The Disaster Artist (Book)
The thing is, Tommy Wiseau sucks. There's nothing unique about him that isn't also present in people who care a little more about their peers. Creative ambitions isolated and honed and just enthusiastically believed-in until they barely resemble anything from Earth are a dime a dozen. Certainly reckless self-confidence wouldn't be hard to find in a survey of western masculinity, or of con artists. Wiseau was able to make The Room because he had money to burn. While The Disaster Artist acknowledges this, it's also too good-natured to spend much time chewing on the fact that The Room could only exist the way it does in a world with the problems ours has. Climate change will kill millions or billions of us for the same essential reason that Wiseau was able to brute-force and abuse his dream into reality, the same reason so many others are prevented from realizing their own dreams. I'm not really prepared to think of Wiseau as an inspirational outsider artist because what is he outside of, exactly? He's a fucking landlord.
I don't mean to accuse the authors of being disingenuous. I have no doubt that Greg Sestero did have a meaningful relationship with Wiseau. And it's not that I have no sympathy for Wiseau--as frustrating as he seems, he's as much a product of the world as the rest of us. He's an interesting person to read about, at least. The book is frequently funny, and I read it in a day, for what that's worth. It's just that whenever Sestero talks about how generous Wiseau could be, I think about how he absolutely would not have extended the same generosity to, for example, an aspiring actress. This isn't evident between the lines so much as riding the lines like a Texas Roadhouse regular on a mechanical bull. There's an entire chapter about this.
And like, I get it. I'm not making anything of consequence, and only a few of those things are public facing. Nor do I think wealth and recognition are necessary goals of a creative hobby. But making things makes me feel better than basically anything else and stresses me out almost as much. Half the time I worry that I'm Tommy Wiseau, vastly overvaluing my own pedestrian ideas to the amusement of anyone watching, and half the time I wonder if it's the lack of Wiseau-like confidence that holds me back. The main thing Sestero seems to have gained from Wiseau, other than money, is an attitude of "fuck it, just go for it," and that's fine. But then let's not forget the money. As with any other American Dream story, none of this is generalizable if you don't own a building or happen to get on the good side of someone who does.