25 Quotes by Mark O'Connell

These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don’t imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny.

I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.

This was what we did as a species, after all: we built ingenious devices, and we destroyed things.

The robot successfully dismounted the car, proceeding at a slight crouch, and with exaggerated caution, toward the door; these movements it performed in the manner of a prodigiously shitfaced man intent on demonstrating that he had only had a couple of sherries with dinner.

The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.

I pressed him gently on the matter, but he seemed a little reticent, which is maybe what you’d be wise to expect from a cryptologist who was also a practicing hermeticist.

Much like Ros’s novels, then, The Room is remarkable for the way it seems to expose the absurd artifices of its form by getting everything about that form so flagrantly wrong. Wiseau’s failure to achieve the clichés he seems to aim for at the level of plot, dialogue, and performance eventually starts to look like aesthetic subversion.

He shows, however accidentally, that the devices and conventions we have learned to respond to do not necessarily solve or even do anything. More than any artist I can think of, Wiseau proves Northrop Frye’s belief that all conventions are, at heart, insane.

The idea of whole brain emulation – which was, in effect, the liberation from matter, from the physical world – seemed to me an extreme example of the way in which science, or the belief in scientific progress, was replacing religion as the vector of deep cultural desires and delusions.