RENT has not held up

The original cast of RENT performing La Vie Bohème in 1996. Photo by Joan Marcus, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

On New Year’s Eve, I found myself drinking with a young man I had met earlier in the evening. His parents were hippie filmmakers, he told us, so “working for the FBI then going into finance was my rebellion.”

Would that all youthful rebellions yield such productive results. Unfortunately, RENT, that grand epic of the grunge generation, glamorizes non-conformity in service of nothing whatsoever, as I discovered the other night at Dominion Theatre’s opening performance of the rock opera.

Unusually for a recovering Theatre Kid, I had never had the displeasure of attending a performance of RENT and went solely to see a friend in the lead role of Mark. The program offered a content warning for coarse language and partial nudity. It should have warned instead of nauseating self-gratification.

Premiering nearly thirty years ago on Broadway, RENT is a loose adaptation of Puccini’s La Bohème, which follows a motley crew of starving artists in nineteenth-century Paris. David McGarry has ably reviewed Puccini’s work elsewhere on this site, but where La Bohème is ultimately skeptical of its protagonists’ romanticist pretensions, RENT affirms them. The show follows a filmmaker (Mark), a musician (Roger), a performance artist (Maureen), a drag queen (Angel), a college professor (Tom), and a stripper (Mimi), as they live hand-to-mouth amid the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Manhattan.

I mention their professions as a formality – each is a talentless hack incapable of making a living from his chosen profession. They endlessly complain that their basic needs are not met for free while contributing nothing to society, spending what they do scrounge together on booze and smack. Meanwhile, they ignore calls from their concerned suburban parents (these are played for laughs) while berating anyone who refuses to step into their parents’ role and provide for them.

The chief example is Benny, their ex-roommate who now owns the dilapidated building in which they live. The one member of the gang who has grown up and tries to make something of himself, Benny is portrayed as the villain of the piece for “selling out” and demanding that they finally start paying him rent to the live in the building he’s kindly allowed them to squat in for free. They organize protests of his attempts to clear a homeless encampment in the adjacent lot, where he plans to build an arts center to provide them all with creative space and gainful employment. They nonetheless rely on him to bail them out when they encounter AIDS-induced hospital fees and funeral expenses.

Unintentionally, Benny comes off as a paragon of Christian virtue as he keeps magnanimously forgiving them for their insolence under a torrent of what-happened-to-you-man abuse. As they preach non-conformity by choosing poverty, they reveal their guiding value to be entitlement rather than noble rebellion.

And throughout one is nagged by the question: rebellion in service of what?

RENT not only fails to articulate a productive end to non-conformity, but it also disparages the very idea of productivity. Benny is the bad guy for trying to improve the neighborhood. Mark attempts to film a documentary of the goings-on throughout the show while Roger struggles to write a single song, but in the end they struggle for nothing: Mark never gets to screen his documentary and Roger’s song sucks. In a rare moment of self-awareness, Maureen’s performance art is depicted as an overwrought tripe. It’s a rebellion for its own sake, nothing more.

Rebellion for its own sake has been an established pillar of American culture ever since boomers started fetishizing it in the late 60s. As early as 1981, Family Ties mocked the ironic cycle this can produce: the children of 60s free love raise a Gen X son who rebels by wearing a tie to school and loving Ronald Reagan. Ironically, there is nothing more conformist than railing against conformity. Aren’t we passed this by now?

Additionally, any character’s attempt to move on in life is immediately reversed. Mark accepts then quits a job at the local news when his protest footage gets him noticed. Roger sells his guitar and moves to Santa Fe for about one scene before he returns to the same shabby digs in New York. The message is clear: choose nihilism and poverty or your art (which no one will see) is inauthentic. Even when offered a way out of poverty and a platform to show your work to someone other than your friends, say no. Can’t have audiences actually see your art, which would be selling out! The relentless pursuit of vague notions of authenticity leads to, as Benny puts it, not Bohemia but Calcutta.

I despair to think that generations of angsty teens have now grown up performing “La Vie Bohème” oblivious to the vapidity of its empty sloganeering. “To hating pretension!” they’ve inveighed as if that’s not the most pretentious thing a self-styled starving artist could say. “To hating mom and dad! To marijuana! To masturbation! To every passing fad!” they’ve shouted as a battle-cry against the bourgeoisie.

Yet each item on the checklist has become more and more bourgeois in the new millennium. Record numbers of young adults are cutting off all contact with their parents, upscale weed stores line the streets in the majority of the US, and porn addiction is off-the-charts. RENT has aged poorly because it preaches rebellion against a bourgeois consensus that hasn’t existed in decades (if it ever did) through behaviors that have been repackaged and commercialized for the middle class.

So why does anyone like this show, besides the fact that a precious few numbers are moderately catchy?

The show endures because it flatters the anxieties of boomer and Gen X audiences uncomfortable with the ultimate conformity of their middle-class lives. In a society that lionizes cutting against the grain as an inherent good, they no longer have the intellectual toolkit to justify conformity as a good in itself. They still instinctually grasp that public order, property rights, and clean streets are desirable, but cannot denounce their younger selves for their immature, radical politics. This is not to say that no one should ever break convention, only that it should perhaps be done in service of something more than flattering one’s own faux-bohemian ego.

Let us hope, then, that more and more of my own millennial generation follows the fine example of my New Year’s Eve companion. We should take it as a generational mission to rebel against rebellion for its own sake and eagerly embrace bourgeois, not bohemian, values. They are what enable positive change in our communities and what give us self-congratulatory Broadway musicals in the first place. RENT, after all, implicitly accepts this through Benny’s interventions on behalf of the entitled brats that make up the dramatis personae.

Be a Benny, kids. Mark, Roger, and Maureen are schmucks.