Among my favorite musicals is Rent. I confess that I feel guilty about some of the more problematic aspects of the musical. It is not as if I actually approve of the life choices made by any of the characters. In my defense, I would like to make the case for seeing the musical from a conservative perspective as an exploration of the intellectual trap of attempting to live outside of any communal standard.
The characters in Rent are fundamentally narcissists in the sense that they choose to live for themselves over the interests of any community. To be clear, there is a spectrum among the characters with Maureen clearly being the most narcissistic with Mark and Angel being the least. In this, they follow the dictates of 19th-century Romanticism, the main philosophy in the Western tradition that attempts to justify placing the desires of the individual over the moral standards of the community.
Ultimately, living for oneself is an unworkable idea so the characters attempt to create their own counter community This can be compared to Milton’s demons trying to create their own counter to Heaven, a project doomed by its own inherent contradictions. If submission to God is the necessary component to build heaven, then any community founded on the rejection of God will, by definition, turn into Hell.
The characters attempt to protect the homeless tent city from being torn down by their former friend Benny. The homeless (unless they are following some version of apostolic poverty) are an example of what can be seen, from an Aristotelian perspective, as a non-community. They may live in physical proximity to each other but they lack a set of binding values that allow them to work together for some greater good. Later, the characters try to form a community with each other. This attempt to build a community is fundamentally doomed as the "greater good" that binds the characters together is their commitment to living according to their Bohemian personal standards.
One can see the logic of Bohemia as leading to one of two intellectual dead ends. The first can be seen in the landlord Benny.
On the surface, Benny is a traitor to the
Bohemian values of the other characters. He once was like them, but then he
exchanged sexual liberation and socialist living for marriage and now works as
a capitalist for his father-in-law, destroying the homeless community in order to
build the more lucrative Cyber Café. It should be noted that Benny still sees
himself as the altruist and he has a highly plausible argument that, in the
long run, Roger and Mark have a better chance of pursuing their Bohemian dreams
under his "neoliberal" regime. The fact that we have good reason to question Benny’s
sincerity both in terms of his marriage and his altruism does not mean that the
other characters are right. On the contrary, it is Benny, with his neoliberalism, who is the ultimate Bohemian, living for himself without any care what other people think of him while pretending to have higher ideals. His hypocrisy is the contradiction within Bohemia
itself.
The second and truly literal dead end for Bohemia is manifested in AIDS, which physically affects both Roger and Angel. AIDS represents death in its inevitability as well as its fundamental unfairness. With AIDS, some people might die in a matter of months while others may go on for years. Obviously, all people face death. AIDS just forces the characters to face the likelihood of dying young without the hope of pushing death to some far-off old age.
Roger hopes to write one song before he dies that will redeem him from being nothing more than a singer who threw away his gifts to heroin addiction and was responsible for his girlfriend's suicide.
Conventional people face the problem of death by making
themselves part of a community. By being faithful to a spouse and raising one’s
children together with them, one ensures that, even after you die, you will
have meant something to someone remaining. This family should be embedded
within some larger community with a story that plays out over millennia. Finally, this
community and its purpose should be based on something supernatural that
transcends time itself. (One thinks of the Last Battle where all the good things of Narnia are taken to Aslan's country to continue to exist forever even after Narnia is destroyed.) Even Romanticism could never truly escape this need for
community. Even the genius artist who violates community standards in pursuit
of their art can only succeed by embodying the essence of some people. Roger has no
people to write for who will appreciate his art, leaving him facing death with
nothing but regret and guilt for his girlfriend’s suicide.
The musical’s solution is for the stripper Mimi to fall in love with him, coming into his apartment to ask him to “light her candle."
With some reluctance, Roger falls for Mimi and this allows
him to join with the other characters to resist Benny. This gives us an
unconventional community populated by people who, except for Mark, are
some combination of gay, drug addict, or HIV positive. The big question of the
musical then becomes can love allow such an unconventional community to
survive.
In the end, the true challenge does not come from Benny, but from the group's own internal dynamics. Angel's death causes the group to break apart as Joanne stops being willing to put up with Maureen's flirting with other people and Roger comes to suspect Mimi of sleeping with Benny, causing her to relapse into addiction.
It is here that the musical finds itself trapped between allowing its scenario to play out to its logical conclusion or giving the characters a happy ending. Logically, the community should fall apart as the characters' beliefs do not allow for the formation of a community. As such, the musical should end as a tragedy. This, though, would not affirm the beliefs and lifestyle choices that the musical is attempting to advocate. In the end, the needs of propaganda outweigh the demands of truthfulness. A happy ending is salvaged with Roger returning to Mimi after she overdoses and she is saved, deus ex machina style, from a drug overdose.
It is interesting to note that the musical has an artistic problem to match its intellectual weakness in that it effectively lacks a second act. The songs that are worthwhile are almost all in the first act. If only musical shorts were a thing then Rent could have been presented up until La Vie Boheme with the gang giving Benny the proverbial middle finger. One imagines Jonathan Larson of blessed memory being forced to add material simply to get to a respectable runtime and hoping that audiences would be so impressed with the first half that they would forgive him for giving them a garbage second act.
