Bohemia is Dead (i.e., What's Bothering Me About Rent)

Maybe I'm procrastinating from finishing my Civil Procedure exam, but I've been bothered all weekend by the movie version of Rent, which I saw late last week, but which it's taken me some time to digest (and to justify writing anything about it, especially here; thanks to the rest of the posts today for inspiring me to write about something not law-related).

Now, granted, any movie prominently featuring the Ninth Circuit's San Francisco courthouse as a backdrop (it's the big, white marble building in some of the background shots) can't be all bad.  [Note my tenuous law connection.] But as someone who first saw the play on Broadway as a teenage New Yorker in the fall of 1996, and who was just floored by its raw power, something's missing here.

Maybe it's the fairly obvious omission of a rather important plot line from the play -- that Roger's ex-girlfriend, April, "left a note saying we've got AIDS before slitting her wrists in the bathroom." (In the movie, we just know that she dies, and there's not even a hint about how.) Maybe it's the slightly less obvious omission of various bits of dialogue dealing with poverty, drug use, AIDS, and the very direct connection between the three, such as the omission of the "Christmas Bells" montage late in Act I. (Much less obvious until you aggregate the differences between the play and the movie, virtually all of which include some drug or AIDS-related dialogue.)

Maybe it's the differences highlighted by Jesse McKinley in the New York Times on November 25 (I'd link to it, but there's no pass-through) -- that the movie is frustrating to New Yorkers because there are so many obvious geographical and physical inconsistencies (e.g., the subway station in the middle of Tompkins Square Park), necessitated by changes in the City since 1990.

I searched fairly far and wide among newspapers and magazines for a reviewer who had some of my angst, as opposed to other angst about the movie, and found at least a somewhat decent candidate in Jorge Morales, writing in (surprise, surprise), the Village Voice. Here's his take:

Instead of bringing a universal love story to the living present, the film traps it in a frozen past like a prehistoric bug in amber, as removed from moviegoers' experience as a dusty diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. I was reminded of the unhip hippies in Milos Forman's Hair, released 12 long years after the Summer of Love, at the height of the disco era. Rent is about as timely now as Gigi.

But my problem with Rent isn't really what I take to be Morales's: that it's anachronistic in a way that it only barely was in the mid-1990s (based on a New York circa 1989/1990 that, even by 1995, no longer was). Because, the difference in emphasis on poverty, AIDS, and drug use notwithstanding, the differences between the play and the movie aren't all that pronounced. Say what you will about it, but the movie is pretty damn faithful. Indeed, Angel's decline in health and ultimate death are even more haunting on screen than they were on Broadway.

So what's really different? Maybe it's context. When Rent hit Broadway in April 1996, it was revolutionary, not in what it did, but in what it stood for. Rent was a message--no, Rent was the message embedded in the frenetic "La Vie Boheme": "Actual Reality. Act Up. Fight AIDS." That line is still in the movie, but the spark, the impetus to do something, is gone.

World AIDS Day came and went last Thursday, with a good (i.e., any) amount of coverage, but no true mandate to people like me. Sure, for many who saw the play, seeing the play was itself as close as they got to acting up. But even then, the play was cathartic in a way that's hard to explicate, but impossible to deny. Even for those, like me, who struggled to identify with most of the characters battling a crippling disease, the importance of and empathy with Mark -- the perfectly "normal," healthy white guy who can only dream of having the energy, passion, and lust of his dying friends -- is impossible to understate.

Now, in contrast, to the extent that the activist message survives in the movie, it's retrospective -- activism was a good idea... AIDS was a problem. Was. So, to a degree, Jorge Morales's review captures exactly what's bothering me. But he attributes it to the filmmaking. I attribute it to context. It's the same story. It's a very different audience. And that's what's sad to me. Although the meaning is largely unchanged, the message is completely gone. At best, "No Day But Today" has turned into "No Day But 1996." Morales seems to think that this was inevitable:

[T]he truth is that by the time Rent opened on Broadway almost a decade ago, it was already a period piece. Giuliani had made the squeegee men disappear, and he'd sent snipers and a tank into the East Village to clear out the squats.

I don't buy it. Because Rent, on Broadway, was still profoundly important in 1998, 1999, 2000, etc. Because New York already had dramatically and irrevocably changed, whether for the better or the worse, by 1996, when I saw it with my Aunt as a wide-eyed 16-year-old. It's not that New York is different now than it was when Rent opened; that's beside the point. It's that we are -- and the world is -- different. And what have we accomplished in those 10 years? Well, if nothing else, we've gentrified Alphabet City.

Oh, and I prefer Daphne Rubin-Vega as Mimi, too... (and, to be fair, Sandra Oh as Alexi Darling).