The “painful to watch” 2003 movie Gillian Anderson calls her ultimate guilty pleasure
The concept of a guilty pleasure movie is inherently strange, since bad cinema isn’t supposed to be enjoyed by anyone. And yet, we’ve all got at least one of them, including Gillian Anderson.
For whatever reason, and sometimes those reasons are hard to put into words, the occasional objectionable film will worm its way closer to the heart, even though you know that by every reasonable or conventional metric, it’s a piece of shit with absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
That’s a big part of why everyone has a couple of below-par pictures that they’ll defend to the death, though: so what if the directing is poor, the acting is even worse, the script is horrendous, and most people would struggle to watch it all the way through? That’s exactly what makes them guilty pleasures.
On the other hand, Anderson’s pick can’t really be counted as a guilty pleasure anymore. Sure, it’s an embarrassingly shoddy production, but it’s long since taken on a life of its own to become a stone-cold cult favourite. Is it one of the worst movies ever made? Almost certainly. However, is it arguably the most popular and widely beloved bad movie ever made? It might well be.
In fact, the X-Files veteran named two, but you can’t really count David Lean’s 1984 epic, A Passage to India, as a guilty pleasure, seeing as it was helmed by one of the most vaunted filmmakers of all time and notched 11 nominations at the Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’, so you could make the argument that she was misunderstanding the assignment somewhat.
“It’s very dated, but there’s something so unbelievably, timelessly romantic, and, I just, even the thought of it,” Anderson reflected. “I can smell it. It’s a palpable film.” Again, an acclaimed, 11-time Oscar nominee directed by one of the all-time greats isn’t most folk’s idea of a guilty pleasure, but Tommy Wiseau’s The Room? That’s a different story.
“I only saw it once,” Anderson prefaced. “But it was so painful to watch that it was pleasurable.” Hardly an earth-shattering or left-field opinion, right enough, with Wiseau’s unintentionally hilarious masterpiece having played to packed, spoon-throwing houses for over 20 years, causing it to take on a life of its own as a genuinely terrible film, albeit one that continues to win over new converts with each passing year.
The two-time Golden Globe and two-time Primetime Emmy-winning stalwart of the small screen wasn’t the first person to find themselves transfixed by the unique charms of The Room, and she won’t be the last, either, with writer, director, star, and producer Wiseau’s passion project occupying the rarefied air of being the best-known bad movie of the 21st century.
If she ever feels the need to watch it again, perhaps a different mindset is required. After all, if you view The Room as a straightforward, serious production, then it is painful to watch. On the other hand, treat it as a comedy made by a would-be auteur who had no idea they were making a comedy, and you wouldn’t have to look too hard to find someone willing to call it a masterpiece.
