RENT - Look Pretty and Do As Little as Possible: A Video Essay

I can't wait for the Broadway musical romanticizing the coronavirus.

Rich kids living in the city and refusing their allowance aren't poor, they're camping.

30:35 I had always interpreted the Who Do You Think You Are scene between Roger and Mimi being Mimi wanting to sleep with Roger, along with doing drugs, so Roger was simultaneously denying Mimi because a) he’s trying to stay sober and b) he has HIV (and doesn’t know that she does) and obviously doesn’t want to infect her. Two very good reasons for rejecting Mimi. And then I remembered getting super confused because I thought about this scene after it was done, and I was like “…wait… why is this movie treating Mimi like the good-person idealist and Roger the repressed stick in the mud? He has the moral high ground?” Like we find out later that she also has HIV, and it’s treated like “Oh my gosh, we can be together!” But I was like, wait, Mimi didn’t know that Roger had HIV prior to soliciting him… so she was going to willingly risk infecting someone else (and do drugs and whatnot) just to “Live in the Moment”? Like what the heck?!

Now that I've actually watched Rent (Mostly because I loved Netflix's Tick Tick....Boom) I think Rent would be a lot more interesting if it mostly focused on Angel and Collins since they're the actual homeless, gay, and aid-victims that the musical seems to want to fight for. You'd get more into whatever Collin's theory is, and Angel comes off a lot more sympathetic as she's made more 3 dimensional.

"Are you mad at a system that failed to act on an epidemic before it became a pandemic?" That hits differently than it did 4 years ago.

The talk about how the American government handled AIDS in the 1980s hits REALLY REALLY HARD watching this now, in the spring of 2020.

When I was a full time stage manager, I was the definition of a "starving artist". One of the venues I was a technician in gave a meal per shift. Most days, that was my only meal. I had to move multiple times just to not be homeless, which I ended up being for a week. It sucked. A lot. One of my friends, another stage manager who worked in more stable companies, had another full time job, and lived at home rent free romanticized the shit out of my life. This movie was the reason she did. This movie is the worst.

having never seen rent and only absorbing it through cultural osmosis, i was today years old when I found out that mark and roger are two different characters

Anyone else re-watching this in the midst of this Corona craziness? “Healthcare is a right!” “40 million infected is a fucking plague!” “Early aggressive action pays off.” Ooooof. The times really never change.

Hearing the crowd shout that healthcare is a right while going through the coronavirus stuff hits different. We really will have to keep fighting forever, won’t we?

Rent was filmed for whatever reason in San Francisco, where they dressed the seediest block of seedy 6th Street as a seedy block of NYC for a month. The crew sprayed fake snow everywhere on the location since it never ever snows there, then they paid all the winos & junkies to go away each day (I am not making this up) and brought in paid extras costumed as winos & junkies.

As a southern-baptist raised white gay in rural Colorado who didn't even hear about the AIDS crisis until his early twenties, it always horrifies me to learn more about it. Every single thing I learn about it is like a knife in the chest and... I just feel the system is still ACTIVELY erasing the many many people who fought and died during that time. The version I ultimately learned, when I learned about it in college was so incredibly watered down and that was the only exposure to it I got in my life until maybe 4 or 5 years ago. "There is a thing called AIDS, it's why you use protection. People thought it was the gay virus in the 80's so quite a few people died but we know that's not true anymore so it's all fine :) " Maybe that's a little harsh on what I was taught but I don't feel by much. A few years ago I came across a fucking TUMBLR post talking about it and I was just like, "Wait... what happened!?" And then I researched and learned so much about it and it just STAGGERED me. It still staggers me. And now with 'rona running around killing almost 400,000 people and everyone acting like it's a minor inconvenience, or even romanticizing it, I just feel like letting things like RENT, things that do everything they can to be like "AIDS bad :( But not... so bad, right?" are honestly a bit more insidious than we give them credit for. Even if it's not the actual intention things that soften and blur the faces of the people who fought and died for the right for US to live, the 90's kids, the 00s kids should not be given a free pass. Many of us wouldn't be here if it weren't for those people, and we need to make sure we give them the thanks they deserve by not forgetting them.

Also, RENT's "rage against the machine" isn't...the FDA, CDC, Pharmaceutical companies, The Reagan Administration but...their landlord.

Yeah, no, poverty isn't romantic. Spend a couple of weeks sleeping on bus stop benches because you actually don't have any money to pay the rent rather than just choosing not to and anyone who thinks that it is will change their tune pretty damn quick. I'm writing this under the blankets of a king sized bed with the heater blazing, and remembering what it's like to be out in the cold with only a jacket to keep you warm, I choose the former every bloody time, "art" be damned. Fucking trust fund kids.

I wonder how long it will be before we get a musical called “Quaran-Teens” or something romanticizing the Coronavirus.

"Capitalism is bad!!! Now please pay $200 for our tickets." -Broadway musicals, basically.

that intro is one of the reasons I start fuming when people say "You can survive trump, you survived Reagan." no. we didnt.

My mom told me "I don't need to watch Rent, I lived it. Too many friends died to have to watch it again" - it made me realize how hollow this movie actually was.

"Why do you hate me so much? What did I do to you? Are you Rent fans?"

both of my moms lived in nyc through the HIV AIDS crisis, and were around this age. they were also activist/artists. one of them devoted her college life to trying to bring attention to it and watching her friends die around her. she did sit-ins, die-ins, and got arrested multiple times. she watched this musical with me and when they mentioned act-up (which is the organization she was apart of) she was like what that’s us! and i was like are you offended? and she was like to be honest a little😂 we both don’t like the story at all but absolutely adore the music though. and for people who will die on their rent hill, just think about that this story has happened to real people, and the musical was written in the 90s. it wasn’t that long ago, it was just tone-deaf. anyway, that’s all i have to say. great video.