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Notes -
I see this crop up every now and then in discussions about the film, and this evaluation of The Room isn't particularly coherent unless you consider virtually all movies that depict women behaving badly and doing things like "lying to hurt people" as misogynistic. Yes, Lisa is obviously the antagonist and is portrayed in a bad light, having an irredeemable female villain isn't enough to declare a film as advocating hatred of women. Is Gone Girl misogynistic? In addition, many films involve a female protagonist taking revenge on the man/men who victimised her (The Invisible Man, I Spit On Your Grave, etc, to name a few); people seem to have zero problems with those despite these films having far more negative portrayals of men than any kind of "problematic" female portrayal.
It's a terrible film, but its "misogyny" is not one of the reasons why.
I don't think any film which portrays women behaving badly is necessarily misogynistic (e.g. Tár's protagonist is a monster, and I don't think that film is misogynistic - in fact it's the best film I've seen so far this decade).
With regards to The Room itself: Lisa is such a uniquely selfish, manipulative and conniving character with no redeeming traits to speak of, who is pointlessly cruel and vicious to everyone around her just for her own amusement. Coupled with Tommy Wiseau's self-insert character laughing uproariously when his friend tells him a story about an unfaithful woman he knew who got beaten up by her boyfriend so badly that she was hospitalised, and banger quotes like:
which I get the impression the audience is meant to enthusiastically agree with - yeah, I do actually think Tommy Wiseau hates women as a group, or did at the time of writing/filming.
In general this is true of the majority of badly written films with badly written antagonists. I'm less convinced Lisa in specific is meant to be a stand-in for women and more an aggressive subtweet of an ex-girlfriend. "According to Sestero, the character of Lisa is based on a former lover of Wiseau's to whom he intended to propose marriage with a US$1,500 diamond engagement ring, but because she "betray[ed] him multiple times", their relationship ended in a break-up."
See above; this is not surprising given the context of who Lisa is meant to represent. Yes, the movie is self-pitying and half-autobiographical, but I'm not so sure it's supposed to be an expression of hatred for all women.
The other quote you linked seems to be a... not abnormal thing to think after being screwed over during dating and relationships, so I'm not surprised one would put it in a script. In a similar vein many films have "I'm done with men, they're rapacious bastards"-style quotes by female characters who you are supposed to sympathise with, so I suppose I can say that if you contextualise those as making the films inherently anti-male, I suppose you're consistent.
That's pretty much my attitude, yeah. The key difference being that a lot of these #girlboss movies include lines like that essentially as fanservice for the audience and the creators don't really mean it (although that being said, we've been debating since last week as to whether or not the "purpose of a system is what it does", and I suppose movies are "systems, broadly defined). Whereas The Room is such a painfully honest, unvarnished expression of its creator's worldview and wish-fulfilment fantasy - it seems reasonable to conclude that the worldview the movie espouses is literally that of its creator. I'm not even sure if Wiseau has the empathy and imaginative capacity necessary to model a character with a worldview other than his own. (I feel like he'd struggle mightily with the breakfast question.)
Not entirely sure that's the case, really. In general, I think the percentage of ideologues in Hollywood is higher than people think it is, and that these pieces of "fanservice" for the audience are actually the stated beliefs of many of those involved (see: the clip of the Disney executive producer effectively stating she had a not-so secret gay agenda which she inserted into films wherever she could). The ratio of true believers to cynical grifters is probably much higher than is usually acknowledged, especially once taking into account the fact that truly believing something is a great way to gain the corresponding benefits of that belief system without bearing the costs of deception. Even when they conduct fanservice, they are basing it on what they would personally want to see.
That's odd because I view The Room as a bit of a nonsensical Rorschach test of a film where you could pick out any number of statements to prove any number of things. There are a number of scenes which try to model differing worldviews, I think, and there are even some hackneyed attempts to try and deepen Lisa's character a bit (e.g. introducing her mother Claudette, who pressures Lisa to stay in a relationship for money against her stated wishes, causing the affair in the first place). Wiseau is not very good at trying to represent these other perspectives, but the point he wanted to convey is also incoherent enough that it's difficult to tease out exactly what it is. Pretty much the only larger-scale point I can glean from the entire thing is that Tommy Wiseau is amazing and he should never have been betrayed, and if he had killed himself that would have truly shown Lisa/the actual real-life girlfriend she represents.
It feels a little voyeuristic, honestly. Like watching someone have a low-level mental breakdown over the deterioration of their relationship.
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