The Disaster Artist and What It Means to Be Reborn
There's this scene in The Disaster Artist where Greg Sestero (Dave Franco) and Tommy Wiseau (James Franco) stand at the exact intersection where James Dean wrecked his Porsche 550 and died at the scene. Just a few moments ago, we saw them watching through his iconic star-making performance as Jim Stark in Nicholas Ray's electrifying and oft-disturbing analysis of generational disconnect Rebel Without a Cause - specifically his famous outburst to his parents at the police station. As Tommy screws up the line while quoting it at a pizza parlor, Greg mentions that he's always wanted to visit the exact spot where Dean died - and Tommy, always willing to start a new adventure at the drop of a pin, decides to go on an impromptu car trip. Greg protests, stating that Dean's crash site is about 200-300 miles away from San Francisco, but Tommy insists on taking the trip.
The odd thing is that James Dean didn't really become a famous actor until he died. At the point of his death, he only made three films as lead. The rest were movies he did as either a featured extra or as a bit player. So the fact that in the span of a year, he made these three movies - all varying in genre - is somewhat amazing. He was an actor destined for great things - and yet what if he wasn't? What if he was just another flash in the pan - another momentarily popular actor who had his brush with fame and couldn't find the project that could sustain his success? In a way, his death cemented what I like to call his "rebirth." If James Dean was just a working actor who was going to go into racing after finishing up his next project, his car accident gave him his rebirth. Dead was Dean the actor working to get by - who finally had his breakthrough year and was all thrown away by a college student in the middle of making a turn. Born was Dean the icon, Dean the bad boy, Dean the actor who was taken away from us too soon.
The idea that Tommy and Greg look up to Dean as an untouchable actor from a period in which works of art where constantly churned out by the hundreds is something I've seen from time to time, especially in nostalgic pieces. Nostalgia tends to make us see the things from the past as having a different quality - to use some of Don Draper's parlance, the "pain from an old wound" is so desirable that everybody that comes across accounts of it wants to experience it for themselves. However, they only get to experience the old wound in its watered-down form - in a form that doesn't match one-to-one what it was in the past. In essence, the memories of the collective conscience shape our understanding of how we approach looking at the works and achievements of an older time we were barely a part of or weren't part of at all. Greg and Tommy are too young - and that's taking into consideration Tommy being a baby boomer born in the mid-1950s - to really understand why James Dean has become a touchstone for '50s culture and Golden Age Hollywood. Even taking into account the original source - Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell's oft-hilarious-but-ultimately-heartfelt autobiography-cum-historical-document The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made - Tommy's experiences with Golden Age works (in particular, the works of Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, James Dean and Alfred Hitchcock) were long after his awakening moment in a dilapidated theater in Poznan showing 101 Dalmatians.
Greg and Tommy desire a time that they associate with. Greg, in a lot of ways, is still that kid so captivated with Macaulay Culkin's performance in Home Alone that he wrote his first attempt at a screenplay as a means to inject himself into that story. Tommy, in every way imaginable, is still both young Piotr trying desperately to escape the creeping realization that Poznan, his home, is is absolute nightmare and disillusioned Pierre utterly entranced with how alive New Orleans is. They have golden ages of their own - Tommy's golden age, in particular, ties into those few years in New Orleans and Chalmette where he first heard about Tennessee Williams, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Hitchcock - the formative backbone of '50s drama and suspense. He comes across as if he's discovered A Streetcar Named Desire for the first time in his life, both in his butchering of Stanley's infamous tantrum/him calling for Stella and in how he's structured The Room. And yet, since he's always trying to find a way to be young - in other words, to shield himself from the reality that he as both Piotr and Pierre, he wants to be as innocent as Greg. To him, his 1996 car accident is his rebirth - dead is his past, born is Tommy Wiseau the uninhibited actor. So of course he structures The Room like an episode of Friends, only instead of Ross getting grossed out over eating dessert mixed with a savory pie filling, we have Claudette bringing up her breast cancer diagnosis only to forget about it the next time she has a one-on-one with Lisa.
That's the fascinating thing about James Franco's The Disaster Artist: by making Greg's deliberately-paced story fit both the confines of an origin story and a three-act Hollywood script, they've managed to tap into a subtext that most people don't know are there. When most people analyze The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room and, by proxy, The Room, they tend to look at how Tommy is both staunchly adherent to Hollywood tradition and yet how disconnected a lot of his performance and plotting are. And yet, watching this with a really enthusiastic crowd of longtime fans of The Room, as I am, I can't help but to think that Franco, despite taking out everything I really wanted to see in the movie - Raphael Smadja's giggle tent, Tommy's 9/11 anniversary tribute/punishment, Dan Janjigian both quipping about Tommy blowing up Birns & Sawyer's soundstage when forced to reshoot Denny's confrontation with Chris-R and him chewing out Tommy for not comping his boots, the intense power play Tommy did with Don (the first guy who played Mark) and how he exactly enticed Greg to play the role while also stealing a dinner reservation, Greg's cameo as a casting agent (I actually want to see if he's improved since his soap opera days) - managed to get at the heart of the story better than anybody who's done a long-form analysis of the story. In essence, Franco has made a movie that encapsulates Greg's analysis as to why Tommy kept in the alley football/"me underwears" scene. The reason is that Franco, by becoming Tommy, has finally got to what Tommy is better than Patton Oswalt's comically shady Alfan Golenpaul or Doug Walker's straight-forward mockery of Tommy's mannerisms and Polish-cum-French-cum-Cajun-English-cum-really-tired-speech-therapist accent: that Tommy is always chasing youth. Tommy is trying to assert his own rebirth.
The Internet isn't too kind to the idea of a person's rebirth. If the person is shady in any way, they will find a way to peel back their proposed youth and discover the broken person that there were. The Internet tends to believe that the person desperately trying to assert their new being is trying to run away from something, often not realizing that the thing they're running away from has a very personal association with the person in question. Take for example one of my favorite examples of this in the whole world: Brianna Wu. The Internet has figured out her deadname, partially because of the vindictive sleuthing of Ethan Ralph and mostly because of Milo Yiannopoulos' highly-disturbing article/essay/manifesto about exactly why she identifies as a woman. She had a rather troubled history, as evidenced by her early posts as Brianna on transgender support forums in the mid-2000s, her behavior at the University of Mississippi by people who studied with her, and her own accounts of what it meant to be a closeted "queer person" (in her own terms) navigating various subcultures in the 1990s South pre-Matthew Shepard - and it's obvious that, with her own dysphoria and subsequent transition, she feels much more at home as Brianna Wu than she did under the name that, if you look her up on the Internet for more than a second, you'll easily find. And yet the Internet thinks that you have to break the facade. They don't want to accept the idea that a rebirth is a rebirth, plain and simple. Brianna's life was way too hard and dissociative for her to even associate under the name her adoptive parents gave her - and despite all that, the Internet still insists she's just doing this just because she's mentally ill or that she's actually a deep-cover Republican trying to censor games from the inside or that she's taken way too much of that transgender Flavor-Aid.
Tommy's rebirth is constantly brought into question by everybody, in particular Greg and Sandy Schklair (Seth Rogen). Sandy questions it constantly, both in him being baffled over having his check being successfully cashed in by the banker and him talking bad about Tommy to Raphael in Markus' behind-the-scenes footage. Greg only questions it when he's brought to his boiling point with Tommy and his rather obsessive behavior - realizing that Tommy views him as the idealized Lisa and Mark whereas Amber is Lisa's more sinister side, dragging Greg away from his production duties in order to do some gateway bit acting on what Tommy considers to be just a stupid TV show. This is apparent in how the film shows Tommy shooting the B-roll for The Room on location - because the film, for three-act structure reasons, had to cut out Tommy and Greg's intense fight regarding Tommy taking him to race in Bay to Breakers in 2000, they had to move Tommy and Greg's fight to them shooting the Golden Gate Park scenes (where Tommy actually tackled Greg over the latter teasing him with French words - which ties into a lot of why Tommy wants to stick to his rebirth - but it's not as intense).
Greg questions Tommy on the exact things Tommy wants to avoid - how he made his fortune, how old is he, where he's ACTUALLY from. And Tommy, all the while, is extremely disturbed at this. He doesn't want to relive his past. He doesn't want to go back to that interrogation room, forced to play Russian roulette in his underwear in front of that cop who wants nothing more than to control young Pierre. He's vowed to himself that he's "not fucking French." He's vowed to be a different person. America is the land of new beginnings. It's where he's discovered himself. It's where he and Drew Caffrey made gangbusters on real estate and defective jeans. It's where he's not just Piotr Wieczorkiewicz, "Johnny American," traitor to the Polish cause and victim of American glamour - it's where he can be who he has been his entire life: that little kid in the theater who's wanted to make a movie because, by God, if Walt Disney could make his life a little less shitty, then by God, he'll give people a little escape as long as they don't hurt themselves and each other.
The odd thing is that James Dean didn't really become a famous actor until he died. At the point of his death, he only made three films as lead. The rest were movies he did as either a featured extra or as a bit player. So the fact that in the span of a year, he made these three movies - all varying in genre - is somewhat amazing. He was an actor destined for great things - and yet what if he wasn't? What if he was just another flash in the pan - another momentarily popular actor who had his brush with fame and couldn't find the project that could sustain his success? In a way, his death cemented what I like to call his "rebirth." If James Dean was just a working actor who was going to go into racing after finishing up his next project, his car accident gave him his rebirth. Dead was Dean the actor working to get by - who finally had his breakthrough year and was all thrown away by a college student in the middle of making a turn. Born was Dean the icon, Dean the bad boy, Dean the actor who was taken away from us too soon.
The idea that Tommy and Greg look up to Dean as an untouchable actor from a period in which works of art where constantly churned out by the hundreds is something I've seen from time to time, especially in nostalgic pieces. Nostalgia tends to make us see the things from the past as having a different quality - to use some of Don Draper's parlance, the "pain from an old wound" is so desirable that everybody that comes across accounts of it wants to experience it for themselves. However, they only get to experience the old wound in its watered-down form - in a form that doesn't match one-to-one what it was in the past. In essence, the memories of the collective conscience shape our understanding of how we approach looking at the works and achievements of an older time we were barely a part of or weren't part of at all. Greg and Tommy are too young - and that's taking into consideration Tommy being a baby boomer born in the mid-1950s - to really understand why James Dean has become a touchstone for '50s culture and Golden Age Hollywood. Even taking into account the original source - Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell's oft-hilarious-but-ultimately-heartfelt autobiography-cum-historical-document The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made - Tommy's experiences with Golden Age works (in particular, the works of Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, James Dean and Alfred Hitchcock) were long after his awakening moment in a dilapidated theater in Poznan showing 101 Dalmatians.
Greg and Tommy desire a time that they associate with. Greg, in a lot of ways, is still that kid so captivated with Macaulay Culkin's performance in Home Alone that he wrote his first attempt at a screenplay as a means to inject himself into that story. Tommy, in every way imaginable, is still both young Piotr trying desperately to escape the creeping realization that Poznan, his home, is is absolute nightmare and disillusioned Pierre utterly entranced with how alive New Orleans is. They have golden ages of their own - Tommy's golden age, in particular, ties into those few years in New Orleans and Chalmette where he first heard about Tennessee Williams, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Hitchcock - the formative backbone of '50s drama and suspense. He comes across as if he's discovered A Streetcar Named Desire for the first time in his life, both in his butchering of Stanley's infamous tantrum/him calling for Stella and in how he's structured The Room. And yet, since he's always trying to find a way to be young - in other words, to shield himself from the reality that he as both Piotr and Pierre, he wants to be as innocent as Greg. To him, his 1996 car accident is his rebirth - dead is his past, born is Tommy Wiseau the uninhibited actor. So of course he structures The Room like an episode of Friends, only instead of Ross getting grossed out over eating dessert mixed with a savory pie filling, we have Claudette bringing up her breast cancer diagnosis only to forget about it the next time she has a one-on-one with Lisa.
That's the fascinating thing about James Franco's The Disaster Artist: by making Greg's deliberately-paced story fit both the confines of an origin story and a three-act Hollywood script, they've managed to tap into a subtext that most people don't know are there. When most people analyze The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room and, by proxy, The Room, they tend to look at how Tommy is both staunchly adherent to Hollywood tradition and yet how disconnected a lot of his performance and plotting are. And yet, watching this with a really enthusiastic crowd of longtime fans of The Room, as I am, I can't help but to think that Franco, despite taking out everything I really wanted to see in the movie - Raphael Smadja's giggle tent, Tommy's 9/11 anniversary tribute/punishment, Dan Janjigian both quipping about Tommy blowing up Birns & Sawyer's soundstage when forced to reshoot Denny's confrontation with Chris-R and him chewing out Tommy for not comping his boots, the intense power play Tommy did with Don (the first guy who played Mark) and how he exactly enticed Greg to play the role while also stealing a dinner reservation, Greg's cameo as a casting agent (I actually want to see if he's improved since his soap opera days) - managed to get at the heart of the story better than anybody who's done a long-form analysis of the story. In essence, Franco has made a movie that encapsulates Greg's analysis as to why Tommy kept in the alley football/"me underwears" scene. The reason is that Franco, by becoming Tommy, has finally got to what Tommy is better than Patton Oswalt's comically shady Alfan Golenpaul or Doug Walker's straight-forward mockery of Tommy's mannerisms and Polish-cum-French-cum-Cajun-English-cum-really-tired-speech-therapist accent: that Tommy is always chasing youth. Tommy is trying to assert his own rebirth.
The Internet isn't too kind to the idea of a person's rebirth. If the person is shady in any way, they will find a way to peel back their proposed youth and discover the broken person that there were. The Internet tends to believe that the person desperately trying to assert their new being is trying to run away from something, often not realizing that the thing they're running away from has a very personal association with the person in question. Take for example one of my favorite examples of this in the whole world: Brianna Wu. The Internet has figured out her deadname, partially because of the vindictive sleuthing of Ethan Ralph and mostly because of Milo Yiannopoulos' highly-disturbing article/essay/manifesto about exactly why she identifies as a woman. She had a rather troubled history, as evidenced by her early posts as Brianna on transgender support forums in the mid-2000s, her behavior at the University of Mississippi by people who studied with her, and her own accounts of what it meant to be a closeted "queer person" (in her own terms) navigating various subcultures in the 1990s South pre-Matthew Shepard - and it's obvious that, with her own dysphoria and subsequent transition, she feels much more at home as Brianna Wu than she did under the name that, if you look her up on the Internet for more than a second, you'll easily find. And yet the Internet thinks that you have to break the facade. They don't want to accept the idea that a rebirth is a rebirth, plain and simple. Brianna's life was way too hard and dissociative for her to even associate under the name her adoptive parents gave her - and despite all that, the Internet still insists she's just doing this just because she's mentally ill or that she's actually a deep-cover Republican trying to censor games from the inside or that she's taken way too much of that transgender Flavor-Aid.
Tommy's rebirth is constantly brought into question by everybody, in particular Greg and Sandy Schklair (Seth Rogen). Sandy questions it constantly, both in him being baffled over having his check being successfully cashed in by the banker and him talking bad about Tommy to Raphael in Markus' behind-the-scenes footage. Greg only questions it when he's brought to his boiling point with Tommy and his rather obsessive behavior - realizing that Tommy views him as the idealized Lisa and Mark whereas Amber is Lisa's more sinister side, dragging Greg away from his production duties in order to do some gateway bit acting on what Tommy considers to be just a stupid TV show. This is apparent in how the film shows Tommy shooting the B-roll for The Room on location - because the film, for three-act structure reasons, had to cut out Tommy and Greg's intense fight regarding Tommy taking him to race in Bay to Breakers in 2000, they had to move Tommy and Greg's fight to them shooting the Golden Gate Park scenes (where Tommy actually tackled Greg over the latter teasing him with French words - which ties into a lot of why Tommy wants to stick to his rebirth - but it's not as intense).
Greg questions Tommy on the exact things Tommy wants to avoid - how he made his fortune, how old is he, where he's ACTUALLY from. And Tommy, all the while, is extremely disturbed at this. He doesn't want to relive his past. He doesn't want to go back to that interrogation room, forced to play Russian roulette in his underwear in front of that cop who wants nothing more than to control young Pierre. He's vowed to himself that he's "not fucking French." He's vowed to be a different person. America is the land of new beginnings. It's where he's discovered himself. It's where he and Drew Caffrey made gangbusters on real estate and defective jeans. It's where he's not just Piotr Wieczorkiewicz, "Johnny American," traitor to the Polish cause and victim of American glamour - it's where he can be who he has been his entire life: that little kid in the theater who's wanted to make a movie because, by God, if Walt Disney could make his life a little less shitty, then by God, he'll give people a little escape as long as they don't hurt themselves and each other.
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