By David Futrelle
So I recently rewatched The Room, probably my favorite bad movie of all time, and was struck again by how much director Tommy Wiseau’s views of women mirrors those of Men’s Rights Activists and, well, a pretty high proportion of those who post regularly on Reddit.
If you haven’t seen The Room — and if you enjoy this blog you definitely need to! — it’s a comically inept film about the ultimate “Nice Guy” being wronged by his cruel, narcissistic and thoroughly hypergamous “future wife.”
I did a post on The Room as an unintentional MRA film a while ago but I’m not sure if I managed to convey just how Reddity it is. One line that stood out for me when I watched it this time was this bit of wisdom from Mark on the female of the species:
I just can’t figure women out. Sometimes they’re just too smart, sometimes they’re flat-out stupid, other times they’re just evil.
It’s not even the strangest, or worst, line in that infamous scene, but watching it this time, that line struck me as pretty much what you’d get if you could scientifically reduce all of Reddit to a single comment.
Since I couldn’t find a clip of just that line, here’s the entire scene. Trust me, it’s well worth the one minute and fifty-seven seconds it takes to watch it.
The Room was made in 2003. I don’t think you could make a comparable movie today, as all the male characters, in order to be believable, would have to spend so much time on Reddit they’d have no time left over to interact with anyone else in the real world.
@Dan Hoan,
Thanks for linking to that Polygon article – it’s a good summary with useful background, although it doesn’t mention some of the most extreme shite (like the punching Anita game). I’ve seen a number of people on social media reacting to the VidCon thing without knowing the history. Stripped of context, the “garbage human” comment is being seen as unprovoked and needlessly hostile.
Although one can’t help wonder how many of these reactions are disingenuous, of course 😐
Well… professional trolls know how to sockpuppet, so some of them are disingenuous, and others are taken in by the faked “righteous anger” of the disingenuous. Others go with “If everybody [in the comments] thinks that she did something wrong, she must have.” Guilt by repetitive accusation. Buttered emails!
It’s wrong, “Sargon” of Swindon clearly knew what he was hoping to get by taking over the front rows of the panel audience.
Tired of people saying, “You can’t call them names when they harrass you in person, because they’re people and deserve respect”. And then use that as an excuse to harrass them again, over and over.
What I noticed with GG is that people who don’t visit GG or feminist sites seem to take the garbage humans at their word. So the garbage humans will go out onto FB and Twitter and cry their crocodile tears about how unfair Anita/Zoe/etc. are being and the bystanders will latch onto that and assume they know both sides and assume both sides have good and bad points. They have no idea about the ops and conspiracies and think that the GGers get just as many death threats as the LWs. So depending on who the reactions are from, they very well could be real, or they could be GGers trying to drum up support.
I know a lot of people in the games industry. The majority of them have heard of GG, but most of them don’t know anything about the true history of it. Most of them think it goes back to Baldwin’s tweet and that’s it. That’s if they even know about Baldwin’s role. I think maybe 2 of them have indicated that they’re familiar with the Zoe letter. I’ve explained the history, but only to one person because that’s someone I trust who I know is truly feminist and not a Male Feminist (TM). Where was I going with this? Oh, right, even people who live and breathe video games, who are so passionate they get jobs working on them (and if you’ve read the EA wife stuff you only know the tip of the iceberg of what crunch can be like), even those people know practically nothing about the truth of GG. All we can really do is keep educating people so they can understand just how bad the GG “side” is and how reasonable feminists are really being about all this.
Off-topic:
I saw the advance screening of Laura Poitras’s documentary Risk last night. I’d highly recommend it: not only is Poitras is a very competent filmmaker, but she has a keen eye for which footage to include in order to tell a story.
The basic argument of the documentary is that Julian Assange is an asshole but Wikileaks is still on the side of the angels. (Disclaimer: This was also my position going in, and is still my position now.) Poitras makes this argument by simply pointing a camera at Assange as he interacts with people, letting us see him as a human being rather than as a symbol.
The documentary assumes that the watcher is already familiar with the basic story, and so doesn’t try to give an overview. It doesn’t really introduce Assange, only briefly mentions Snowden and Manning in passing, and only shows Harrison inasmuch as she comes into contact with Assange. Domscheit-Berg isn’t in it at all, which is weird. The only person who really gets a side plot is Appelbaum, which is interesting in its own right but which is included seemingly because it mirrors that of Assange.
Speaking of Assange, he comes across incredibly badly here. Seeing how he interacts with other people when he’s not on stage shows us what a narcissistic bully he is. Before I saw this, I thought that he was probably a rapist; now that I’ve seen the way he interacts with women I am convinced of.
(SPOILERS BELOW, INASMUCH AS YOU CAN HAVE SPOILERS OF A DOCUMENTARY)
The best scene in the film is with the musician Stefani “Lady Gaga” Germanotta. She is a genius and is the only person who really understands what’s going on.
The most interesting scene in the film is seeing the Ecuadorian ambassador and consul talking, away from the media, and to realise how pissed they were over the British threat to storm the embassy. That was probably the moment that guaranteed Assange his freedom.
The most uncomfortable scene in the film is with the lawyer Helen Kennedy QC, in which Assange goes on a breathtakingly misogynistic tirade. This is the point at which I lost all doubt about him being a rapist.
(A close second is watching how he interacts with his mother. Ugh.)
The most horrific scene in the film is some entirely uncensored footage of the murder of a group of Iraqi journalists by a US military helicopter. It’s an important piece of footage which needs to be shown, but it’s still revolting to see a pool of blood with a corpse lying in it and know that this isn’t special effects.
Tommy Wiseau is so utterly bizarre and ridiculous, it’s impossible to find any of his views or actions offensive. He is like a parody of himself.
I recently re-watched The Room, my favourite scene is an often overlooked one where “Mark” lightly touches “Mike” (I think?) on the arm and he full on launches himself onto the floor, falling into the rubbish bins, prompting Johnny to ask if he needs a hospital. Truly astonishing. “Let’s go home Denny.”
Hello.
> Alan Robertshaw
Is it a communist raven ? I mean, it is literraly the Cracoucass with the knife in the beak.
Have a nice day
@kupo, @JS
Appreciate your comments; thank you.
In a further twist, Anita is now apparently part of a conspiracy to stop men enjoying 2D women, or something (I can’t read this without my brain threatening to abdicate):
http://i.imgur.com/GpQXjsB.jpg
found here
So this is where the Mark gifs come from. I never realized just how fitting they were.
Mish,
I love how convinced these guys are that feminists spend all their time obsessing over the dating lives of random internet misogynists.
Dude, I don’t care enough about your penis to participate in a conspiracy against it and even though I have never met Anita Sarkeesian, I am near 100% sure that she doesn’t either.
That whole thing about feminists being frightened by their sexual preferences is pure projection and this
is what really betrays it. I’m going to assume “the idea of a woman” means that he thinks women are supposed to only exist to look hot and fawn over him. Actual women stubbornly remain human individuals with our own opinions, thoughts, and desires and that terrifies him.
I do think it’s cute that his lofty goal for humanity is to explore Mars and Jupiter. They’re already fairly well explored. There could always be more, but it’s not like we don’t already know quite a bit about them and their moons.
I would also like to hear his thoughts on how the sexbot revolution will end war. This isn’t the first time I’ve come across the opinion that men only go to war over women and I’m just so confused about it. It just makes no sense whatsoever.
Mish, did you listen to the dramatic reading?
It’s hard to read this as anything other than a complaint that rape isn’t legal. This is one of the many links between toxic masculinity and rape culture: the idea that men are always up for it and want sex incessantly, while women are the sexual gatekeepers who are able to say no, and that that “no” is intensely unfair to men.
I mean, the reality is that women also have libidos, sometimes very strong ones, and that men can also say no. In fact, even the most toxic man is constantly saying no to women he doesn’t find attractive, and yet these men don’t seem to realize that they are also performing a sexual gatekeeper function by saying no to women carrying extra weight or who have colorful hair. They see their own noes as perfectly legit and ordinary, but the noes of the women they want to fuck as unfair and the exercise of an illegitimate power that women don’t deserve to have.
In other words, just as was the case with so many men in the past, the worst possible fate these dudes can imagine is women treating them the same way they treat women.
Wait, wait… women are the sexually dominant ones? Clearly this explains the huge numbers of male rapes… right? *sigh* #MRALogic
Oh, that dramatic reading is a thing of beauty.
Just splendid.
(Oh great. A manospherian said something dumb about space, so now I have to say something about badass women astronomers. It’s the rules.)
See the person smiling below? This is Nadine Barlow. She probably knows more about Mars than anyone else. She’s written books about Martian geography and geology. In fact, she probably knows more about Mars than humans knew about Earth prior to 1900-ish.
I won’t presume to speak for Dr Barlow but I would be surprised if she cares much about dominating the sexuality of reddit misogynists. She’s too busy exploring Mars.
Image: the Empress of Mars holds a model of her planet.
That’s misandry. Mars is the male planet. It’s red! It’s named after the god of war! Why are feeeemales always trying to steal male spaces!?
I suppose 3D women can seem intimidating, if you’re a 1D man.
WWTH, because this:
Wow. It’s not just the script, is it? The acting is really, really, really bad.
Oooooh, that dramatic reading of the 2D thing!!! It made my morning. Bloody brilliant 😀
And like everyone else, I seriously don’t care if some guys prefer 2D women. Why the hell would anyone find that threatening?
Personally, I completely get that 2D/fictional people can be preferable (do these guys think they’re the first to ever feel this way?). It’s just that I don’t articulate it as: “I love anime men! They’re so superior to disgusting horrible actual men!”
Also, Policy of Madness – yes, exactly. This is why the whole idea of women as sexual gatekeepers, who give or withhold sex, is so fucking dangerous. Not to mention out of whack with actual reality (and my libido).
EJ
I have to say I disagree that WikiLeaks is a force for good anymore. Maybe they were at one point but watching their online presence the last year or so has really soured me to their existence entirely. I do agree that Assange is trash tho ?
Wikileaks became a force for evil when it stopped reporting on leaks from Russia. I believe at least one US Intelligence official has denoted it a hostile foreign agency, or something very similar.
I’m OK with sites posting information leaked from intelligence agencies, but when they decide to skip very large countries because “there aren’t any leaks”… right, and my last name is Chekov, too. (it isn’t)
Brie Larson’s gonna be an awesome Col. Danvers ?
Also agreed on disagreement of wikileaks as the good guys. Not sure they ever were, honestly. A spherical wikileaks in a vacuum maybe, but not the one we have…
Hot tip for anyone falling in love with the deliciously atrocious The Room: you can buy the DVD online directly from Tommy’s company, and it arrives with an autographed arty b&w photo of Tommy without his shirt on. Mine also is inscribed with the immortal line: “Love is blind”. I framed it and put it up near the TV. My other half has since stuck googly-eyes over the photo’s eyes, and I have to admit it’s been an improvement.