It was while we were watching Rent (the 2005 film based on the musical: you may have blinked and missed it) from Netflix that Mark and Roger struck me as being exactly like the villains from Atlas Shrugged: they feel that because their friend Benny has a job and they don't, he should pay their rent for them, and if he doesn't, he must be greedy, selfish, and mean. When he does offer to pay their rent for them, instead of saying, "Hey, thanks, Benny!", they resentfully accuse him of doing it only for the ulterior motive of feeling magnanimous.
Now, I recognize that this is a gross oversimplification, but that's how it felt at the time. I thought that Benny should just cut loose his mooching friends (especially if they're just going to be unpleasant to him), just as Dagny Taggart should cut loose her brother Jim, and Hank Rearden should cut loose his brother Philip.
[The complicating factor is that, from the dialogue, it seems that Benny told them in the past that he had waived their rent, in which case is indeed to jerky to then demand that they pay the previously waived rent: gifts are not to be taken back. But this interpretation is by no means clear, since the opening song is very much about their concern about how they're going to be able to pay their rent (which is not consistent with Benny having told them that they were "golden", as they later claim in the dialogue). (Now, perhaps Benny never did tell Mark and Roger that they were "golden", and Mark and Roger are just trying to trick Benny into thinking he did, which would reconcile the song and the dialogue, but would make Mark and Roger to be even less sympathetic characters, so I'm not sure that's right, either.)]
The last time I had seen Rent was live, on stage, in Milwaukee, with my dear friends Ellen and Laura, some time ago (I was perhaps fourteen or fifteen at the time? help me out here). I hadn't prepared for it by listening to the music or any other sort of basic research (although I had seen a film of La Bohème, which only made the ending even more confusing), so spent most of the show trying to follow the plot, and being awed by my first exposure to the concept of a transvestite (which, just to show how much time has passed since then, is a word I have not heard in a long time: today we would say Angel is transgender (considering which, I was a bit surprised by the decision in the film to have Angel sing tenor, when I distinctly remember from the musical that she sang alto: but maybe that's just a memory I've manufactured?)).
This time around, race struck me as far more of an issue. (The first time I saw it, I just thought, "oh, look, a diverse cast".) The two most bourgeois characters (i.e., the only characters who have white collar jobs) are Benny and Joanne, who are both black.
I'm not entirely sure why Joanne is singing about la vie bohème, since she's a lawyer. (Unless she's bohemian simply because she's gay, which may have made more sense in 1989 (a lifestyle choice?) than it does today: today, I don't really one's sexual orientation as being any impediment to being a yuppie.)
But the fact that Benny is black is what struck me the most. Benny probably had to work very hard to get his white collar job, and his parents probably worked even harder to send him to college so that he could get that job. But instead of celebrating his success, his white friends resent him for it and view it as the result of bad decisions. They have the luxury of choosing to be poor, which they consider to be a virtue, precisely because their ancestors were able to amass enough wealth to send them to college, and they always have the option of picking up the phone any time their loving parents call, and asking to be bailed out. So what's so bad about Benny wanting to build enough wealth to give his own children that luxury?
In a similar vein, after having read The Feminine Mystique, I have even less sympathy for Mark's opinion that writing TV episodes is "selling out". Shouldn't he be glad to have the opportunity to share his art with an audience? The fact that they're willing to pay for it means that they find it valuable, which is a good thing, not a bad thing.
1 comment:
I want to say that I was 15 which would probably make you 14, but I could be wrong.
I don't really follow you on The Feminine Mystique but I think it's less Atlas Shrugged getting to you than Chris Columbus' terrible, terrible movie. I don't know if it's easier onstage to make audience members root for a group of well-fed advantaged actors playing a surrogate family of ragtag artistic miscreants, but I found the stage characters much more sympathetic than the too-old too-clean too-naive portrayals in the movie. (Complicating matters, the movie features most of the original cast... but I stand by the "too old.") They just seem whiny instead of earnestly trying to work on their art, and the Disneyland of the East Village set design makes it unclear where or when the musical is set... which historical understanding is crucial to the plot, but of course looking to musicals for that kind of logic is probably a lost cause anyway.
Or maybe Taye Diggs as Benny is just that good of an actor, which is possible.
To your point about Joanne, I think being a lesbian is the bohemian thing about her, much as she may have to disguise it at the office.
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