The Disaster Artist
10 Dec 2017I’ve tried to avoid writing Trump-related reviews all year. I’m not shy of introducing political topics in my reviews, I just wanted this to be a Trump free space. I’m going to break my own promise to myself today. And I apologize to anyone reading this for bringing Trump into this.
To me, there’s no sunlight between someone like Tommy Wiseau and someone like Donald Trump. Here are a few ways in which I find them to be the same:
- they both conceive of themselves as maligned outsiders struggling to be taken seriously
- they both started out rich (Tommy maybe didn’t get an inheritance from his father, but his $6 million seemingly came from nowhere)
- they’re both convinced that everyone is out to get them and that their way is the only way
- they seemingly subsist entirely off a diet of Red Bull/Diet Coke and junk food
- they only care about seeing their names in the headlines. They want to be stars. They’re not motivated by any inner morality or ethic or philosophy. Tommy was completely fine pivoting his film to a comedy as soon as he saw the audience laughing. Trump was fine adopting a racist platform when he saw it working politically.
- Trump has General Kelly. Tommy has Greg. People who handle and enable them. Who translate the world for them. And translate them to the world.
- they are both, at the end of the day, narcissists
The Room is not a film for which I have a particular fondness. I know many people who do. And for them, The Disaster Artist works much better. And there is certainly plenty to love including James Franco’s performance/immitation, the fidelity of the recreations, the meta-textual references with “Waiting for Godot” and the ever-interesting topic for movie-goers-how movies are made.
So where does that land us? What happens when we, the audience, sometimes ironically and sometimes not so ironically, props up narcissists like Trump and Tommy? Do we, as Franco/Tommy say, become the villains when we “laugh, ha ha ha” at them? What happens when an artist like James Franco, no slouch in the narcissism department himself, creates a project that pathologizes Tommy. Franco could have explored themes about the audience’s role in creating people like Tommy and Trump, who give themselves up for consumption, and we consume laughing and smiling, until it’s no longer funny. We get none of that, just a simplistic story about friendship, and some laugh lines. Irony and satire are not very potent when they’re built on flimsy moral scaffolding.