Why I'll Probably Never See The Room

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend, and as most of my conversations do at one point or another, my thoughts turned to the movies.  As this friend is also a cinephile, we discussed movies that we had never seen and somehow The Room came up, a film that I have never seen.  He was shocked, considering it plays at the theater we were about to go to nearly every single month, that I hadn't seen it, and asked if I was ever going to watch it, and my quick reply of "no" was equally puzzling to him.  It also, it should be noted, puzzled me for a second.  Two of the principle beliefs of my film education have been that "every movie is worth seeing at least once" and "I never regret seeing a movie, even if I didn't like it"...so why was I so quick to dismiss ever seeing The Room?  The answer to this question I wanted to discuss here, and talk a little bit about what my cinematic mind has been doing for the past few weeks as I prep for the fall and winter, when arguably I see the most movies in any given calendar year (either at home or otherwise).

The Room, for those unfamiliar, is a cult film directed by Tommy Wiseau, and gained a lot of attention recently with the James Franco feature The Disaster Artist, which was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars (and which I did see).  The film is frequently lambasted as one of the worst movies ever made, bordering on the incoherent, and has only gained notoriety due its low quality & Wiseau's bizarre, enigmatic off-screen behavior.  Like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (a film I have also seen, though not in theaters), it has interactive moments during its midnight screenings, and is seen as an event by ardent fans of the picture.  It's also, like Rocky Horror, considered something of a "bad movie night" sort of screening, which have become increasingly popular in the past decade with home screenings of crappy, under-known titles from the past forty years.

Normally I'd subscribe to The Room as being a film I should see just so that I can be a proper, unbiased authority on my opinion of it, particularly considering its place in the zeitgeist.  I might like it, or appreciate it ironically (though I'll be real here-I am not someone who appreciates things ironically very often), but another article keeps swimming around in my head, one that I've become obsessed with and have forced everyone I know to read despite its gargantuan length: a piece by Kate Hagen about her "search for the last great video store" which talks about how we're in a potential "erasure" of cinema akin to the Silent Era, where thanks to legal reasons, lack of venues, and a sole focus on maximizing profits for studios, many movies may never be seen by new generations of filmgoers due to lack of interest.

The Room connects with this argument in part because I realized while reading it something I know subconsciously but never really think about in a tangible, actual way: there are more movies currently out than I ever will be able to see.  I have a lifelong goal of seeing every narrative, feature-length, Oscar-nominated film ever made for the Oscar Viewing Project, but this is hardly the only film-watching project I want to embark upon in my life, and isn't the only film-watching project I'm embarking upon currently.  And yet the OVP, which I've made tremendous progress on through the years, has exactly 2089 titles left just for me to see alone, even after seeing thousands of nominated films (or the fact that the Oscars come out with new nominated titles every single year).  If I watched every single one of these films every single night (forgoing any sort of social life, romantic life, sex life, vacations, or just watching other movies), I could finish this in six years, but that's not practical or plausible.  And even then, I'll be into my forties, and we have a finite amount of time on this earth.

After all, in recent years I've become intrigued by the "body of work" articles that different people on Twitter I follow seem so intrigued by.  People like Nick Davis who watch an entire lineup at Cannes or Catherine Stebbins who has been profiling dozens of movies from 1949 she has never seen in hopes of shoring up years she's "weak" on to better flesh out her film knowledge of that particular year.  The Film Experience is currently watching every single live-action film that Meryl Streep has ever appeared in, since apparently it's at 52 right now.  These all sound like amazing projects that I'd love to emulate with my own favorites (or copy them verbatim just to play along).  But time is a precious thing, and you can't hit a pause button on your life to try and catch up to where you wish your life was.

I haven't been watching films as much this summer on home video, and I'll admit that.  Part of that has to do with moving to a new house and enduring a new job that is more taxing on my time than my previous one (even though it's challenging in a fun way).  Most of that, though, is being daunted by the blog (it's hard to keep up with reviewing every picture, and I like more-and-more having these little capsules of what I think of different films, actors, and directors because the work of Davis, Stebbins, Hagen, and Nathaniel Rogers at The Film Experience all inspire me to continue to find new avenues to further my film education).  As a result, because it's holding me back from seeing movies, my big personal project for the next week is going to get as many of these film reviews out of my "drafts" file as is personally possible to at least eliminate this roadblock.  I find that in life we spend so much time imagining our goals that we never actually achieve the ones that deadlines (work-related, home improvement-related) or society (spouse, kids, retirement) force upon us with pressure. I'm usually pretty good on that, but as you might have noticed from the near lack of reviews from pre-2018 this summer (and the fact that so many 2018 releases like Crazy Rich Asians, Black Panther, and Solo: A Star Wars Story that I've referenced elsewhere still don't have reviews), I'm clearly behind and need to get caught up if I don't view each new movie with dread because it's adding to my mountain of film reviews left untyped.

But that doesn't solve the problem of The Room, and I think I'm vowing that I'll probably never see it, and I'm comfortable with that.  "All movies are worth seeing," but not all of them are worth prioritizing.  Wiseau's vision, as robustly awful as it seems to be, doesn't need to be a priority, as there's nearly always a movie that I have easy access to that I will want to see before catching it.  This may be a philistine attitude, and my inner-curiosity may get to me at some point, but I view it more as pragmatism.  In my life, I'll likely continue the quest to see as many movies as is humanly possible while also still having a life, and will hopefully be blessed with enough years to get through as many movie projects as I possibly can.  But we can't see it all, and if that means occasionally I won't have a frame-of-reference for the "worst movie ever made," I think I'm okay with that.