The Room - A Theory from the Internet

The key to "The Room's" staying power is that it's so dreamlike and hard to understand. People have described it as what would happen if aliens, trying to understand human life, tried to make a movie about it. The vast consensus for why it is the way it is, is that its creator Tommy Wiseau is simply inept. And when he claims he had a "vision" for the movie, he's simply dismissed. Especially since he's never explained what that vision was.

In trying to understand what "The Room" might mean, I wonder if there's a clue to the some of the answers in the title itself. After all, does anything in the movie suggest the title "The Room"? Why name it that? It's clearly about the relationships (man-woman and man-man) of the characters themselves. But the title - the simplest summary of the movie's meaning is "The Room".

What if the "room" (the apartment) was an active participant in the events of the movie. Let's suppose it was possible that some sort of inter-dimensional nexus could exist on Earth that it had the power to affect people's thoughts slowly over time? And suppose that Johnny and Lisa's apartment happens to be that nexus. Then what we perceive as bad writing and awful acting is really a manifestation of the negative psychological effects of long-term exposure to The Room. They're acting and speaking strangely because they're no longer in their right minds and haven't been for a long time. If this is the case, Johnny, who's presumably spent the most time in The Room, seems to exhibit no normal human behavior whatsoever.

Lisa and her mother would be second to Johnny in their exposure to The Room's effects which explains why they still have traces of humanity but yet show that a cancer diagnosis isn't a worthwhile conversation topic, etc. This is particularly hinted at by Lisa herself on the roof, "I'm changing... people are changing all the time".

If the Room is causing gradual madness over time, it naturally follows then that that the most ancillary characters like Michelle and Steven would seem to most resemble real people and act as the "voice of reason" to our "crazy" main characters. And this is exactly the case.

People often wonder why Mike suddenly falls down in the alley. Watch again and see that this moment comes right after he's told a story about being in the apartment. He's suffering brain trauma.

The effects of being in The Room?

What about the pictures of spoons? Ever since Uri Geller in the 1970s, the idea of "spoon bending", the supposed ability to bend spoons with one's mind, has become a symbol of the metaphysical. This imagery was probably most famously used in The Matrix, a science-fiction film. The spoon pictures, purposefully placed in the background, suggest that something paranormal is happening in the environment all the time. When asked directly about the significance of the spoons, Wiseau gives an enigmatic answer hinting at the harmful effects of foreign chemicals inside the body. People are victims, unaware that they're slowly poisoned by outside elements.

I think Tommy Wiseau may have very well had a vision for "The Room" and he's not telling anyone in the same way that all the great filmmakers never reveal the meanings of their works. "The Room"  may be a science-fiction piece. It's a movie that observes a group of (previously) normal people whose minds have been warped and distorted by a force outside their control. And being unaware that this force exists, unaware that they're sick, they must continue to argue, fight and cheat each other, following what their sick minds are telling them to do. Without the possibility of thinking "outside the Room", the events of the movie flow inevitably and the very last scene is a bleak determinism.

In short, "The Room" may be a companion piece to "Upstream Color".