You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!

— Adam Rosen is a fulltime freelance writer and book editor who has contributed to the Los Angeles Review of Books, TheAtlantic.com, Atlas Obscura, and many more. The Houston Chronicle wrote that he has earned the strange distinction of one of the country's foremost experts on The Room. Contributors include film journalists, prominent pop culture writers, and academics. — The Room is dubbed the worst movie ever made, but a quintessential cult film and an iconic site of fan culture. There is renewed and ongoing interest evident in The Disaster Artist, originally a memoir about the making of The Room told by a film costar. James Franco adapted it in 2017 into an American biographical comedy-drama film that chronicles the relationship between the budding actors who created The Room. The Disaster Artist achieved critical and commercial success, award nominations at the Golden Globes, Oscars, Screen Actors Guild, and more. During the release of The Disaster Artist, articles about it and The Room popped up in major news outlets and entertainment magazines including the NYT, NPR, The Atlantic, and more. — The Year's Work series is dedicated to the analysis of recent fan cultural phenomena. This book explores the idiosyncrasies of a specific cult film and the fan culture around it. The series description states that suitable topics will most likely require a multidisciplinary and often coauthored approach. — Target audience includes film buffs and fans of The Room.

When released in 2003, The Room, an obscure, self-financed relationship drama by an eccentric self-taught filmmaker named Tommy Wiseau, should have been completely forgotten. Yet nearly two decades later, "the worst movie ever made"—as many a critic would have it—has become the most popular cult film since The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

In You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!, contributors explore this priceless cultural artifact, offering fans and film buffs critical insight into the movie's various meanings, historical context, and place in the cult canon. Even if by complete accident, The Room touches on many issues of modern concern, including sincerity, authenticity, badness, artistic value, gender relations, Americanness, Hollywood conventions, masculinity, and even the meaning of life.

Revealing the timeless, infamous power of Wiseau's The Room, You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa! is a deeply entertaining deconstruction of an original work of all-American failure.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Let's Toss the Ball Around, by Adam Rosen
Part I: Cliché and Convention, Misapplied
1. Chris-R's Gun: The Room as an Unconscious Parody of Hollywood Film Conventions, by Carter Soles
2. Do You Understand Life? Do You? Tommy Wiseau and the Anti-Method Acting Style, by James Curnow
3. "She Can't Love Anyone": The Evil Women and Tormented Men of The Room, by Lenika Cruz
Part II: Unlocking The Room
4. Is The Room Worse than Vertigo? The Aesthetic Philosophy of "So Bad it's Good", by James MacDowell
5. Everybody Betray Me! Revenge, Reverse Revenge, and Slave Morality in The Room, by John Dyck
6. Anything for My Princess: Using Don Quixote to Bring (Some) Coherence to The Room, by Adam Rosen
7. Crypto-Wiseaulogy: Uncovering Stanley Kubrick, Jewishness, and Judaism in The Room, by Nathan Abrams
Part III: Cult and the (Class)Room
8. I Just Like to Watch You Guys: How Screenings of The Room Give People Permission to Perform, by Ellen Wright
9. The Room in the Classroom: How I Use a Bad Movie to Teach Good Filmmaking, by Ross Morin
10. For the Love of Cult, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Build My Own Screening of The Room, by Amanda Ann Klein
Part IV: Fan Reception
11. How Can They Say This About Me? Riffing Johnny, Lisa, and Denny in Online Homebrew Commentaries of The Room, by Matt Foy
12. "Can We Please Not Talk about James Franco?": How The Disaster Artist Threatened The Room's Fanbase, by John Donegan
13. I'm Tired, I'm Wasted: The Room as a Waste of Time, by Ernest Mathijs
Part V: Constructing Tommy Wiseau
14. Oh Man, I Just Can't Figure You Out: Building the Persona of Tommy Wiseau through The Disaster Artist, by Hario Satrio Priambodho
15. I'm an American, Just Like You: The Room and American Cinema, Identity, and Masculinity, by Landon Palmer
16. To Err Is Human, to Auteur, Divine: Tommy Wiseau as Auteur, by Renee Middlemost
17. I Don't Have a Friend in the World: The Lonely Authenticity of Tommy Wiseau, by Keith Kahn-Harris
Works Cited
Index