of Tennessee Williams, whose highly emotional scenes he enjoyed acting out in drama school – many advertising materials for The Room make explicit parallels to the playwright's work through the tagline "A film with the passion of Williams." In his direction and performance, Wiseau attempted to emulate Orson Welles, Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando and James Dean, especially Dean's performance in the film Giant, and went so far as to directly use quotes from their films – the famous line "You are tearing me apart, Lisa!" is derived from a similar line performed by Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. MacDowell and Zborowski point out that The Room democratises "the pleasures involved in being a critic, due to the film’s blatant breaking of the most simple rules of coherent cinematic narrative". Middlemost has shown that Wiseau's authorship and intentionality are integral to the audiences' enjoyment of the film's flaws. Tirosh has suggested that this need for integrity is comparable to the reception of medieval works such as the Icelandic sagas, and equates the audience shouting at the screen with scholarly works on textual editions. Inconsistencies and narrative flaws The script is characterized by numerous inexplicable mood and personality shifts in characters. In analyzing the film's abrupt tone shifts, Sestero highlighted two scenes in particular. In the first scene, Johnny enters the rooftop in the middle of a tirade about being wrongfully accused of domestic abuse, only to become abruptly cheerful upon seeing Mark; a few moments later, he laughs inappropriately upon learning that a friend of Mark's had been severely beaten. On set, Sestero and script supervisor Sandy Schklair repeatedly tried to convince Wiseau that the line should not be delivered as comical, but Wiseau refused to refrain from laughing. In the second instance, occurring later in the film, Mark attempts to kill Peter by throwing him off a roof after Peter expresses his belief that Mark is having an affair with Lisa; seconds later, however, Mark pulls Peter back from the edge of the roof, apologizes, and the two continue their previous conversation with no acknowledgment of what just occurred. In addition to being rife with continuity errors, the film has several plots, subplots and character details whose inconsistencies have been commented on by critics and audiences. The Portland Mercury has stated that a number of "plot threads are introduced, then instantly abandoned." In an early scene, halfway through a