WMG / The Room

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Tommy Wiseau

Tommy Wiseau is an alien.

Not a theory I come up with myself; a number of people have mentioned it. But it fits perfectly: the weird accent, the lack of an origin or even a definitive nationality, the secrecy, and of course, the complete lack of understanding of how humans work. For example, Wiseau apparently says that the reason Claudette's cancer isn't brought up again is that his research indicates that the seriously ill don't like to talk about their condition, suggesting that he's never had much in the way of normal human interaction and that the only "information" about how humans act that he has, he gleaned from dry studies of human behaviour. If you tried to picture an alien making a film, The Room is what you'd get, isn't it?

• He meant it when he said I fed up with this world!
• On the planet that he is from, there is an animal that looks exactly like a chicken, but makes noises that are completely different from earth chickens. His impression of it is actually spot on.
• Considering his accent, he may be a Centauri in disguise.
  • That would explain all the "love has nothing to do with marriage" talk in the movie.
• He's not actually laughing at inappropriate times. The sound we call laughter is a placeholder sound to his species, like "Um" or "Uh" would be to a human. He's not laughing, he's thinking over what he's going to say next.
• Confirmed by Captain Marvel and brought to mainstream attention by Brie Larson herself in this hilarious Instagram post. At least he's an alien somewhere.

Tommy Wiseau is a vampire.

• He's got no discernible origin.
• His accent is impossible to trace.
• On-set accounts indicate he smells bad, possibly of death?
• He certainly looks like a vampire. Specifically Morbius.
• The rooftop scenes were shot on blue screen because he couldn't shoot them on an actual rooftop in actual daylight.
  • According to the the behind-the-scenes book "The Disaster Artist" the blue screen was set up on a parking lot and had no roof.
  • There were multiple scenes with him in broad daylight, for example, when he and Mark played football in the park.
    • Wiseau used CG to make it look like they were shot outdoors in the daylight. Hey, that eight million dollar budget had to go somewhere. Plus, many of the shots were wide angles taken from a great distance. Could have been a double.
    • Not all vampires burn up or die in the sun. Most of them are simply weakened by it. It's possible that Tommy is another example of this.
• The terrible acting, writing, and directing is the result of a creature that's long since forgot what emotions are trying to replicate them.
• He's planning on making a movie about vampires, maybe he's trying to tell us something?
• The unintentional over-sexualization of Denny is due to Values Dissonance. Wherever or whenever Tommy Wiseau's originally from, pederasty was perfectly common.
  • My god... It all makes sense!
  • Perhaps he's a Anne Rice-style vampire.
• Also, in "The Tommy Wi-show", he played Mortal Kombat and asked if there was a playable vampire character.
• In some interviews, he's seen wearing an enormous pair of wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. He also has a rather pasty, pallid complexion. As though he's afraid of sunlight...
• Rumor has it there was originally going to be a vampire subplot in the film. Maybe he dropped it because he realized people might figure out he actually is one of the undead.
  • The Disaster Artist actually gives yet more evidence to this. In addition to the vampire subplot, he referred to his ability to go to sleep and wake up at the perfect time as a "vampire trick"; he sleeps through the morning and is active at night; when going to the park with Greg, he complained about the sunlight and had to put on sunscreen after getting a rash from it; he displays surprising strength for his age; Greg walked in on him hanging from his feet by his chin-up bar like a bat...
• If Tommy is an Old Worldof Darkness vampire, he could be either a Toreador or a Malkavian who thinks he's a Toreador. He recently came out of torpor, and somehow got himself an artifact that keeps the sunlight from doing him too much harm (possibly those sunglasses Greg says he's always wearing): unfortunately, it endangers his already-frail sanity and has other unpleasant side effects...
  • Nosferatu was my first thought, but I guess he isn't really that creepy-looking.
    • He could also be a New World of Darkness Nosferatu. New World Nossies can look more-or-less normal, but suffer from a kind of inherent air of wrongness.
• Adding to all this, Greg's actually his Secret Keeper, as well as the one who supplies him with...*ahem* "food".

Tommy Wiseau was born into a homeless family, or at least spend a significant portion of his life homeless.

Thus, the subject of his documentary and his reluctance to talk about his past. His looks are due to never getting in the habit of washing regularly, and malnourishment.

• Aww..
• Greg Sestero says in The Disaster Artist that Tommy didn't like the guy who had first been hired to play Mark. Greg said they both assumed the guy was rich because of the way he acted. He thought that Tommy's enmity was in part because Tommy had not always been rich.

Tommy Wiseau made the people in the documentary homeless.

He could have robbed from in order to get his funds to make The Room, seeing how he is not revealing how exactly he got the money. He could have simply made the documentary as a cover-up.

Tommy Wiseau is not, as commonly believed, French.

Given how often in the movie he calls Lisa his "future wife", he doesn't seem to know that the word "fiancée" exists. So while he is definitely some shade of European foreigner, a Frenchmen not knowing of a word that their own language originated would be pretty inexcusable.

• Maybe he wasn't aware that the word is also used in English and was trying to sound more American?
  • Which would put the lie to his claims that he was born in America.
    • Not necessarily. A person can be born in one country and raised in another.
  • This - or something similar - seems to be the case according to some accounts. It wasn't necessarily that he didn't know the word is used in English, but more that he insisted that the movie only contain English. He's somewhat obsessed with the concept of being American, even though it seems that, at the very least, he spent a significant portion of his life outside of the United States.
• It's been pointed out a couple times in this wiki that W is not a letter in common usage in the French language. This would hint he's either not French, or his family is, and changed the spelling in an attempt to Americanize the name.
  • He spent some time in San Francisco selling knick knacks, including toy birds. It seems that he created his surname from the French word for bird - oiseau - but attempted to Americanize the spelling (and/or connect it to the family he lived with in Louisiana, as mentioned below) by replacing the "O" with a "W."
• It's been suggested that he probably comes from an Eastern Bloc country, likely Poland, based on his accent and the people who are likely the family he lived with when he moved to Louisiana (the Wieczors).
  • Wiseau's accent is definitely heavily Polish. Listen to videos by Roland Warzecha on YouTube, a Polish medieval re-enactor who currently lives in Germany. Roland's accent is almost a near-perfect match for Tommy's.

Tommy Wiseau is Cajun.

Think about it. According to The Other Wiki he grew up in New Orleans, plus the suffix -eau is VERY common in Cajun/Acadian surnames. His moving about the U.S. and Europe when he was older must've warped his accent a bit. And maybe his mom is Eastern European while his dad is Cajun.

• The Disaster Artist mentions two fake reviews for the movie that were almost certainly invented by Wiseau. Both of them call him a Cajun.

Tommy Wiseau is from Romania.

His accent is kind of eastern European... yet also he can come off as French sounding at times as well. Romanian is a romance language like French. the -eau in his name can be found in a fair amount of Romanian surnames. Or maybe if we combine this WMG with the one above it.... (I'm totally pulling this one out of my ass, I know.)

• I'm starting to think that he's Ukrainian. Just watched an episode of SVU, "Hothouse" and the Ukrainian father of a girl who was murdered sounded an awful lot like Tommy Wiseau (Especially when he's yelling).

Tommy Wiseau didn't even know what was going on in his own movie as often as not.

An interview in Entertainment Weekly revealed that there was an uncredited script supervisor, Sandy Schklair, who also ended up handling most of the directorial duties (confirmed by one of the actors, who wished to remain anonymous) due to the fact that Wiseau was more concerned with the acting portion of his job. They also said that the scripts that Wiseau created were almost incomprehensible and that the others went to Schklair for help with fixing it. It seems like the rest of the cast knew that they were making a legendarily bad movie and decided it was best to leave Wiseau, who honestly believed he was making a decent movie, out of the loop. (Schklair was left out of the credits because he quit prior to the end of production in order to work on Jumbo Girl.)

Tommy Wiseau is Palpatine.

Look at their faces. Notice the resemblance?

• My God...

Tommy Wiseau is an immortal Neanderthal.

That would explain the weird, not quite French accent. He must have learned English long ago, and the last place he lived in that spoke French was early colonial New Orleans. He actually was born in France, where he says he lived "a long time ago." Given that his face appears to be that of a Neanderthal's, a REALLY long time ago.

• He's a Neanderthal Vampire! Oogah Boogah!
  • He's a Vampire Caveman from Mars!
• The odd speech comes from having a different voice box from Homo Sapiens. His bizarre personality is due to the Fog Of The Ages from being over 27,000 years old. All the problems with The Room? Neanderthals don't have an advanced imagination as our species, so no wonder it was a flop

Tommy Wiseau had a stroke at some point.

It makes as much sense as anything else.

Tommy Wiseau is an oni.

I swear the oni in the game looks like Tommy Wiseau's face on the poster as seen on the main page, minus the hair.

Tommy Wiseau is Muammar Gaddafi.

He tried his hand at film directing because he didn't see why Kim Jong-Il should get all the fun.

Tommy Wiseau is The G-Man.

They both wear suits. They both put emphasis on all the wrong words and syllables. They both seem like aliens doing the most unconvincing human act ever. The G-man grew his hair long and disguised himself (very poorly) as a crappy real-life filmmaker to keep the bills paid between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Now, as he waits for Half-Life 3 to come along, he's been forced to go back to appearing as Wiseau, hence the cult following that's sprung up between the time the film was released and today.

Tommy Wiseau actually has Mensa-level intelligence and is a brilliant actor.

He just does the whole "caveman-vampire" thing because A.) He knows people will find the novelty of such a being fascinating, and B.) He has a blast doing it. He funded "The Room" by shrewdly playing the stock market. "The Room"'s entire existence, in fact, was intentionally designed to flop because he WANTED to be known as the man who made the worst movie ever so he could surprise people when he does something really good.

Tommy Wiseau is actually the most gifted filmmaker of our time.

He cannot mention what country he's from. After he graduated film school there, he made a powerful, epic drama with strong allegories to the country's corrupt government, believed by film scholars to be the greatest film ever made before its destruction at the hands of the country's censors. Now banished from his homeland, Tommy fears that any indication of his home country will get him assassinated by their military's secret agents. He wound up in America, where his genius remains buried in culture shock: A poor grasp of both the English language and American customs prevent him from properly directing or writing a good script.

Tommy Wiseau is the latest alias of Connor MacLeod.

They both seem to have an inscrutable accent and enigmatic origins. Also, depending on whether you regard Highlander II's Zeist plot point as canon, it could tie in to the "Tommy Wiseau is an alien" guess.

• Perhaps Master Shake's assertion that "Highlander was a documentary" is true. MacLeod got a lot of unwanted attention thanks to the film, so the Tommy/Johnny thing is a disguise that went overboard.

And now, Greg Sestero's personal WMG.

As per his biography, The Disaster Artist:

Tommy is from a former member of the Soviet Union, likely Romania. His father, a World War II veteran, beat him savagely throughout his childhood, resulting in facial deformities. He fell in love with America and began selling treasonous american souvenirs to make money to illegally immigrate to France, where he changed his name to Pierre in an attempt to fit in, but had an equally miserable life. From there, his uncle in Louisiana sponsored his legal immigration to America.

After a few more miserable years working as a stock-boy, he realized his weirdness was marketable and moved to San Francisco, where he somehow made a fortune through, again, selling tacky souvenirs. His most popular item was a toy bird (the kind you can get at the Eiffel Tower), so he became known as the "Birdman." He changed his name to something more american: Thomas P. Wiseau. Tommy the Birdman. His fortune from toy birds was negotiated into a few pieces of prime real estate, which was the source of his money. A traumatic car accident (possibly the second he'd had in his life) spurred a mid-lfie crisis. Being a Rich Idiot with No Day Job, he was able to easily commute between LA and San Francisco for acting classes. When his only friend, Sestero, began to drift away, he felt hurt and betrayed, and from that came The Room.

Tommy Wiseau is the protagonist of the Sonic.exe creepypasta.

Just a couple of stupid coincidences that had me think about this:

• The author of Sonic.exe is named Tom.
• Tom is incredibly slow on the uptake in Sonic.exe, while Wiseau is still unsure as to why people think The Room is So Bad, It's Good at best.
• Some consider The Room to be the My Immortal of films while Sonic.exe is something like the My Immortal of game-related creepypastas.
• The writing for The Room is horrible and some of it makes no sense. There is no given rhyme or reason to the events of the Sonic.exe creepypasta.

...Hey, it makes as much sense as some of these other WMGs.

Tommy Wiseau is Frankenstein's monster.

He matches the description of the monster given in the book, particularly the "flowing black hair." Also, it's widely believed that Tommy Wiseau is French, and what language did the creature speak? That's right, French. It would make sense; that's why he won't disclose his backstory: because he's actually a 200 year old living corpse. The Room could have been his wish fulfillment dream of being a normal person. Of course, he would name his future wife in the movie "Elizabeth" since that was Victor Frankenstein's wife's name, so he had some attachment to it.

Tommy Wiseau is an alternate-universe counterpart of Christian Weston Chandler.

He acts very bizarrely and appears to have little grip on reality. His work is very poorly-made, but he seems unable to tell that it is not excellent and that his fans are laughing at him rather than with him. He has a strong accent and uses peculiar euphemisms, phrases, and sentence construction. He uses ideas and quotes taken from other media (like "You're tearing me apart") with little context. He has a surprising amount of money that he seems to have obtained for doing absolutely nothing. And, according to The Disaster Artist, he's egotistical enough to want to own his own personal planet, he's prone to Patriotic Fervor, he shamelessly apes the people close to him, he acts pettily towards those he dislikes, and his work on The Room has been alleged to be a giant scheme for him to be able to kiss a girl. Really, he's the kind of person you'd expect Chris to grow up to be, if he was indiscriminately foreign and had a life of his own.

• Now now, let's not be unfair to Wiseau.

Tommy Wiseau has Schizotypal Personality Disorder

This Troper, personally having a family member with the illness, believes it's very plausible. After all, more evidence of this is given in The Disaster Artist, as Tommy is said to take a lot of prescription medications and tends to have very strange beliefs and ideas.

The symptoms are as follows, with examples of fitting behavior from The Disaster Artist:

• Being a loner and lacking close friends outside of the immediate family (Greg Sestero is pretty much the only friend he has)
• Incorrect interpretation of events, including feeling that external events have personal meaning (how he treats the cast and crew of The Room reflects this in many ways)
• Peculiar, eccentric or unusual thinking, beliefs or behavior (thinks he is a vampire, among other things)
• Dressing in peculiar ways (Greg points this out in the very first chapter of The Disaster Artist)
• Belief in special powers, such as telepathy (back to the vampire thing...)
• Suspicious or paranoid ideas, hypersensitivity, and constant doubts about the loyalty and fidelity of others (just look at the whole plot of The Room)
• Flat emotions, or limited or inappropriate emotional responses (laughs at inappropriate times, being pulled aside once or twice for it. Can't grasp why people think his emotions are out of line.)

More or less, he could be easily classified as having this disorder. In a lot of ways, it would make sense as to why he is the way he is. It's not a disorder that you can treat very well, either...

Tommy Wiseau's accent is fake,

When Tommy Wiseau decided to embark on a film career, he realized he needed some kind of personal brand. He thought about how people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone are known for the way they talk, and how people love Funny Foreigner charaters, so he decided he was going to give himself an iconic accent. Unfortunately, Wiseau sucks at impersonations, which is why the accent is impossible to place.

Tommy Wiseau is D. B. Cooper.

This strip from XKCD goes into the details, but the fate of famed vanishing plane hijacker D. B. Cooper dovetails nicely into the origin of Wiseau. Makes as much sense as vampirism.

• If this is true, and the police sketches of Cooper are accurate, then the 30 years between 1971 and 2003 were not kind to that man...
  • D. B. Cooper would have likely (the descriptions peg him as mid-forties in '71) been in his seventies in 2003. If he's Wiseau, he's actually aged pretty well.
• I saw Tommy at a Q&A at the Musicbox Theater in Chicago on 8/20/14. One guy asked him if he was D. B. Cooper. He denied it.
  • Of course, that's exactly what the real D. B. Cooper would say
• For what it's worth, Cracked supports this theory too, not so much cause they think it's true, but because they think someone will think it's true.

Tommy Wiseau is from Earth's distant future

• Tommy Wiseau comes from a time when the Earth is at peace, and no one wants for anything. It's a bit like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, except the prosperity wasn't created by a band, but a movie. A movie called The Room, which was full of Big Important Messages about things like friendship, love, and betrayal. The movie was so sublimely nuanced and its message so supremely crafted that it united all the peoples of the Earth. Next to nothing is known of the film's creator in the future, except that he lived in the 21st Century. Then, whether by accident or on purpose, a young man named Tommy Wiseau finds himself transported to the late 20th Century. He speaks perfect English, it's just a form of English as different from what we speak as Shakespeare's is to us. This would explain his incomprehensible accent and manner of speech, he's accustomed to different grammar rules, as well as words whose meanings have changed over the centuries. Realizing he was in a pre-Room society, and having a bit of an overinflated ego, he decides that he's in a Stable Time Loop, and he must be the genius who creates the Greatest Movie of All Time. He sets out to do so, using a small fortune he'd raised selling some of the advanced technology he had on him at the time, or using his knowledge of the future to make some shrewd business investments. Unfortunately, he either never saw The Room, or he saw it when he was young, and only has a vague idea of how the movie went. His final result fell somewhat short of The Greatest Movie Of All Time, but his ego won't let him see that, and he keeps waiting for the day he becomes the savior of the world.
  • As backup for the "shrewd business investments," Wiseau has stated that he always knows when something is about to become marketable. Advanced foreknowledge, perhaps?
  • Alternately, The Room as we know it is the film that will bring about the new golden age, but present day people really just aren't ready to fully understand its sublime genius.
  • Or the creator of the world-changing The Room got his inspiration after attending a showing of this movie, meaning Wiseau is indirectly responsible for its eventual creation.

Tommy Wiseau has suffered brain damage from a car accident.

• In The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero relays a story about how Tommy Wiseau was nearly killed in a car accident before they met. Wiseau told him that he had been hospitalized for about two weeks after another motorist ran a red light and crashed into him. It's possible that Wiseau suffered moderate to severe brain trauma, which would account for some of his various quirks and difficulties: his poor memory (being unable to memorize his lines and needing constant prompts, despite having written the script), lack of coordination (taking hours to perform simple stage direction), slurring, strange syntax and language comprehension, mood swings, bizarre tastes in clothing and other aesthetics, and partial memory loss (his inconsistent stories about his youth and background may betray his inability to recall certain elements). If I remember correctly, this traumatic car accident was what spurred Wiseau on to reinvent himself and pursue his acting dreams - perhaps his new lease on life was also influenced by his brain operating differently in regards to how he perceived himself and the world around him.
  • IIRC, The Disaster Artist says that he was in two near-fatal car accidents in his life, and in one the car landed upside-down in a fountain. Brain damage from a lack of oxygen sounds very plausible.

Tommy Wiseau has Asperger Syndrome

• Throughout The Disaster Artist, Tommy frequently reacts to people as if he fails to understand the basic idea of empathy. Between his rude reaction to the girls who flirt with him and Greg at dinner to his abusive relationship with his cast, he never really seems to exercise any social grace or understanding. He likely isn't a sociopath, however, as his script does seem to imply that he has a basic understanding of what emotion is, and he is capable of having friendships, as is evidenced by his relationship with Greg and the other "producers" (seeing as they were deceased by that point) of The Room, Chloe and Drew. He isn't cruel so much as he is socially awkward, and he doesn't understand that certain things go against social grace, like using the memory of Greg being threatened by him as inspiration for him to act a scene convincingly. Overall, a lot of his interactions seem normal for someone with Aspergers, and his hobbies only seem to help the diagnosis. He has a very strong affinity for movies and bodybuilding, leading him to dedicate nearly all of his time to those activities, even when it isn't appropriate. His sleep patterns, as well, are extremely abnormal, as he goes to bed very late and rarely gets much sleep. He also views himself as a vampire which, as Greg says, is essentially an excuse for him to put up walls against society. Which seems to fit with his personality: he is a very guarded person, yet he tries to open up. Even his weird accent could be explained this way. People with Aspergers oftentimes speak in the same way that they originally heard something being said, which would explain why he still has an obscure accent despite having lived in America for at least a quarter of a century. Many of the characteristics of speech attributed to someone with Aspergers can also be attributed to him, such as oddities in inflection, odd phrases that only mean things to him ("mickey mouse stuff," etc.), and tangential tendencies. All in all, he almost seems like a textbook definition for Aspergers Syndrome.
  • Tommny does have some odd turns of phrase, like telling Greg Sestero he has "doughnut" hair, but the Mickey Mouse one does make a kind of sense. I figured it was a reference to the rather antiquated phrase "Mickey Mouse Operation," which refers to something that is amateurish, small-time.

Tommy Wiseau is a Time Lord

Specifically, he's a Valeyard created from the darkest sides of the Time Lord whose other incarnations include The Nostalgia Critic and the Angry Video Game Nerd.

Tommy Wiseau is proxy for The Slender Man

In The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero mentions that on his first visit to Tommy's condo, he sees an abandoned car coated in several layers of dust. In the dust, someone's drawn the Zodiac Killer's symbol. Or that's what Greg thinks; he's interpreting the symbol from the wrong angle. It's the Operator Symbol.

Slendy's been using Wiseau for his own dark purposes for decades— maybe even centuries. He provides Tommy with everything he needs to live and then some, but at a terrible cost: Wiseau's very soul and mind are forfeit to inscrutable and terrifying forces.

Other Actors

Greg Sestero (Mark's actor) had no idea that he was in a movie until the end.

Think about it. His "acting" sounded like he had no idea what was going on. Like when Lisa called him again and why he didn't get that Lisa wanted to have sex with him.

• I actually didn't think he was that bad an actor. It's just that Mark is written to have no personality.
• Greg has admitted to mailing in his whole performance, mostly because he didn't think the movie would ever see the light of day. So it's not so much that he didn't know he was in a movie, more that he didn't care.

Chris R's actor, Dan Janjigian, was an actual drug dealer.

Denny's actor seems pretty surprised by Chris R's appearance on set, and Chris himself seems pretty intent on getting Denny's FUCKING MONEY! After Wiseau figured it out and took him to the authorities, Denny probably made the drug deal story up on the spot because they didn't want to lose precious film. Just a possible justification for the poorly written scene.

• Jossed. He played a role in the movie Irangeles. Granted, he could be a drug dealer that moonlights as an actor in shitty movies.
• According to The Disaster Artist he is, among other things, a motivational speaker for the Armenian-American community of Los angeles. So either he's not a drug dealer, is extremely good at hiding it, or is a Villain with Good Publicity.

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Johnny

Johnny is the reason why harsh topics like breast cancer and drug money are dropped after they are mentioned.

Ideally because his presence indicates that there should be no need for something as bad as say, owing some guy who tried to kill you for money. Only when Johnny died will those bad things come back at full force, thus reinforcing the Downer Ending.

Johnny's weirdness is the key to his success at the bank.

His banking skills are decent enough, and they get customers purely because they want to see this fascinating weirdo. This also explains why he never gets promoted, that's all well and good at his current level but his boss wouldn't want him to have any more control.

Alternatively Johnny is kept at the bank because he sounds foreign.

It's not an uncommon practice to keep a white person around in a Japanese business just to look foreign. Either the bank is a Japanese company with primarily Japanese employees and they let Johnny stay there to be the Token White, or Johnny poses as a foreign investor at business deals. That's why no one can pin his accent. He intentionally makes it vague so he can pose as any ethnicity.

Johnny is mentally handicapped and Lisa is his caretaker.

Johnny is related to a wealthy banker who pays for his home, wardrobe, and a full-time caretaker, Lisa. Johnny thinks that he works at the bank because he goes there several times a week to see his relative, who puts him into an empty office and gives him random papers to shuffle around. Johnny gets so far into the delusion that he's convinced that he's earned a "promotion", which is why he's upset when he believes he was passed over. Johnny actually does go upstairs to take a "nap", and his sex scenes with Lisa are dreams, which explain why he's always wrong about how sex works. People only call him "Johnny", never "John" or "Jonathan", as though he's a child.

The lady at the flower shop treats Johnny the way she does because he actually is a regular customer but doesn't know she's ripping him off. She always has a bundle of day-old flowers that some customer forgot to pick up or pay for ready to hand off to Johnny.

Claudette knows that Lisa is woefully underqualified for her job as caretaker, but she doesn't have any qualifications or certification that would allow her to get a job anywhere else. "Honey, you can't take care of yourself," she says. Lisa got that job by seducing Johnny's rich relative.

Denny is an actor, paid off to act as a friend to Johnny. Lisa doesn't like him, but keeps him around because she gets paid to "like" him as well. He doesn't have to pay rent and he gets money for college by humoring the rich eccentric and keeping Johnny entertained. His moment with Chris R. was orchestrated by him, Mark and Lisa to insert some drama into their lives and to deepen the Masquerade.

The same goes with the people at the birthday party at the end. They were all (apart from the "main characters") extras, paid off to act as friends to keep Johnny happy.

In short, everybody in the movie is in on Johnny's disability and either humors him, takes advantage of him or is a paid off extra.

• That is the saddest thing I've heard all day.
• Mark is Lisa's boyfriend/husband, which Johnny ignores in order to keep up the pretense that she's his "future wife." Mark takes Johnny out to play football because he feels sorry for Johnny and so he's not inside all day. Because of this, Johnny thinks Mark is his best friend. The whole supposed betrayal was Johnny finding it harder and harder to pretend that Lisa and Mark aren't lovers. Mark blew up at Johnny at his birthday party because he was fed up with Johnny's obvious crush on Lisa.
  • Adding to this guess, Johnny's suicide was all just a dream. Johnny's uncle probably wouldn't allow his mentally ill nephew to have access to a fire arm. The tantrum probably really happened, but he went to sleep afterwards and imagined himself committing suicide and everyone's subsequent reactions.
  • If the Chris-R incident was staged, why do Lisa and Claudette tear into Denny about it even when Johnny isn’t there?
    • They didn't know when he'd come back, and they had to make it look good.

Johnny is a Reality Warper who is losing his powers.

At the beginning he is a prosperous man with a well-paying job, a beautiful future wife with whom he has had a seven year relationship with (yet she looks 18), many friends, and is generally adored by everyone. This is because he can warp reality to his specifications, though it is limited mostly to situations and personalities. Then his ability starts fading: he loses out on his promotion and his future wife realizes she doesn't love him (and never has, only thought she did because of said reality warping) attempts to exert free will by seducing his best friend who is also exerting his free will. As Johnny desperately tries to fix everything while his powers continue to fade (causing many of the plot holes, inconsistencies, and dropped subplots), Reality Ensues more often: breast cancer, troubles with a drug dealer, and more. Seeing Mark and Lisa together at the party proved to him that his powers were soon going to disappear completely (until then, they had at least kept the affair somewhat discreet) and unable to handle it, he takes his life. The oddness of the characters afterwards is the residual reality warping still affecting them (until reality finally fixes itself).

Johnny kept a pistol in a box labeled "In Case of Betrayal, Open Box."

If you look closely at Johnny's gun, it's not the same model as Chris-R's gun. Johnny knew that his life may someday go to pot so he bought a gun as a contingency plan.

That, or it was meant to be the same gun as Chris-R's and Tommy Wiseau is incompetent at keeping continuity. Either explanation is equally plausible.

Johnny's ideas for the bank aren't as great as he thought they were.

Johnny has a very weak grasp of how banking works. The ideas he gave the bank manager was stuff like "I think it would be a good idea if the bank gave people money when they asked for it. They could pay us back later, and give us a little extra so we make money." The next day, he spotted the loan department for the first time, asked what they did there, and said to himself "Wow! They already put my ideas into practice, hah?"

Johnny works at a bank, but he's not a banker.

Johnny's secretly a low-level janitor or similar at the bank. That's why he's so vague about everything going on at the bank. The "upcoming promotion" and his "ideas" for the bank were all a lie. Alternately, he was hoping to get promoted to head custodian, and his money-saving ideas were stuff like buying off-brand floor cleaner. It also explains why nobody at the bank seems to mind his disheveled appearance. When he gets to work, he takes off his wrinkly suit, puts on a jumpsuit, and gets to mopping. He can't tell Mark about the "new client" because he knows nothing about the client, he just heard people talking about it at the bank. His constant hangdog expression is because he's been living beyond his means for years, and the bill collectors have been hounding him for a while now. He didn't want to give money to Claudette's friend not only because he doesn't know her, but because he's already massively in debt. He'd been considering suicide for months now, and being betrayed was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Johnny is an alien.

He lacks social skills. He seems to be screwing Lisa's navel, not her vagina. He couldn't cash an "out of town check" meant he had something of value, but it wasn't a check - it was gold bars or something. He's "tired of this world" means that his suicide will return him to his virtual reality station where he's controlling the earth human body.

Johnny's full name is Johnny Truant.

The mental trauma he endured while compiling Zampano's notes completely warped him, so he now speaks and acts with the same fractured, nonsensical mindset as the layout of the book. His seemingly inexplicable actions are a result of living in constant fear of the Minotaur, and the various subplots are dropped like hot rocks around him because he is too focused on it to worry about what few real friends he has left. He hasn't stopped having lots of off-putting sex, though.

Johnny is from the future.

Let's stop and think about this for a minute, shall we? Johnny is actually from the future trying to make sure the timeline stays in the balance. He has actually told a number of people (specifically the main characters), and they believe him. When he calls Lisa his future wife, he doesn't mean fiancée, he means she's LITERALLY his future wife, and they need to keep this in order for the future to remain in balance. However, she wants to rebel somewhat, and starts having an affair with Mark, who decides to go along with it. Ultimately, Johnny cannot take the pressure, and kills himself. Them crying is not them mourning a dear friend, it's them realizing what they have done, and will unleash onto the timeline....also, in the future, breeding is through the belly button.

Johnny is (or believes he is) being possessed by Great Red Dragon

Except he's just way more sociable than Francis Dolarhyde. Near the end of the film, Johnny smashes a mirror.

Johnny faked his death at the end.

The "gun" used by Johnny to "kill himself" is an airsoft replica of the Beretta 92FS Inox - the film makes no effort to hide this fact from us^note aside from removing the orange tip. Maybe he and the undercover narcotics officer Mark decided to fake Johnny's death to get back at Lisa. Mark pulled strings in the police department to get realistic first-response and forensics guys to respond to the "suicide". Their hilariously bitchy fight in front of Lisa was simple misdirection.

Johnny paid off Chris-R.

Every indication is that Johnny has no problem throwing money around; paying for Denny's tuition, buying Lisa expensive presents, etc. When he dragged Chris-R off the roof, he realized that the quickest way to get rid of him would be to give him his FUCKING MONEY. This would explain how he and Mark are back on the roof in minutes, with vague explanations like "it's clear." Johnny didn't want Lisa to know that he'd given an unspecified amount of money to a drug dealer (especially if he did something real dumb like write him a check), so he lamely claimed that they "took him to jail."

• This may have been Denny's plan from the start, which is why he was hanging out by himself on a rooftop that Johnny is known to frequent. It's also why he told Chris-R that the money is "on the way," he had planned on getting Johnny alone and hitting him up for cash. If nothing else, he could let Chris-R mug Johnny.

Other Characters

Mike and Michelle have a food fetish.

The chocolate blow job scene, and at Johnny's party they are sexually feeding each other cake.

Mark is a Magnificent Bastard Depraved Bisexual with No Fourth Wall.

• Mark is aware he's in a movie, commenting on the soundtrack when Lisa seduces him. Others seem to be aware of it too, but only he takes advantage of it. By maintaining a "sympathetic" facade for most of the film, he can do almost whatever he wants within the context of the film, including vanishing from a frolic in the park with Johnny to go try and get it on with Lisa, then returning an hour later wearing different clothes.
  • Sort of a cinematic version of lucid dreaming.
  • The park to apartment to park teleportation thing seems to be the result of bad editing. After Mark leaves, Lisa says that the guests will be arriving soon, even though Johnny's birthday party isn't until the next day. That scene was probably going to be later in the movie originally.
• When he, Johnny, and Pete are all talking and Lisa shows up with Denny, Mark gives Denny one of the most brutal eye-rapings ever, mirroring the one Denny gave Lisa at the beginning. It's not hard to imagine that Mark's planning on taking Johnny's place as Lisa's future husband, with Denny as a little bit on the side.
• We see him doing drugs at least once, and he was probably high far more often, and he was willing to throw a friend off a building while doing so. Note that they never said what happened to Chris-R, just that "it's clear", and that the last time we see him Mark has a gun to his head. Clearly, Mark took Chris-R down into the basement and blew his brains out, possibly because Chris-R was moving in on his territory, Denny.
• By the end of the film, Mark's the boyfriend of the defacto owner of a building in San Francisco, has a monopoly on the local drug trade, has a man child sex slave, and the one man who stood in his way is now dead. Unfortunately, the party-goers all know that Mark was sleeping with Lisa, and the gun Johnny killed himself with has Mark's fingerprints on it...
  • Yes, but Johnny had his hands on the gun too. Plus, you're forgetting gun residue - Johnny would have it all over him and Mark wouldn't.

Denny is prostituting himself to pay for college.

He already shows signs of being at least a bisexual (See his eagerness to join Johnny and Lisa and his disappointment when he's unable to). His whole exchange with Chris R is what you'd expect between a Prostitute and his/her Pimp (He calls him "Baby.") He only says that he bought drugs off of him as a cover story as it was the scenario least likely to freak them out. After taking Chris R to jail, Johnny then figured out the truth and decided to pay for his tuition so he wouldn't prostitute himself anymore.

• I don't think Chris-R called him "baby" at any point. It's just he was sometimes a bit hard to understand due to all that screaming.
  • In the alternate take of the scene, Chris-R does call him "Danny boy," which sounds like a weird term of endearment.

Claudette has Alzheimer's.

She seems to always forget that Lisa fell out of love with Johnny, so much so that he is always taken by surprise whenever Lisa tells her so; this would also explain why Lisa doesn't seem exasperated every time she has to tell her the same thing over again. Her breast cancer is never mentioned again either because she forgot about it, or perhaps sometime in the past she was misdiagnosed with it and it became a recurring memory. After the fight at Johnny's birthday party, Claudette goes upstairs and calmly talks to Lisa as if nothing serious has happened.

Claudette is Mary Worth.

Do I even need to explain further?

Helping engaged women cheat on their fiancés is a hobby of Mark's.

Notice the best man in this video: Coincidence?

Claudette is fully aware that Lisa is a lying, conniving bitch.

This completely explains her complete nonchalance when Lisa says "He got drunk last night and hit me." Her response of "Johnny doesn't drink!" actually implies she knows that Lisa's lying, and instead is defending Johnny.

• Or Claudette has no problem with her daughter's actions (being that she's a lying, conniving bitch herself), and is trying to subtly point out to Lisa that she needs to make her lies more convincing.

Everyone in the movie is just bilking Johnny for money and gifts.

Mark, Lisa, Claudette, et al, have all seen how generous Johnny is, and are merely pretending to like him so that he'll buy them stuff. Note that Claudette is angry with Johnny for not giving her friend money to buy a house. The whole movie is a result of Mark and Lisa starting to get tired of pretending to like him. Denny isn't really a socially awkward Manchild, he just acts like one because it makes Johnny feel like he's a father figure. Note during the Chris R. scene, he seems to break character. For one moment, he goes from whining and crying to screaming "You're not my fucking mother!" at Claudette, then goes back to the sniveling. In his frustration, he accidentally let them see his real personality. Denny's extreme reaction to Johnny's suicide is because he realized that he's lost his gravy train.

Lisa was a late-life child.

Lisa's in her 20's and her mother's in what - her 60's? Lisa's mother has to have been in her 40's when she got pregnant with Lisa.

• IIRC, Claudette says something suggesting that Lisa's father wasn't her first husband, so it sounds likely.

Chris-R is a Troubleshooter.

He's come back in time from Alpha Complex. He's still got his name and he's obviously RED clearance, he just doesn't use his housing sector or clone number on his name anymore.

Mark and Lisa were already having an affair before the movie began.

Note that when Lisa calls Mark at the beginning of the movie, before the affair supposedly begins, she calls him "baby," and he doesn't react at all. As though that's nothing new to him. Granted, he seems confused as to whether or not Lisa is trying to seduce him the first time they have sex on film, but he's that way every other time, too.

Lisa works at a retail place like Best Buy.

This is why she's in "The Computer Business" but is dependent on Johnny for cash and is home all day. She doesn't have a big "Silicon Valley" or Computer Programing job or anything....she just works part-time ^note about 20 hours a week, making minimum-wage ^note $5.15 per hour in 2003 at a computer/electronics-based retail outfit like Best Buy. Saying Lisa is in the "Computer Biz" is like saying someone working part-time at The Gap is in "The Fashion Biz" or McDonald's is the "Culinary Industry".

• She tells her mother at one point that she's expecting a client, but she might just have been trying to get rid of her. Or she's just a pathological liar, there's evidence for that as well.

Lisa is a Veela.

Everyone wants her. Everyone points out how beautiful she is.

• So, does the audience not see her as being particularly beautiful because whatever gives Veela that illusion doesn't carry over onto film?
• This may also explain why Mark is portrayed as blameless in the affair. He doesn't want to betray Johnny, but he's powerless against Lisa's advances.

Lisa is actually Nomi Malone.

After Johnny dies, Denny inherits all his money and Lisa is bankrupt, so she changes her name to Polly Anne Costello, gives herself a fake backstory and moves. But she's unable to support herself, (as Claudette keeps insisting) so she turns to prostitution, eventually ending up with a bad rap sheet. She changes her name again and decides to move to Vegas and the rest is history. They have a lot of similar traits (everyone finding them desirable, acting like a bitch, being a gold digger, blonde hair). Since The Room never really specifies when it takes place, it could easily take place before the Stardust went under.

Denny didn't really want sugar, butter, et al.

He knew Chris-R was gonna be coming by pretty soon for his FUCKING MONEY. He figured he'd root through Johnny's sock drawer for cash, thinking Lisa was out shopping with Claudette. When he found them at home, he came up with something on the spot to try and get rid of her for a couple minutes.

• Or, he wanted to make pot brownies.

Lisa and Johnny have been sexually molesting Denny for years.

Denny sees nothing wrong with jumping into bed with Lisa and Johnny because that's the way their relationship has always worked, and until recently they have had no problem with involving him in threesomes. Denny's line "I just like to watch you guys" strongly implies that he HAS, in fact, watched Lisa and Johnny have sex at some point in the past, and the completely unfazed way Lisa and Johnny react to his creepy behaviour suggests that it's just the way their relationship used to work. Perhaps Johnny recently got wind that child protection agencies were keeping an eye on him and thus made an agreement with Lisa to no longer involve Denny in their debauchery, and this is what's causing Denny to be so desperate for attention from Lisa - with their sudden withdrawal of sex, Denny feels unwanted and is afraid they'll stop paying his college tuition.

Claudette doesn't really have breast cancer

Late in the movie, Lisa tells Johnny she's pregnant, apparently just to fuck with him, and seems baffled when Michelle and Steven call her out on this. Why does this seem like acceptable behavior to her? Because she's seen her mother doing the same thing for years. That's why she blows off Claudette when she says she has breast cancer, Lisa assumes it's just another lie to "make things interesting."

Mark Never Shaved His Beard

Lisa ate it off his face. Just look at their first sex scene and picture that several times over.

Denny has a crush on Johnny, not Lisa. Johnny is aware of this and is using it as a Secret Test of Character for Denny.

Denny is sexually attracted to Johnny. Afraid of what Johnny would think of him, however, Denny pretends that it's Lisa he's crushing on. Johnny saw through this almost immediately and is perfectly happy to take his and Denny's relationship to the next level, but he wants Denny to overcome his fears and come out to him first. This reaches a head during the rooftop scene where Johnny and Denny discuss his "Crush" on Lisa. The reason Johnny seems oddly calm and serene about the whole thing is because he knows Denny's lying and is waiting for him to come clean. He never does and in the end, Denny was never able to tell Johnny how he felt and Johnny was never able to be with Denny the he wanted to be.

Mark is at least partially how Tommy Wiseau views Greg Sestero

Not sure which folder this should go in, but here goes: While I haven't read The Disaster Artist, it seems pretty obvious from the TV Tropes article that while they are close friends, Tommy is deeply jealous of Greg's (comparative) talent, success, charisma and looks. In the movie, Mark has sex with Johnny's "future wife" several times, but he's portrayed in a much more positive light than Lisa and seems to regret the whole affair after Johnny's suicide, suggesting that Tommy on the one hand feels that Greg has stolen something from him, but on the other hand respects him and sees him as a good friend. This also adds up with Tommy's paranoid personality.

• The Disaster Artist would seem to bear this out, as it's mentioned in there that Mark was heavily based off, and planned to be played by, Greg Sestero (or at least Wiseau's interpretation of him).

Johnny and Mark executed Chris R with his own gun and kept it instead of taking him to the cops.

How else would the police have let them keep what's undoubtedly an important piece of evidence?

• It also explains how they got back up to the roof so quickly. It's not like they could just drop Chris-R off at the police station and leave.

Michelle is an exhibitionist who likes living vicariously

Why else would she decide to have sex with her boyfriend in Johnny and Lisa's living room? She was hoping she'd get caught. Considering the way her and Mike were feeding each other at Johnny's party, she might have dragged him into the bedroom or started dry humping him in front of everyone if Johnny and Mark hadn't started fighting. This is why she seems to flip-flop on her stance regarding Lisa's affair. On the one hand, she knows it's wrong, but on the other, she can't help but get excited hearing about her friend's indiscretion. Maybe she's even hoping to walk in on the two of them. She only starts telling Lisa to knock it off when Lisa goes off the deep end and does things like lie about being pregnant.

Mark is an undercover narcotics officer

This is actually semi-canon, as it was the backstory Greg Sestero created for the character. It does explain quite a bit, like how Mark is sure the situation with Chris-R is "clear" after being gone for only a few minutes. Either Chris-R is an informant, and Mark let him off so that Chris-R will keep snitching, or he called in a couple nearby uniforms to arrest him. Or why he has to sneak up to the roof to smoke pot. Or why he tells Lisa he's "busy" while sitting in a car, he's on a stakeout.

Denny is a cat

Explained here. The reason Lisa and Johnny let Denny in and then leave him alone to go have sex is because that's normal with a cat. They're amused and unsurprised when he tries to butt in when they're in bed together because cats are particularly likely to want attention when you're trying to have a private moment, but it's only a mild annoyance when a cat does that. When he randomly shows up uninvited for an extremely brief visit, sits on the floor for no reason, wants to kiss his friend's "future wife", etc., it's all normal behavior for a cat. Moreover, the reason he hangs out in high places so much? Bingo. Because he's a cat. And the reason he won't admit what kind of drugs he's been taking? He thinks he's people and doesn't want to admit to his human friends that he's been doing catnip.

Based on the general vibe of his behavior and relationship with Johnny, he's probably a stray that Johnny started taking care of. The fact Tommy explained that Denny is "ed, a little bit" doesn't necessarily conflict with this theory; a lot of cat owners think theirs is particularly dim, especially if they're the needy, clingy type that Denny seems to be. Even a talking cat who says the sort of stupid shit Denny says probably wouldn't win any prizes for intelligence.

• This theory would mean that Chris-R was brandishing a gun, screaming, and demanding money from a cat.
  • The guy is a drug dealer. Maybe he likes to sample his wares.

Plot

The sex scenes are POV shots.

Denny: I just like to watch you guys.

• This is both the funniest and creepiest WMG I think I've ever seen.
• Also explains why Denny is so open and confident that Lisa will kiss him: He knew about her affair with Mark, and figured she'd be just as willing with him and/or was trying to drop sadistic hints that her secret was blown.
  • If this is the case, then perhaps Denny's lust for Lisa is just a cover story, and there's a reason the scenes focus so much on Tommy Wiseau's wrinkly, pulsating buttox.
  • Even the RiffTrax for this movie agrees. Just before the first Mark/Lisa sex scene, they crack a joke that Denny is videotaping the whole thing from a window.
  • The Room: The Game seems to support this as well, as during the last part of the game, it's possible to find Denny's secret camera room, in which he's watching all parts of the hotel.
  • This would explain a plot hole Obscurus Lupa pointed out in her review, namely why Denny's crying before seeing Johnny's corpse. He saw the suicide happen. Lisa and Mark just beat him to the bedroom.
    • As for why Denny didn't intervene earlier, well, either he was in too much shock to do anything but stare, seeing how his dream girl proved herself a two-timer and his father figure is having a breakdown, or...

ALL of the movie consists of POV shots taken from cameras Denny's installed (with some exceptions) because he's a secret agent.

Denny is an Older Than They Look FBI agent or policemen investigating Johnny, who is the prime suspect in an embezzlement scheme from his bank. Denny poses as a neighbor kid to gain Johnny and Lisa's trust and eventually plants cameras in their home and outside their home to try to find evidence of Johnny's role in the embezzlement scheme. Exceptions are the flower shop scene (which could just be their own security cameras) and some in the park (which could be an innocent bystander's camera confiscated or another agent posing as such). The scene with Chris-R was set up by Denny and another agent to throw them off and think they were not being spied on.

• Now, this scenario has three possible branches (because I have too much time on my hands):
  • No one else is in on it. Denny is working...not alone, per se, he'd have backup of course, but no one else in the movie but Chris-R is involved.
  • Mark is also an agent. Like Denny, he befriends Johnny and Lisa to try to find out their plans. Being seduced by Lisa was not part of the plan, but Mark went with it in hopes she'd be more talkative post coital. If it is possible she did know something of it, or even took part in it, she'd might blab to Mark, using it as an idea for how to get rid of Johnny (which incidentally does prove her intent to commit a crime. The police were already on their way to arrest Johnny and Lisa after the party when Lisa left him and Johnny offed himself. What we didn't see right after the movie was Mark and Denny arresting Lisa for her role in the embezzlement scheme, especially since they couldn't prosecute Johnny. Hence why he shoved her away and said he didn't love her. He could have handled that with a bit more tact, but whatever.
  • Lisa becomes The Mole. Some time after Denny installs the cameras, he sees her first conversation with Claudette and correctly identifies Lisa as the weakest link. He approaches Lisa off camera with their suspicions and offers her a deal that if she helps them, she can escape prosecution and they'd help her go into Witness Protection. Whether she genuinely didn't know Johnny was involved in a crime, did but put her own skin first, or didn't but saw it as a good excuse to break it off with Johnny, she agrees. One of the pieces of information she uncovers is that Mark's in on it too, so she pulls a Dirty Harriet and seduces Mark to get him to give up information about it, especially since he's getting cocky now that he's getting money and the girl (so he thinks) and is already thinking of ways to frame Johnny for the whole thing and get off scot free. With that information, they have enough to prosecute. Lisa cried partly cause she didn't excatly want Johnny's death on her hands, and as a ploy to keep Mark there long enough for Denny to arrive, and what happened after the fade to black was Mark's arrest. Lisa (and probably Claudette) enter Witness Protection after that.

Every character in The Room has a two-minute memory span.

• The bizarre repition of certain details is not just because the film thinks Viewers Are Goldfish, but because the characters literally can't remember them otherwise. This is why Johnny and friends constantly talk about how beautiful Lisa is, Johnny and Lisa being engaged, how Mark is Johnny's best friend, etc.—they don't realize they've always been talking about it. This also explains why Mark is shocked each of the several times Lisa cheats with him, and why subplots like Chris R and Claudette's cancer just vanish out of nowhere; as these characters forget anything they don't write down.
  • So the whole building is for people like Leonard in Memento?

Claudette is so frustrated with everyone because she's the Only Sane Man.

• Related to the above: Lisa's mother knows she's Surrounded by Idiots and hates it. As for why she constantly gushes about Johnny, she's either just trolling Lisa for a reaction (the same reason she dropped that she has breast cancer out of nowhere) or hates her daughter so much she's secretly glad that she's in a toxic relationship.

Johnny was actually murdered by Denny.

And the whole movie is a story that Denny made up on the spot to cover the truth, but he got really carried away with it.

• And he's acting it out while he makes it up. This explains Johnny's bizarre dialog and accent; it's Denny's rather over-the-top impersonation of how a French guy talks, and he's not doing it very well.
• It also explains why everyone in the movie is constantly going on about how beautiful Lisa is. Denny was a Stalker with a Crush, and assumed that everyone thought she was as beautiful as he did. This is why he killed Johnny, to Murder the Hypotenuse.

Johnny is suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, and much of The Room takes place in his imagination.

Johnny suffers from crippling low self-esteem, and he makes up for what he thinks is his "unloveableness" by playing Santa Claus with his wealth. But he really doesn't feel equal to their love or friendship, because he "knows" deep inside he isn't worthy of it. Images of how they talk about him when he's not there constantly play in his mind.

• Lisa is actually completely faithful to Johnny. But since Johnny loves a woman who (he feels) is "too beautiful" for him, Johnny is obsessed with the idea that she must be cheating on him. (He also feels that everyone must think she's as hot as he does, hence every characters' remarking conspicuously on her beauty.)
• Lisa's mother is always cordial to Johnny. But Johnny believes that she must be faking it – that she must see him as a meal ticket for her daughter. Why else would a classy woman like her approve of him? (And why else would an "incredibly beautiful" woman like Lisa stay with him anyway?)
• Johnny trusts Mark as his best (read: only) friend, but he also resents him—for being so handsome and socially adept, things Johnny wishes he were.
• Peter isn't Johnny's friend who's a psychologist, he is actually Johnny's psychologist. Johnny thinks of him as a friend because it's too threatening to imagine he's the kind of person who needs psychological help.
• Denny isn't "slightly ed," Johnny is. Johnny's in denial about his problem and is projecting some of them onto Denny. Denny is actually a fairly crafty teen boy who's taking advantage of the slightly-slow (but wealthy) weird guy. He plays innocent because Johnny relates to that, and Johnny is bankrolling his tuition.

Many confusing parts of the plot make much more sense this way. For instance:

• Lisa and Mark's affair looks as bizarre as it does because it's all in Johnny's head:
  • Lisa hasn't fallen out of love with Johnny...he has fallen out of love with her. In other words...
  • Johnny is projecting his own (lack of) feelings onto Lisa to avoid the guilt he feels for not loving a woman he's promised to marry. He wants to believe she's cheating on him so he can end the relationship, guilt-free. However...
  • The only (adult) male who is ever around the apartment much is Johnny's best friend, Mark; so if Lisa is cheating, it can only be with Mark. But...
  • Johnny actually does trust Mark (as much as he's capable of trusting), so he has to see Mark as an innocent party. Therefore...
  • He imagines Lisa seducing an unwitting Mark. This is why Mark seems so surprised every time Lisa puts the moves on him...because it's just Johnny's fantasy as he imagines Lisa seducing Mark for the "first time," over and over again.

Other plot weirdness that this theory can explain are:

• Johnny's Make-Out Palace: Johnny likes to imagine his friends coming over to make out at his place...he likes thinking he's just that generous, and he...well...um...enjoys imagining what they do.
• The Football Scenes: Johnny thinks this is the way guys should behave, so he inserts the football-tossing into a lot of imagined conversations.
• A Wild Drug Dealer Suddenly Appears: The drug dealer subplot is Johnny's daydream. Johnny wants to feel like a hero, so he concocts a crisis he can help solve. Once it's "solved," it's never mentioned again.
• The Breast Cancer: Johnny resents Lisa's mother for what he imagines is her real attitude toward him, and her "breast cancer" line is just Johnny's wishful thinking.
• Denny's Creepiness: Denny actually does have the hots for Lisa, and takes advantage of his "innocent kid" persona to express it. He vaguely hopes that someday Johnny might be "generous" enough to offer to share even his girlfriend.
• Tape Recorders Don't Work That Way: Johnny wants to tape Lisa's calls, but he has no idea how. He clumsily imagines hooking up an old-style tape recorder—this is why it comes out of nowhere and never runs out of tape.
• Peter, Called Steven: Peter goes on vacation partway through the movie, and Johnny starts seeing another psychologist, Steven, in the interim. He clumsily "edits" Steven into his imagined scenes.
• Reefer Madness: Johnny doesn't really know how drugs work; he also resents Peter for "abandoning" him, so he imagines Mark getting high and arguing with, and almost killing, Peter.
• Baby Surprise: Lisa tells Johnny they're having a baby just before the party, as a birthday present. Johnny is outwardly happy, but inwardly panics—he can't possibly take care of a child! And now he'd be a real monster if he broke their engagement. Johnny fantasizes that she lied about the baby—this would relieve him of his responsibilities AND give him the excuse to break up with her. But inside, he knows it isn't true.
• Ballroom Blitz: Johnny has a panic attack that leads to him accusing Lisa and Mark of having an affair, causing a big scene at his own birthday party.
• Bathroom Betrayal: When Johnny has locked himself in the bathroom, Lisa is not talking to Mark on the phone, she's calling an ambulance and/or the police. Presented with this proof of her "betrayal," Johnny flips out. Lisa rather sensibly escapes from the apartment until help gets there—she has the baby to protect.
• The Denoument: Johnny then goes on his rampage, weakly imitating what he thinks a furious rampage must be. Then he imagines how everyone would react if he killed himself. Lisa, who has now betrayed him, must be humiliated and rejected; everyone else goes on about how much they miss him and what a good person he is. Johnny has what he wants: everyone loves him, Lisa is to blame for everything, and all his problems vanish. He lays on the floor, wishing he actually had a gun to do it; this is how the paramedics find him when they arrive.
  • I think for this to fully work, you would have to assume that the first confrontation during the birthday party is real, and the second is a fantasy. The first time starts with Mark asking Lisa who the baby's father is, though since this is before Johnny actually approaches them, that could just be what he imagines Mark's saying to Lisa. When Johnny and Mark do start arguing, Mark's side of it is vague things like "You don't know shit!" When Johnny catches them slow dancing however, Mark pretty much admits to having an affair with Lisa ("Maybe if you satisfied her she wouldn't have to come to me" or something to that effect). This does kinda work though, when you factor in the end of the first argument. Tommy's anger dissipates very quickly, and he leaves the room after asking Lisa to clean up. We never see what happens between then and the next fight. For all we know, Lisa followed Johnny outside and tearfully reminded Johnny that she loves him, and insisted she's not having an affair.

The plot of the film (sex scenes aside) is kids play-acting their interpretation of a "grown-up" movie.

• Johnny talks about his job in an extremely vague fashion, as if he is a young child trying to explain what his father does for a living.
• When Johnny and Mark apprehend Chris-R, they say that they're going to "take him to jail", which is a very simplistic view of the legal system. "Jail" might even be just "time-out".
• The swearing in the movie is very stilted and awkward, like preteens attempting to use curse words they have heard before, but are not quite sure how.
• Mike flatly states that he's "going to go make out" with Michelle, and Johnny abruptly asks Mark about his sex life. A child or preteen who has seen a movie or television show with sexual content or simply heard about sex from their peers may believe that adults talk about sex so openly and casually.
• Johnny's tantrum resembles a young child's, not an angry adult's.
• Even the sex scenes make a kind of sense. Children wouldn't be expected to know how sex works, which is why Johnny is doing it wrong.

Betty and Elizabeth aren't examples of breaking the One Steve Limit

Rather, they are actually the same people. Elizabeth's dozen guys included both Denny and Mark; when Mark found out through Johnny that Elizabeth was cheating, he beat her up so bad she ended up in a hospital in Guerrero Street.

Your love is what I need to set me free.

The Movie

The Room is, either deliberately or coincidentally, the Anti-Citizen Kane.

Many people have refered to The Room as the Citizen Kane of bad movies before, but I'm pretty sure it was only meant in the sense that it's the best of the worst. However, both films are very similar in some aspects, the main difference being that while Citizen Kane made these aspects work, The Room... didn't. Now, consider this:

• Both had one person as the director, producer, and lead actor.
• Both cast new actors who had never been in a movie before in leading roles.
• Both are on one end on a scale of quality, with Citizen Kane being the best and The Room being the worst.
• Both have a scene with the main character destroying their rooms after being left by their wife/future wife near the end.
• Both feature affairs in the plot, though this one might be pushing it a bit.
• Both Kane and Johnny are betrayed by their best friend in one way or another. Again, might be pushing it a bit.
• Both Kane and Johnny are dead by the end of the movie.
  • For bonus points, the scene at the end where Johnny destroys his apartment was meant as a deliberate Shout-Out to Citizen Kane.
  • Tommy Wiseau himself had a webshow, and his first episode was spent comparing Film/TheRoom to Film/CitizenKane. Which is about as close as we're going to get to calling this one confirmed.

The Room is Tommy Wiseau's Springtime for Hitler.

• The film's budget was $6 million. However, with the poor image quality, the use of only a few locations and little set construction, the apparent lack of continuity editing, the ill-fitting costumes, and a lead actor filling in as line producer and assistant to the director, is there any way $6 million could have gone into the production? Even with Tommy Wiseau's poor purchasing decisions vis-a-vis cameras and the rights to birthday songs ... $6 million?
• Tommy Wiseau will not even hint at where the $6 million came from. Not that it's anyone's business but his possibly-nefarious, possibly-vampiric investors', but still. That's awfully suspect.
• With his $6 million, Wiseau made a So Bad, It's Good / So Bad, It's Horrible movie that was sure to tank, especially with its extremely limited release, and which conveniently was way under budget. Once the movie failed and it was clear that none of his investors would be getting their fuckin' money! back, Wiseau would be free to leave the U.S. - with the rest of the budget - for Kuala Lampur! Or Mars. Wherever he's from.
  • You sir have effectively decribed the best plan I've heard in a while.
  • Furthermore, once the film tanked at the box office, Wiseau was able to repurchase the exclusive rights to the film from the investors for pennies on the dollar, leaving him free to profit from it by screening it at midnight and selling DVDs to fans of So Bad, It's Good.

The Room is a Sims movie.

Repetitive and irrelevant conversations, limited leisure activities, time spent in shops excessively brief, little-to-no motivations behind actions...because the unseen player is controlling all the sims in the room. Johnny's suicide was via a third party mod.

• That would explain Johnny's accent: his mother tongue is Simlish!

The Room really was supposed to be a dark comedy.

However, Wiseau's script supervisor, the above-mentioned Sandy Schklair, didn't see it that way. Either he didn't understand the comedy, understood it but didn't find it funny, or thought that the comedy got in the way of what he saw as a great story. Regardless, Schklair rewrote the script and instructed the actors to treat it as a drama, which Wiseau either begrudgingly allowed or didn't notice. However, Schklair did a real lousy job covering his tracks; he basically got rid of some scenes, added some new ones, and left the rest completely intact. This explains tons:

• Denny's creepy behavior was supposed to be a lot more obvious, but the really questionable stuff was cut out.
• Claudette's breast cancer was a subplot that was completely removed (not sure what jokes you could make out of breast cancer, but there you go).
  • Alternatively, like Chris-R, it was inserted in to add more drama, but then they forgot about it.
• We were supposed to be disturbed by Johnny's nonchalant "what a story, Mark!" That's the joke.
• Ditto for "anyway, how's your sex life?" and "I did not hit her, I DID NAHT! Oh hai Mark!"
• Mark's obliviousness to Lisa's advances was meant to be clearer, but since the actors were told to play it serious, that didn't come across.
• The endless amount of football scenes would have had even more examples, as an Overly Long Running Gag.
• "Oh hai!" was also a Running Gag.
• The huge number of overdubbed lines is a result of Schklair making post-production edits of lines he considered too funny.
• The drug dealer scene was clumsily thrown in to add some drama.

The Room is a sequel to Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.

• The two Johnnys are the exact same character—both of them are Marty Stus that have the respect of a lot of people and can cause Love at First Sight. His face got horribly scarred before The Room.
• Jane is Lisa. She catches herself between two men, both for whom her love is completely superficial, but she went a little further in Plumbers Don't Wear Ties due to being younger.
• The boss, Thresher, is Denny. He's a time traveler, and in both stories he is a sexually agressive, possibly mentally-disabled person that gets into something illegal.
• Claudette is the Straw Feminist second narrator. Just because.
• Lastly, Mark is the man with the upside down fucking chicken mask. Again, just because.

The Room is a sequel to 10 Things I Hate About You.

In Ten Things, Heath Ledger's character, Patrick, has long curly black hair and speaks with an accent - not nearly as weird as Johnny's, but he's still noted as having one. Sound familiar? Obviously, he didn't age well. Lisa is an older Kat.

The story (intentionally, or otherwise) is told from the perspective of an "unreliable narrator" with a serious mental disability.

The way that things play out makes very little sense, to a normal person. People come and go through Johnny's house for no explained reason; they wear clothes that make no sense for the occasion; their emotions and tone-of-voice don't match the situation, and so on. However, Johnny (and perhaps Tommy Wiseau) notice nothing out of the ordinary about any of this.

This is because the protagonist (and writer/director/star, perhaps) does not understand how people work, or maybe even how the world works. From his point of view, this is just the way things are: people randomly show up in certain places, and randomly leave; they change their clothes and tones of voice from time to time; and he constantly hears phrases like "That's me!" and "Oh hai Mark." Johnny/Tommy doesn't understand that people have reasons for doing these things. From his point of view, they just do them.

In addition to being laughably bad, this film might be an insight into the mind of a disabled person with no concept of cause and effect.

• Soooo...a thinner, less rage happy Chris Chan?

The film is actually about the monuments and buildings of San Fransisco.

All the shots of actors are actually the Establishing Shots, while the buildings and Golden Gate Bridge are the actual story. The actual story is incomprehensible to humans, and the human parts are incomprehensible to humans because it's just the way monuments view humans.

• This is the most plausible explanation for the movie I have yet seen.
  • A room is another character! It's a Character Title!

The Room is Ben & Arthur with straight people.

Ben & Arthur is a 2002 film written/produced/EXECUTIVE produced/directed by and starring Sam Mraovich that follows a gay couple who try to legally consummate their relationship while trying to dodge the evil machinations of the main protagonist's hyper-religious brother. Most comparisons between the two films tend to refer to their mutual incompetence and anviliciousness, but the two films have a surprising amount in common:

• Both films take place in one of the two largest cities of California (Los Angeles in Ben and Arthur, San Francisco in The Room), with the primary setting in each film being the apartment of its male lead.
• Both films have terrible leading actor-writer-directors, who are fond of showing off their bodies much more so than most audience members are fond of seeing them.
• Both films depict everyone bar the leading guy and one other male character (the eponymous Ben in Ben and Arthur, and Peter in The Room) as being evil bastards.
• A wedding is an important plot point in both films; in The Room the wedding never actually happens, while in Ben and Arthur the wedding (between two men) does technically happen, but isn't recognized by the state of California.
• Each film features a main character obtaining a pistol during a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, and the pistol in question is used to take someone's life at the end of the film.
• Both films have a Downer Ending, with the saintly protagonist meeting his untimely demise at the hands of a gun.

The Room is actually a high class piece of film, based on the standards of the Spoon World.

On the Spoon Planet, they prefer films where character motivations and development do not exist and drama is gotten out of the way quickly. The Room was a top-class award winning movie on their home world, and is considered one of the finest pieces of Spoon-made drama.

• A variation on this could be that the film tanked on Spoon Planet, but they knew that certain segments of the population of Earth really love So Bad, It's Good Ham and Cheese. So the imported it in the hopes of recouping their losses.

The Room is at least semi-autobiographical

The more I watch this movie, the more I feel that it was made in part to be a kind of public catharsis for Tommy Wiseau. It all smacks of someone who got hurt by someone they loved, and they're raging and storming about how unfair it all is. Note how Lisa decides to cheat on Johnny For the Evulz. Lisa's feeble attempts at justifying her actions are practically infantile, and everybody seems to take it for granted that Johnny is completely innocent. Nobody seems to blame Mark either. In fact, it seems the only reason he's in the movie is because Lisa needed to be sleeping with someone. Johnny, meanwhile, is presented as Marty Stu-like martyr, constantly thinking of everyone else around him, and ultimately Too Good for This Sinful Earth. The whole thing just comes off as a 90 minute exercise in Wish Fulfillment and a massive Take That! at whatever woman jilted Tommy Wiseau in his past.

Regarding the suicide at the end: it's said that teenagers often contemplate suicide as a form of revenge, as in "Won't everybody be sorry they were mean to me if I killed myself!" Tommy Wiseau, being an adult, is presumably smart/mature enough to understand the foolishness of that line of thinking, but it doesn't stop him from fantasizing about it, and therefore sticking it in his movie. Mark and Lisa's actions immediately after Johnny's death perfectly mirror this mindset.

The Room is a modern day AU fanfic of The Lord of the Rings.

Johnny is Wormtongue, Lisa is Éowyn, Mark is Faramir, Denny is Merry, and Claudette is Théoden.

The Room is a "loose" retelling of The Apartment

Both titles are similar in a way, plus the fact that the films take place in the the film title indicates (The Apartment takes place in Baxter's apartment while The Room takes place in the room of where ever the hell Johnny lives). Much like the character of Baxter, Johnny wants to get promoted at his job (It's mentioned that he didn't get promoted) so he uses his place for a co-worker to have an affair. That part of the film sadly goes nowhere, but it's no surprise that other subplots in the film go nowhere as well.

• But the Mike subplot makes sense that way : it explain why he's sneaked into Johnny's appartment to sleep with his girlfriend, and why he need to tell the embarassing story to Johnny.

The Room was set in the early to mid-90s.

Although Tommy Wiseau ostensibly wrote it in the late-90s to early 2000s, it still has many elements of the earlier part of the decade. The characters' overall looks (the hairstyles of Denny, Claudette, and Johnny himself, Lisa's thick eyebrows, the makeup, Claudette's outfits, Chris-R.'s generic drug dealer get-up, etc.), the Ikea-inspired sets (in particular Johnny and Lisa's living room and bedroom), the Cinemax-style love-scenes which are reminiscent of the likes of Red Shoe Diaries, the lack of any current cultural references, and of course the generic 90s style love songs/R&B classics like "I Will" and "Crazy". Also, it was set in San Francisco to appeal to fans of the popular sitcom, Full House, which was, you guessed it, set in San Francisco and which aired around this time frame. Even with the numerous rewrites and improvisations, the script ultimately never shifted away from the general time period.

• This would explain Lisa's vague talk of being in the "computer business." Back in the 90s, computers were still considered to be magical, unknowable machines (look at all the movies about hackers who could do literally anything with computers). Lisa might have quickly gotten fed up of trying to explain to people what she does for a living, but if she says "computers," people just nod and change the subject.

"The Room" is actually a fairly good European film that was given a horrible dub.

The Room is an imitation of Soap Operas.

• Constantly adds tons of extra subplots, many straight from soaps, that only follow the Rule of Drama.
• Tons of gratuitous sex.
• Mostly about the personal problems/relationships of rich people and those that associate with them.
• Mostly occurs indoors.
• American soaps are broadcast everywhere, including France and Poland. Wiseau may have even learned English from them.
• Scenes jump from conversation to conversation, usually between only two people.

Other

The Room is the fever dream of another Johnny.

Nny gets the flu, feels crappy and accidentally falls asleep. He has a dream about what his life would be like if he were a normal guy and not a crazy serial killer, but because he's sick and doesn't really understand normal people to begin with, all the conversations and events are extremely weird and stilted, his sick, delusional mind creating the many non-sequiturs in the dialogue and storyline. Johnny is now his idea of what sociable and friendly must be like, petting doggies and doing "nice" things for his friends.

• Denny/Danny is an aged up stand in for Squee, whom he is able to mentor and be a father figure for in the dream.
• The nonsensical football-toss scenes are what he imagines normal people must do for fun.
• The sex scenes are disturbing and nasty because that's what he thinks sex is like.
• His fever finally breaks in the infamous suicide scene as he starts to remember who he is again.

The "bank" Johnny works for is, or is affiliated with, the Bluth Company.

They already put his ideas into practice. Namely, his terrible chicken impressions.

Regarding the alien species at the ending of the game that Johnny is a member of

...They reproduce asexually. To do otherwise would require female members of the species.

• The pink Johnny was implied to be female.

How the film got its name....

Someone looked at the first page of Tommy's untitled script and said "Be sure to leave room for the title." Tommy's mind is so scrambled he thought they said "Be sure to have 'The Room' for the title"

• So you're saying he made up the 'happy place' explanation on the spot when asked.
  • Well he did Parody Retcon the film as a Black Comedy when he realised everybody on the planet was laughing at it, so we know he can be less than honest on occasion.
• Sorry, but jossed. According to this wiki's Trivia page, the title is a reference to the fact it started out as a one-room play.

Most of the characters have serious mental problems

As others on this page have speculated, Johnny (and possibly Wiseau) is mentally handicapped, and the film seems random and senseless because it is told from his point of view. But certain plot points regarding other characters still seem strange (disregarding theories where these things are simply taking place inside Johnny's head).

The reason: Johnny is not the only one with mental problems. Lisa is not "intellectually disabled" like Johnny, but she has a mood disorder, such as Borderline, Bipolar Disorder, Histrionic, etc. This is why, as her mother says, she "can't support herself;" her form of whatever disorder she has is so severe that even meds and therapy can't help her live a normal life. Her only hope of surviving outside a group home is marrying Johnny, living off a combination of Johnny's well-off family, disability checks from the government, and being Johnny's official paid caregiver (relatives of the disabled can sometimes get paid as official caregivers). Lisa's disorder is also the cause of her lies and nymphomania.

Denny, like Johnny, is mentally disabled, which is how they met (families with seriously disabled kids tend to socialize with other families in the same situation). Johnny and Denny's other "friends" may just be neighbors, or relatives, who are looking out for them. Mark might have a slight disorder too, which would explain why he's so slow to figure out what Lisa wants, why he lets himself be so easily seduced by his friend's wife, and why he blurts out nonsensical things like "Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!" Alternatively, Mark is simply high.

Does Claudette really have cancer? Either she really does, and just doesn't mention it often because there's no point, around people too disabled or deranged to comprehend it; otherwise, Claudette doesn't really have cancer, and lied because Lisa's mood disorder runs in the family.

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