Wiseau’s authoritarian approach is what made The Room so bad, but it’s also what made it so special. Film, perhaps more than any other art form, is a collaborative medium. As director-financier-star-producer-writer, Wiseau didn’t have to collaborate. He had the rare liberty to do exactly what he wanted to do. “Movie studios don’t let people like Tommy Wiseau make them,” Bissell tells me. “Someone should have just pulled the plug on it at some point, and no one did.” When Hollywood—or really, anyone with some sort of power—fails to intervene, The Room happens. And, according to Wiseau, rightfully so. “This is real life,” Sestero remembers Wiseau telling his weary crew. “You want to be fake? Not me. I hate fake stuff.”

For most viewers, little in The Room bears even remote resemblance to real life. One of the film’s most cherished lines, judging by YouTube views, is when Mark exhorts a nosy friend to “leave your stupid comments in your pocket!” For Wiseau, however, this expression made some kind of strange sense. So much so, in fact, he “wasn’t going to let any of us move on until he had this ridiculous line of dialogue in the can,” Sestero writes. What else made sense? A scene with four men, each in tuxedos, tossing a football around while standing only a few feet apart. And, the idea that a stockbroker with a randy stay-home woman is the apex of American achievement. The Room may be a non-native’s laughable, even grotesque caricature of modern American life, but it’s an incredibly sincere one.

Given this context, it might be useful to think of Wiseau as something of an outsider artist. Outsider art—also known as visionary art, or art brut— “describes the work of untrained, self-taught people who make art,” says Charles Russell, author of the book Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught and Outsider Artists. Marginalized from society, or at least the art world, due to disability, isolation, or lack of artistic training, outsider artists “are basically following their own personal vision,” Russell says. The label has traditionally applied to painters and sculptors—Sarah Boxer gave an overview of the genre in a recent issue of The Atlantic—but it’s hard to see why it couldn’t also refer to Wiseau or any other thwarted, un-self-aware filmmaker.

Hollywood studios, after all, can be seen as akin to the mainstream art world's gatekeepers. When a major film company puts out a bad movie—ahem, The Lone Ranger—it rarely becomes as cherished as The Room has. It's just seen as a failure to correctly adhere to or transcend the established rules of cinema and the marketplace. Similarly, “a lot of the mainstream art world focuses largely on formal and aesthetic issues that play out within their own sense of art history,” Russell says. “But it doesn't really connect to the raw sources of art.” However silly they appear to viewers, Wiseau’s shrieks and contortions are undeniably raw. In one scene, probably The Room’s single most mocked performance, Johnny reenacts wholesale a famous part from Rebel Without a Cause. James Dean’s desperate cry “You are tearing me apart!” becomes “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” It was melodramatic, unimaginative—and deadly serious.