and infidelity.
– Sestero on his initial reaction to The Room's script[5]
The Room is considered to be semi-autobiographical as it draws on specific incidents from Wiseau's own life, such as the details of how Johnny came to San Francisco and met Lisa, and the nature of Johnny and Mark's friendship.[37][38] According to Sestero, the character of Lisa is based on a former lover of Wiseau's to whom he intended to propose marriage with a US$1,500 diamond engagement ring, but because she "betray[ed] him multiple times", their relationship ended in a break-up.[39] Defining the script as "an advisory warning about the perils of having friends", Sestero has described The Room as Wiseau's "life study of human interaction", dealing with additional themes of trust, fear and truth.[5]
Sestero further postulates that Wiseau based Lisa's explicit conniving on the character Tom Ripley, after Wiseau had a profound emotional reaction to the film The Talented Mr. Ripley, and matches elements of its three main characters to those in The Room; Sestero has likewise indicated that the character Mark was named for the Ripley actor Matt Damon, whose first name Wiseau had misheard.[40] Wiseau also drew on the chamber plays of Tennessee Williams, whose highly emotional scenes he enjoyed acting out in drama school – many advertising materials for The Room make explicit parallels to the playwright's work through the tagline "A film with the passion of Tennesee [sic] Williams."[6][41]
In his direction and performance, Wiseau attempted to emulate Orson Welles, Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando and James Dean, especially Dean's performance in the film Giant,[42][14] and went so far as to directly use quotes from their films – the famous line "You are tearing me apart, Lisa!" is derived from a similar line performed by Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.[43]
MacDowell and Zborowski point out that The Room democratises "the pleasures involved in being a critic, due to the film's blatant breaking of the most simple rules of coherent cinematic narrative".[44] Middlemost has shown that Wiseau's authorship and intentionality are integral to the audiences' enjoyment of the film's flaws.[45] Tirosh has suggested that this need for integrity is comparable to the reception of medieval works such as the Icelandic sagas, and equates the audience shouting at the screen with scholarly works on textual editions.[46]
Inconsistencies and narrative flaws
The script is characterized by numerous mood and personality shifts in characters. In analyzing the film's abrupt tone shifts, Sestero highlighted two scenes in particular. In the first scene, Johnny enters the rooftop in the middle of a tirade about being wrongfully accused of domestic abuse, only to become abruptly cheerful upon seeing Mark; a few moments later, he laughs inappropriately upon learning that a friend of Mark's had been severely beaten. On set, Sestero and script supervisor Sandy Schklair repeatedly tried to convince Wiseau that the line should not be delivered as comical, but Wiseau refused to refrain from laughing.[47] In the second instance, occurring later in the film, Mark attempts to kill Peter by throwing him off a roof after Peter expresses his belief that Mark is having an affair with Lisa; seconds later, however, Mark pulls Peter back from the edge of the roof, apologizes, and the two continue their previous conversation with no acknowledgment of what just occurred.[48]
In addition to its continuity errors, critics and audiences have commented on the presence of several plots and subplots that have been called inconsistent and irrelevant.[49] The Portland Mercury has stated that a number of "plot threads are introduced, then instantly abandoned."[10] In an early scene, halfway through a conversation about planning a birthday party for Johnny, Claudette off-handedly tells Lisa: "I got the results of the test back. I definitely have breast cancer."[14] The issue is casually dismissed and never revisited during the rest of the film.[10][14] Similarly, the audience never learns the details surrounding Denny's drug-related debt to Chris-R, or what led to their violent confrontation on the roof.[10][50]
Beyond being Johnny's friend, Mark's background receives no exposition; when he is first introduced, he claims to be "very busy" while sitting in a parked car in the middle of the day, with no explanation ever given as to his occupation or what he was doing. In The Disaster Artist, Sestero states that he created a backstory for the character in which Mark was an undercover vice detective, which Sestero felt united several otherwise disparate aspects of Mark's character, including the secretive nature of various aspects of his behavior – including marijuana use – his mood swings, and his handling of the Chris-R incident. Wiseau dismissed adding any reference to Mark's past to the script.[51] The makers of The Room video game would later introduce a similar idea as part of a subplot involving Mark's unexplained backstory, much to Sestero's amusement.[52]
At one point, the principal male characters congregate in an alley behind Johnny's apartment to play catch with a football while wearing tuxedos. When Mark arrives, he is revealed to have shaved his beard, and the camera slowly zooms in on his face while dramatic music plays on the soundtrack. Nothing that is said or occurs during the scene has any effect on the plot; the scene ends abruptly when the men decide to return to Johnny's apartment after Peter trips. Similar to most of the other plot points of the film, the event is introduced abruptly and is never referenced elsewhere in the story. Wiseau received enough questions about the scene that he decided to address it in a Q&A segment featured on the DVD release; rather than explaining the scene, though, Wiseau states only that playing football without the proper protective equipment is fun and challenging.[4] Sestero has been questioned about the significance of Mark's shaving, though his only response for several years was "if people only knew."[20] He describes in The Disaster Artist that Wiseau insisted he shave his beard on-set just so that Wiseau would have an excuse for Johnny to call Mark "Babyface," Wiseau's own nickname for Sestero, and that the revealing of beardless Mark would be "a moment." Sestero further detailed how the football-in-tuxedos scene was concocted on set by Wiseau, who never explained the significance of the scene to the cast or crew and insisted that the sequence be filmed at the expense of other, relevant scenes.[53]
