The actor:	Tommy Wiseau
The character:	Johnny
The film:	The Room
The line:	“You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!”

Most of our favorite lines from The Room aren’t great lines. Like, the scene with “Hi, doggy” is memorable, but it’s because it’s like they were trying to get the words in like a boxer trying to get punches in before the bell. I think the first thing I ever learned about The Room was that “Oh hai Mark” series, but of course that’s not a good line because it’s risible. You know what’s a genuinely great line from The Room? “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” The hand gestures, like a reverse raise-the-roof (a “bring-down-the-roof?” there may be a reason this doesn’t have a name), are silly, but within the run of the film, especially halfway through, it’s a recognizably human gesture that’s been basically missing from the film thus far. You take what you can get, or, alternately, context is everything.

There’s a reason that this line works so well. It’s because Wiseau plagiarized it! And not just plagiarized it, but didn’t even cover his tracks!

There’s a reason that the line reading Wiseau gives for this line is so much better than “hahaha, what a story, Mark,” and it’s because like an amateur singer studying a professional’s performance, Wiseau has studied this line. I don’t know if he wanted a closer rendition of it for his own film; goodness knows that one of the primary lessons of The Room is that Wiseau has swimmer’s ear for his own dialogue. He’s not got the length on “You’re” that James Dean does, nor “me.” Dean’s “apart” is rawer than what Wiseau can get to, although Dean was in his early twenties when he made Rebel Without a Cause and I’m not sure that Wiseau himself knew how old he was when he made The Room.

Where the two of them really do come together is on “tearing,” which is a great word for the sentiment that Jim and Johnny are both getting after. The unvoiced alveolar stop whispers you into the real star of the word, that /æ/ which creates the tonal sharpness that defines the rest of the sentence. The rest of the sentence can go hang if you nail “tearing,” and Wiseau does just that. More than that, he’s the only person in The Room you can imagine being able to rip this one off. Juliette Danielle may have inspired a seventeen-year-old Lena Dunham’s appearance, but her register doesn’t have this kind of abandon in it. Greg Sestero, just the prettiest fella you ever did see, is uncomfortable outside of the quietest emotional expression. Wiseau, as is evidenced in this movie that by rights should have disappeared forever like so many other cheap indie flicks, knows how to go for it.