I know, in my last post I wrote that I don’t care about biopics, yet here I am, writing about The Disaster Artist. The anomaly that is The Room and the story of its making promised to make for at least an entertaining viewing. And it’s a film about filmmaking as well, a topic I’m very interested in. It came as a Double Feature screening with The Room playing afterwards. I wondered if screening it in this order wouldn’t diminish the experience of The Room, even though this was not my first time watching it anyway – but interestingly it didn’t.
The Disaster Artist simultaneously praises and makes fun of Tommy Wiseau, while also attempting to humanise him – and I’m not sure if that’s really necessary, especially if you don’t really try to look beyond the persona which Wiseau created for himself, but instead make a film about your own amazement that a guy like Wiseau was capable of pulling off all he was able to pull off. Now you’re kinda jealous but also admiring, so you get a wig and fake an accent and try to embody this enigmatic persona while also attempting to reap some laughs. Well, that’s all fine. But it’s also just another superficial fairytale about the reality of the American Dream: You just have to have a lot of money, no sense of shame and a good sense of self-aggrandisement and even a guy like Wiseau could have been a president if only he had been born in the right place.
For an actually bad film where the makers quite clearly feel themselves to be superior to Wiseau and try to exploit his incoherence, see The House That Drips Blood On Alex {2010, Brock LaBorde & Jared Richard}. There’s no need to feel sorry for Wiseau being exploited, of course. But this film manages to be actually terrible on all accounts without any further merit.
As my goal with these posts is to learn something from every film or music video even if I don’t like it too much, I have been wondering for days, what to get from this. Looking at the wiki page of The Disaster Artist, the name Angelyne caught my attention, as mononyms (another term just learned) often tend to do. I can’t remember noticing her before, but surely I must have. Even German TV wanted her in 1988. Angelyne the Billboard Queen – apparently a living Hollywood legend.
Interestingly, if Gary Baum’s research is true, her story might even have some similarities to that of Tommy Wiseau apart from both of them selling merchandise to everyone they encounter and their apparent discontent with aging. Both of them were probably born in 1950s Poland but immigrated to the US. Wiseau seems to be from a Catholic upbringing, whereas Angelyne’s Jewishness connects her directly to the Holocaust, as both her parents endured concentration camps. At some point in their life both of them decided to break with their past quite radically. In Angelyne’s case creating a new persona and striving for artificiality in the entirety of her appearance. In Wiseau’s case it’s hard to tell, apart from the name change, how far he has actually departed from his past, as most of it still remains unknown. And, of course, exposing the pasts of people who clearly wanted to get away from it is a questionable thing to do, even if these people want attention and fame. Angelyne wishes to have the choice to tell her story on her own terms and to make a living from it. Tommy Wiseau also doesn’t seem to be too happy about people looking into his past. And now there’s even an Angelyne TV series in production without any clear notion if she will get to have any part in this and profit from it or not.
KINOXIKON 