You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!

The Year's Work on The Room, the Worst Movie Ever Made

Adam M Rosen editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Indiana University Press

Published:8th Nov '22

Should be back in stock very soon

This hardback is available in another edition too:

You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa! cover

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.

We enjoy laughing at The Room, but to stop there would reflect poorly on us as an audience. Something so singular and immense deserves loving attention and careful study, and that's what we find in this rich and delightful collection of essays.

-- Matthew Strohl, author of Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mon

ISBN: 9780253062710

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

238 pages