How We Narrowly Avoided "Peanuts" Becoming "The Room"
Sometimes I send a tweet, nobody interacts with it, and I feel genuinely befuddled, tempted to run around showing it to everyone insisting “this was a good one, dammit!” Other times I get why they fail. And sometimes, I send a tweet out into the world that I think is brilliant, but also know not a single soul other than myself will even begin to comprehend.
Oof. I stand by this, though, so how about I actually explain myself? I am going to force you all to appreciate this.
Let’s start by laying down some context. The Room is a 2003 “film” (I use the word loosely) widely considered to be one of the worst movies ever made. Ostensibly about a woman cheating on her fiancé with his best friend, it’s more a series of non-sequiturs, dropped plot points, gratuitous, ugly sex scenes, bad green screen, mid-film recasting, and some of the worst dialogue to ever be put on the big screen.
What makes The Room so genuinely, unironically watchable despite its complete ineptitude in every single metric of filmmaking and storytelling is the fact that it has a point of view. This wasn’t a film made to meet a quota or by a committee, it wasn’t cobbled together by thirty indifferent screenwriters — The Room is clearly a passion project, a labor of love. The Room has something to say and absolutely zero ability to articulate it, and the gap between ambition and talent is riveting.
The man behind The Room is notorious ghoul Tommy Wiseau, who can be best described as the demented lovechild of Danzig, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and D.B. Cooper.
Wiseau — who wrote, starred in, and directed The Room — is a man shrouded in mystery. His origins and background are unknown. The source of his vast wealth — he funded The Room out-of-pocket, without working a day job and with no paper trail — is unknown. The man even had a tell-all novel written about him (with a movie adaptation!) by his best friend/roommate that only finds more and more questions the more it tries to answer. To be quite honest, half the fun of Wiseau is the almost mythical aura that surrounds him.
If you really want to get to know Wiseau, though, the best way to do so is to just sit down and watch The Room. The man’s personality bleeds into the film like he just nicked a vein, and it makes one thing very, very clear: Tommy Wiseau fucking hates women.
Wiseau — of course — casts himself as The Room’s lead character, a banker named Johnny, who is described in dialogue from pretty much every character as a saint despite spending the majority of his screen time acting, at best, casually cruel, and at worst downright sociopathic. At one point Johnny’s best friend Mark tells Johnny a story about a woman who had a “dozen guys” and was beaten by the boyfriend who discovered this, and Johnny replies with a joyous laugh, “What a story, Mark!”
Johnny’s “future wife,” Lisa (played by Juliette Danielle, who deserves a Purple Heart for the role), as portrayed by the movie, has capriciously and cruelly grown bored of Johnny and decides to seduce his best friend Mark1. She accuses Johnny of hitting her, fakes a pregnancy, and does pretty much anything she can to torture him and sabotage the relationship besides just walking away. There’s never any explanation or motivation for any of this besides an assumed “bitches be crazy, huh?” Every male character who shares the screen with Lisa at some point sleazily comments on her looks or outright crushes on her/makes a pass on her. Lisa’s mother, Claudette, wants Lisa to marry Johnny solely so he can financially support her. The only other female character, Michelle, is introduced in a lengthy sex scene with zero context2; actually, about the only scenes in the film where Lisa isn’t being portrayed as the stereotypical “crazy girlfriend” are the sex scenes, the first of which traumatized Juliette Danielle to the point where she refused to film the second (which led to Wiseau just reusing footage from the first as if it was new).
The film ends with Johnny discovering Lisa and Mark’s deception and shooting himself in the head; as they stand over Johnny’s body, Mark blames Lisa for his death. The message behind the story of the saintly, upright man driven to his death by the untrustworthy feminine wiles of the cruel seductress is painfully clear — and Lisa is such a broad, undefined character (with exactly zero interior life) that there’s really no way to read her other than as a stand-in for all women as a whole.
It also doesn’t take an English major to realize that The Room is just Tommy Wiseau working through some painful break-up from his past. That’s actually the least novel thing about the entire movie — bad art about men processing their break-ups is a dime a dozen. What makes The Room stand out in that respect is, again, how poorly it delivers its message. Most of these shitty men can hide behind their technical skill, and Wiseau has none of that. His attempts at exorcising his soul and shaming the women who once scorned him through a dramatic movie backfired; instead, fans enjoy The Room as an unintentional comedy, and Wiseau stands with his faults laid bare for everyone to see.
So how does this all tie into Charles Schulz, the cartoonist behind perhaps the most famous comic strip of all time, Peanuts, and the creator of icons like Charlie Brown and Snoopy?
I want to be up-front about this: I am not saying Schulz hated women, nor am I accusing Peanuts of misogyny. But throughout his life Schulz was pretty open about the semi-autobiographical nature of Peanuts, and especially of Charlie Brown’s relationships with women. Charlie Brown’s eternally unrequited crush on the Little Red Haired Girl, for example, is ripped straight out of Schulz’s life. Lucy, meanwhile, was modeled after Schulz’s first wife, Joyce.
Given that Lucy is egotistical, bossy, cruel, selfish, and vain, I have to wonder if the comparison has something to do with the “first” part of that title. Lucy is perhaps one of the most unlikable characters in newspaper comics and the closest thing Peanuts has to a villain. In fact, this entire essay was sparked by a particularly mean-spirited story currently re-running in newspapers where Lucy throws Schroeder’s piano down into the sewer, destroying it, then sticks around and gloats afterwards.
Looking at Peanuts through the lens of Lucy, knowing what we know about Schulz’s life and influences, one could craft a theory that he hated women, or was at least working through some deep issues with them, especially in the early 60s, when the only other female characters besides Lucy were Violet and Patty, whose entire personalities also revolved around tormenting Charlie Brown.
I don’t think that’s an accusation that holds up to scrutiny, though. For starters, the introduction of Peppermint Patty and Marcie in the late 60s upends things entirely; they’re protagonistic, complex, viewpoint female characters in a way Lucy never really is, and they’re actually kind to Charlie Brown. In fact, both nurse crushes on Charlie Brown, and his confused, slightly overwhelmed and fearful responses to those crushes paint a very different picture of Schulz as someone who perhaps just really doesn’t know how to handle female attention after years of bad experiences.
Charlie Brown himself actually plays a huge part in refuting this as well. For starters, it isn’t just the female characters who dislike and torment him, it’s many of the male ones too; the cruelty of Schulz’s world isn’t divided down gender lines. And unlike Johnny, who takes his pain out on Lisa, on women, and on himself, Charlie Brown perseveres and always retains his optimism and hope in people, often to ridiculous, unproductive degrees. If he’s an avatar for Schulz (as Schulz often claimed he was), that says a lot of good things about him and the way he interacts with women, even in difficult circumstances.
The connection that links Wiseau and Schulz in my mind is the fact that they both used their art to process their issues and their thorny, sometimes ugly relationships with women. The line that divides them, though, is talent. Schulz didn’t become Wiseau because he’s an empathetic storyteller, a skilled artist, a writer capable of finding the humor in life’s sour moments. It’s Schulz’s talent that allows him to write a character as cruel as Lucy yet still find the humanity in her; in the hands of almost anyone else, she could have devolved into Wiseau’s Lisa all too easily.
So it’s easy, at least for me, to look at Schulz and imagine a parallel universe out there where he didn’t have that great talent, where his attempts to work through the trauma of his life without it led to him creating something just as blatantly, unflatteringly revealing as The Room.
I’m certainly glad I don’t live in that universe, though.
THE GAY SUPERHERO UPDATE
A few newsletters back I wrote about the surprising (yet also somehow not at all surprising) decision DC Comics made to have Robin/Tim Drake come out as queer.
Now, in potentially even bigger news, DC has announced that Superman will be coming out as bisexual in November’s Superman: Son of Kal-El 5.
This isn’t the iconic Clark Kent as Superman, of course — this is Jonathan Kent. Jon as a character was introduced about six years ago or so as the ten-year-old son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, who eventually started adventuring at his father’s side as Superboy. Around two years ago or so Jon was aged up to young adulthood after spending time living in the future (comics, everyone!), and just within the last few months took up his father’s mantle of Superman as Clark left on a long mission throughout space and time.
Jon isn’t a character with a longstanding queer subtext like Tim Drake, nor a relatively marginalized one like Tim’s recently been, looking for a new hook and receiving his coming out moment in an anthology. Jon is still relatively new and under-explored, and a character who’s recently been thrust into a much larger spotlight than ever before. This is a very conscious decision on the behalf of writer Tom Taylor, artist John Timms, and DC Comics to create a new high-profile queer superhero for DC, and knowing that this is an area they’re purposely pursuing is just so cool to me. DC is making such big moves right now. I’ve been watching the DC books in my pull grow as the Marvel titles have shrank for a few months now, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
Also, Jon’s new boyfriend is a reporter, so he is still absolutely 100% Superman.
AND FINALLY, A VERY “THE ROOM” GOODBYE
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!
And I use the word “seduce” here because that’s absolutely how the film plays it — Mark reacts to Lisa’s overtures with zero visible interest yet goes along with it all anyway as if he’s hypnotized, as if he’s obligated to have sex with her simply because she asked. It would strain even porn credibility. While Johnny does at one point physically fight Mark, he reserves the majority of his vitriol for Lisa, and even Mark, hypocrite that he is, blames Lisa for Johnny’s suicide.
And I mean zero — the first thing this character does is walk into Johnny’s currently empty apartment and start giving her boyfriend a blowjob. We don’t know these character’s names, how/if they know Johnny or Lisa, or why they’re in the apartment until the laughably awful, uncomfortably-long sex scene is over.