*gasp* Honey, look! It's a homeless person! Awww, he's so cute. Everyone shush, don't startle him. This is a really special moment, you guys. Look, he wants my sandwich, aww hehe no, silly. That's not for you. I got this special because I can't have wheat. My crystal healer said so.
@@useroffline9999 You know, the internet can disappoint you so often. But sometimes a person reaches across the void to voice their disarmed approval. It feels nice. Thanks!
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.
@@alim.9801 She continued to get better jobs than me. I actually decided to take a long break from theatre in December (good timing) due to the mass amounts of abuse by a few companies.
Recently I found out a friend actually believed this. He legitimately asked me what kind of lessons he could learn from me given my own poverty. He couldn't comprehend that my suffering _didn't_ make me stronger or more creative or more intelligent. It ruined me. He just glamorized what I went through so much that he genuinely though that I was somehow "better off than him for going through this." Then when I talked to friends I trusted online about it they thought the exact same thing. Suddenly it went from friendship to them telling me what I SHOULD be doing or dismissing everything I say purely because it didn't fit their worldview of what being impoverished is actually like.
@@purplegill10 HOLY SHIT that sounds awful. You pulled your shit together and got through something fuckin' horrible then people 'supposed to support you fuckin' dismiss it? I dunno if you're still with em' but I hope they've at least changed, but jesus christ. They owe you a massive apology. Don't know much bout being homeless other than it's traumatic.
@@bonfyre4711 most people who think they hate capitalism don't even know what it is. We somehow live in a world where asking for simple rights such as healthcare is constructed as "Communism" for some fucking reason, and as such people who want to have basic rights end up being told all those rights would be communism, so... Yeah, lots decide to claim they hate capitalism. The only real problem with a free market is that if people are free to do anything, they are also free to take huge advantage of others in worse positions than theirs; we got it mostly right with our legal system, where nowadays most countries focus on the idea that "well, if you're not hurting anyone else or destroying anyone else's property, whatever, do what you want"... But somehow in the area of market legality we still have the stupid belief that asking for something as simple as "hey, could you maybe not knowingly kill people?" would be living in 1950's Russia. We've painted the economic world black and white, and if you don't have a million dollars in your bank right now, you are among the people who suffered for it.
@@bonfyre4711 Capitalism sucks because it fixes people into hierarchy based on capital, it cant deal with ecological issues it causes, it yo yos from economic crash to economic crash, high stage capitalism causes imperialism, people are sick, illiterate, and hungry and jobless. And its profitted off of human suffering.
@@sugarcakezz if you actively go against cdc guidelines because you feel like you shouldn't have to, fuck you man. covid got rapidly worst, the cdc didn't predict it right away. whatever. it's not that hard to just listen so people don't have to die. carelessness along the lines of "everyone dies anyway, why not" is stupid as hell.
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.
as a trans person with considerable access to privilege through my parents, mark drives me up the fuckin wall. does he not realize he could use his resources to help his community? even the smallest things, like having a warm, clean apartment where your friends/community can come stay when they’re in trouble. having groceries and food to share. i don’t understand how you can live among people you love in poverty in good conscience, when you could bring more resources to the table.
I would never be comfortable accepting this help from rich 'friends', first cs they all expect you to do that, to use them (ironic) second, well poor are always in trouble, that's our thing.
Maybe you missed the parts where he offered his apartment as a shelter to friends who were struggling? Also, the documentary showed what it was like to be silenced as a community, what it was like to live with HIV/AIDS, and what it was like to be homeless in the winter. Sure, Mark was imperfect but please direct me towards someone who is.
@@LuanaSantos-rl4sb dude, that is a you problem. your pride isn't justification for the amorality of mark who could and did not do anything that could have actually made a difference in the life of his friends or the community he pretended to be part of so that he could milk it for 'art points'. when you are part of a community you are _supposed_ to help when you are able to. this is how it works, everyone chips in what they can for each other to float the whole of the group through the hard bits. this guy offered nothing to the community even when he was looking at the people in it struggling
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?!
Yo. I never thought of it that way. I just thought roger was rejecting her because she was basically a baby-19 yrs old- and he was probably going to die from that disease and he didn’t want to ruin her life with a relationship with him.
Yeah, I found that odd too. I was backstage for my high school's production of RENT, and I remember always being so confused at why the song is written as if Mimi is right: Roger has perfectly good reasons to reject her, even when he realizes that she has HIV. Yet, the song is staged and written as if it's Roger that's being overly angry. Mimi gets the entire female ensemble backing her in the script, while Roger sings alone, making it seem as if her opinion holds more weight, even though Roger has denied her multiple times, which he completely has the right to do. I don't really have much experience with the movie, as I have only watched it once, but from my time helping out with my school's production, those are just my thoughts on the scene.
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?
Well the United States is also the the world major supplier of medical technology and medical research. Medical technology is one of our main exports. So it’s easy to argue for healthcare as a right when you don’t know that our current healthcare system has created untold good in the world. It’s a tough thing to say. I think we could find a good middle ground somewhere. I don’t want healthcare to be completely free. Rich people buying medicine and getting treated creates a lot of money for R&D.
i feel bad for the US, i wish you guys were able to obtain free healthcare. We have free healthcare in my country and just knowing you never have to worry because the system supports you, is much more liberating than the american idea of freedom tbh
a) An NHS wouldn't be completely free, it'd be paid for by tax dollars, like in every country it's been tried and works in. How does research happen? The same ways it happens in those countries; with medical research like what we have, with government research competing, with bounties, etc. b) Canada, the UK, Australia, Europe, Japan, and Korea are huge in healthcare technology and medical research and competitive despite having nationalized systems c) other countries, such as the developing countries and whatever China is, also manage proportionally to their economies. Hell there's a worldwide demand for Cuban doctors, and no one is advocating for the system that made Cuban medicine. This argument is not only unconvincing, it's honestly starting to become insulting
@@notmytruthTHEtruth >tfw people call bernie anti-semetic for fighting the israeli government's blatant right wing nationalist tendencies stop being a doomer; tulsi literally supported a resolution to defend israel at all costs and spun it as free speech shit when in reality all it does is hurt palestinians and circlejerk the israeli government twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1155268020723310592
@@notmytruthTHEtruth while I dont love Israel, that's far from the most important, possibly election-deciding decision to make right now. Even if you see that as a lost cause, there are other reasons to decide on a candidate to support.
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.
"We are soooo anti selling out and pro poor people"! *Proceeds to yeet the f*ck out the poor people and replace them with well paid actors, thanks I hate it!*
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.
But that is the whole problem, the characters they chose to centralize instead are instead these self-involved entitled straight white boys who are really falsely sympathetic to people who are ACTUALLY oppressed, and act like they are somehow ALSO oppressed merely by association, and by their desire to ACTUALLY exploit them for "art".
I feel like watching tick tick boom gives you the explanation of why the musical doesn't fully focus on that and it's because Larson didn't know how to create those characters without also having himself in the story because of his close relationships to people like that and that creates the characters of Mark and Roger and they also need focus to warrant being in the show.
@@RoaringKetchup its definitely not something I would do or support, but poverty really does make you do crazy shit for money. its why some SWers do (invertebrate, usually) crushing.
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.
@@reganfisher8180 It's not just LGBT people they're talking about. Victims of the AIDS crisis aren't gonna watch a movie where "but muh art" takes priority over "the tragedy of AIDS" when the movie uses AIDS to set up it's drama.
Oh poor baby Mark, affording a pretty big studio apartment while having a good paying job in his field that leaves him time to work on his passion project and maintain a friend group with a family that loves him, I feel so bad for him
I think you've missed the point. 1st off, they are poor. Secondly, they are squatters. Thirdly, its a show about the condition of struggling artists during the aids epidemic in New York. Some of the characters have Aids and struggle with it different. Roger is defeated and desperate to leave his mark on the world. Mimi: is going full YOLO, but is destroying herself in the process. Angel and Collins: Take life one day at a time. Enjoying the time they have and embrace the friends they have. They are scared. But they do not fear.
@@TheReddShinobi13 lol. They are poor, he is not. They are dangling over an endless pit of misery, he's hanging over an indestructible safety net that he could fall into at any moment. He doesn't want to pay rent because he'd rather do nothing, not because he's in any way unable to.
@@TheReddShinobi13 1. "They are poor." Mark had a well-paying job that allowed him free time to work on his passions. Which he CHOSE to quit. 2. "They are squatters." See previous. 3. "Struggling artist." He decided to be a struggling artist. He literally had a decent job that would have subsidized his art _in his lap._ The other characters' struggles may or may not be legitimate, but Mark's are not. Mark is a douchebag.
@@GoddoDoggo Mark is textbook trustfund babies BEGGING to he opressed while ignoring how lucky and priviledged they are. He could have helped any of his friends with that job.
I hope they do something like that. I’m really tired of hearing about unemployed folks struggling to survive, and essential workers whining about their jobs being stressful and having to put their lives on the line. I think it would be eye-opening to have a story highlighting the struggles of those who don’t have to work, and especially those who have to work from home. People don’t understand how hard it is motivating myself to put on pants for zoom meetings and not procrastinate while I’m safe at home.
That is an amazing title. "Becky, i cant hear you over the BLM protestors, can you move to another room in your Manhattan penthouse? I know the wifi isn't as good in the dining room but I can barely hear you over the screams as those poor people of color are teargassed."
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
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.
ThejollyFrenchman Yes, poverty is romantic. The Romanticd in the 1800s did exactly what this musical is doing: Mock the establishment while idealizing the lower classes they actually had no connection with often truly absurd depictions of their life. All while never truly challenging the status quo (with the exception of France where Romantic Art was more political) They weren't the first to do so, just the ones who coined the term. So yes poverty is romantic in the purest sense of the word: It is approriated by the middle class in order ti fit into their idealized narratives.
Kullerva I was getting at the point that Romance itself is an artficial construct and that this construct was created by the values of the 19th century upper and upper middle class. Roses and starry nights are only romantic because they were romanticized as well. As is monogamy.
Concur! However, you're mixing up Romantic and romantic. Romantic (capitalized) has a lot of different meanings; one of the first was as a descriptor for adventure tales like Don Quixote (no, seriously) and, later, grew in meaning to refer to the cult of exceptionalism of the artist and the fetishization of deep feeling as the ultimate goal of life (a la Goethe's Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers). "Rent" adopts the worst parts of Romanticism in spades, but romance (i.e. lovey-dovey bullcrap that men use to get women into bed) is something entirely different, even if it was--and continues to be--constructed in the same way. English is a weird language.
I haven't finsihed the video yet, but does she mention that Jonathan Larson did live in poverty? Or is that an idea in my head that is somehow untrue? I always thought he did and that he died the day before (or a few days before?) RENT opened on Broadway.
@@tape-6 He shouldn't have let them live rent-free if he planned to retroactively demand back the money all at once. As their friend, he knows they can't pay it and he knows that Roger has AIDS, yet he turns off their heat in winter and threatens an eviction to make them stop a protest by a mutual friend who he could deal with himself. In the movie, Benny is played as kind and charismatic, so I get why his friends come off as jerks. But consider that they're cold and sick and they know that Benny is comfortable and only wants the rent money to drive up property value for his new business. It makes sense that they feel somewhat betrayed. On top of which, Benny probably didn't pay rent either when he lived with them.
@@AliciaNyblade I confess, I am a Mark fan. No doubt that he is pretentious and flawed, but he is doing the emotional labour of helping Roger and has to watch his friends die. But thanks! Benny shouldn't get a free pass to act sleazy. The movie sanitized him when it changed his and Mimi's relationship.
@@AliciaNyblade I think Mark's worst fear is loneliness. As such, he is always in others' business and ready to defend his tribe by any means. I really really enjoy Lindsey's videos! I think the "woke" style is a way of adding humour and keeping a strong thesis. I get where you're coming from though, since her biases show. I suspect that Lindsey, and a lot of Rent critics, are defending themselves - like, "I'm an artist who works hard and has to pay rent and I don't feel that entitled." Where I really disagree with her is the implied assumption that the play's job is to represent the whole AIDS crisis or have a clear moral. She makes a good point that La Boheme/Rent doesn't exist to tackle politics, but to make us feel for specific characters. Also, (I'm sorry for getting on a tangent), it bugs the heck out of me when audiences ignore context. I'm not an expert on NYC in the 90s, but what little research I've done explains a lot about the musical and why it's written the way it is.
@@AliciaNyblade I think we're on the same page. Except that I am all for dissociating the work from the author when possible (hard to do in Rent's case!) Maybe death of the author can be a crutch for critics who want to push a single interpretation. My thinking is that, to get to know Rent, I have to really pay attention to the story and part of that story includes knowing about history, AIDS stigma and gentrification. And in my experience, the more I pay attention to a text, the more profound it is. In Rent, like you pointed out, I see characters who value friendship and creativity more because of how fragile those things are. And Benny, the alternative, compromises his friendship for wealth. I agree that the show wouldn't be what it is without Jonathan's need to honour his friends. His story is part of the show's mythology. However, I guess I think death of the author is just acknowledging that we can never know his motives for sure. We can only look at what's written. Btw, I really appreciate your comments. You've clearly thought all of this through!
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.
If there's one thing Neo-liberal culture will do, it will frame all problems and atrocities that non-standard entities (minorities) have faced as both 'not so bad' and totally over and fixed. This is done for the sake of the standard entity. Take the civil rights movement, specifically Martin Luther King, and how... softened he has been. His edges have been rounded off. His Fight framed as a thing without fire and anger, of politeness and pure civility. Take the nature of Amerind - European 'relations' throughout american history. All fights are framed as "Really not so bad, just cause of some bad actors. And it's all over and gone now. Totally won.". Just look at the 'racism is over' folks. Like shit man I used to buy into that. Just cause I didn't exactly don a KKK hood myself and no one I knew did either. But it's fuckin not over. The fight hasn't been won, Martin Luther King didn't cure racism. He just dragged a ton of legal protections out of the governments bloated rotting mass against it. But whomever is behind the cultural propaganda would have us believe that it's over, the standard-entity is good to the nonstandard entity now. Except for the few bad eggs. (in this case, White people, to Black people. To be specific) There's no like, concerted powerful systems that act against the non-standard entity. Perhaps luckily, society has paid attention to the recent Police Murders of non-standard entities (and a bit of the police murder of the standard entities too) so it's become harder to push the soft and smooth view of the civil rights struggle. But I'm sure once the passion behind the current Police Murder thing dies down, they'll get back to smoothing it all down. same sorta thing is happening now to THE GAYS. Pretending that everything is fine now and if it ever wasn't fine it wasn't too bad, and it was fixed quick by the Good Standard-Entities when the Nice Non-Standard Entities asked. There totally isn't a powerful largely religiously motivated political force that actively opposes the gays actively. Has to be that way so corporations can profit off the Gays. They gotta be Shiny and Smooth. Watch. When Trans People get their foot more in the door as far as 'being accepted' goes, the EXACT same thing will happen to them. I'll give it 10-20ish years before it starts. People will look back now and pretend Terfs barely existed and were just a few bigots that the Good Standard Entities didn't like, and not an active powerful opposing force that is given equal respect and weight by the Standard Entities.
This is how I feel about the opioid epidemic and how romanticized addiction is in movies. 75,000 people died of a drug overdose last year alone, and 50,000 of them was specifically from an opioid overdose. The number has increased every single year since the early 2000s. Nothing ever happens...they'll talk about the problem but no one ever makes rehabs or medication more affordable and accessible. But the make prison hell of accessible and once they can get an addict in the system the know the chance of recidivism is sky high and they make a lot of money off prisoner slavery. But addicts and people with mental illness in general are also stigmatized and no one really cares about them. Not really but they do a lot of lip service. Thoughts and prayers thoughts and prayers.
AIDS traumatized our parents in ways they are still working through. I was taught how HIV/AIDS worked and was transmitted in school, but it was always shrouded in this layer of silence and discomfort with the subject. Teachers didn't want to talk about it, parents grew silent, even the videos and readings would make vague allusions to how HIV+ people shouldn't face discrimination, but no real explanation of why they would in the first place (this was especially confusing since they first introduced the topic in sex ed before we learned about actual sex, so it was just this a bunch of stuff about periods and one random video about an autoimmune disorder). It was much, much later that I learned my parents had lost friends to AIDS and that they had been deeply scarred by the hatred and negligence they had witnessed --even though they themselves were not the target. My mother still gets tense whenever there is an outbreak of ebola, bird flu, etc abroad, because she remembers what kind of atrocity a stigmatized disease led her government to commit.
One of my *MANY* favorite critiques here is that the show builds up this song that Roger is writing as this earth-shakingly poetic, life-altering song - a song that sums up his life of heartbreak & tragedy - and when we *finally* get to hear it...it’s easily the most forgettable song in the entire show. Every other song in Rent is an absolute BANGER, but the ONE SONG that the show actually builds anticipation for...is a total dud. It’s almost like the perfect metaphor for Rent in general.
Absolutely! It’s so ironic that the song he sings ( One Song, Glory)ABOUT the masterpiece he wants to write is so much more memorable and emotionally impactful than said masterpiece.
I was under the impression that he was lying, saying he worked on it all year to make her feel loved in her dying moments. Then he just pulls a very meh song out his arse in an attempt to be sweet. But yeah, that song was pap!
I always assumed that was kind of the point. Same with how Mark's movie wasn't great either. It's not about the quality of the end product, it's about the love behind it.
@@introusas I get what you’re saying, but Mark is a bad example of that. He doesn’t actually love anything - he just wants to be subversive for the sake of being subversive. Literally all he does for the entirety of the show is complain about his life, despite the fact that his life is objectively awesome. He has parents that love him (who he completely rejects cuz sOcIeTy), he has a GREAT job **in his chosen field** but he quits it cuz it’s too cOrPoRaTe ew!! And he quits to make his own film, which is absolute horseshit. Mark is easily the worst character in the whole show. He has almost no redeeming qualities and he’s a complete selfish prick.
@@captross07 Okay, I understand and agree with that, but that literally has nothing to do with what I'm saying. I was simply comparing it to my point about Roger's song. It's very simple, derivative, and the lyrics are boring and basic. But believe it or not that song is the one of the few that moves me MOST because of the emotion in his voice. And I'm talking about OBC because the movie is garbage that similarly has no love behind it. And I can personally relate to that song from Mimi's perspective because I have had someone in my life who has pushed me away out of fear, but whom I knew to have loved me. Anyway - I'm not here for an internet fight because I hate those. I'm just stating my own perspective and that even though the song is pretty underwhelming, that it still holds meaning to me personally and if art means anything to even one person, that makes it valuable. And I'm not saying you're arguing against that either, I'm sure you agree. I just wanted to add that perspective to the conversation.
I like to think of Rent as that person who says "I'm not voting because all politicians are corrupt." They think they're rising above it all and are so superior, but they accomplish nothing.
These people think they're better and more intelligent than the rest of the masses because they're "woke" and can "see through the government's lies", so they think that not voting is some profound statement of dissent. When in reality, by not voting, they are effectively silencing themselves and rolling over to let the rest of the masses trample all over them. Their opinion then does not matter because, by not voting, they are choosing to never let their opinion be heard, and are letting the vocal, voting majority speak for them. Not to say that people who don't vote can't complain, but...they really CAN'T complain, because, in this way, they never spoke up against what they're complaining about in the first place, when it would've ACTUALLY made a difference.
1) "Rent" does not have an anti-political-involvement message. In fact, quite the opposite: "Revolution, justice, screaming for solutions, forcing changes, risk and danger. Making noise and making pleas!" 2) Does the relentless scapegoating of non-voters on the internet do anything to convince more people to get involved in politics?
+jdprettynails I don't think I'm superior, I just don't think the system offers change. If I can vote for brutal capitalism #1 or brutal capitalism #2, I care for neither. The system is designed to ensure the process of reaching the top transforms you into a bastard, unless you are already a bastard; witness Obama's early idealism turn to bombing children & deporting families. I don't think that system holds liberation. If voting on its own was effective resistance, politicians wouldn't frame nonvoting as a problem or try to get people to vote; they do these things because making people think voting is the sole form of resistance is an effective way to bind them to the system & divert their efforts. By all means, vote! Just please don't stake all your hopes solely on that; please don't do only that. I don't think I'm superior to you or want to be superior to you; if you want this world to be better, you are my comrade.
@@swanscream5152 I assure you that John fucking McCain and Mitt Romney would have been worse for the country and the world at large than Barack Obama. Voting is triage. It doesn't mean you stop other activism, it doesn't mean you can't protest the person you voted for, but it does mean you keep the worst of two (or more) options out of office. That is not nothing.
well luckily and sadly its being handled better then how aids was initially handled since it affects alot more people, its less about the government not being able to deal with these things but refusing to put effort in the AIDs crisis because they simply could care less if gay people die
Republicans being careless and not at all bothered about a pandemic that they believe doesn’t concern them and that their focus should be on the luxuries they should be given? I’ve never seen that before!
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.
One question I would like to pose for discussion: Did Jonathan Larson intend to write a social justice musical that was intended to inspire activism? Or was it simply a love letter to his friends...warts and all? (Side note: In the NYTW 1994 version of Rent, he plays up the fact that these are flawed people alot more: Maureen is selfish, Mark is obsessive over her, Collins and Angel break the law and steal property shamelessly. The opening song is them describing in detail various methods of killing themselves. I find it interesting how Disneyfied the characters are in the 1996 version.) From the few interviews of Larson that exist the only thing I gleaned from his words is that his biggest intent was to bring younger people to the theatre and to inspire a more rock influenced sound in the genre. To me I always thought that his focus was on the interpersonal struggles of the characters and how they coped with the shitty hand that has been dealt to them rather than making any public service announcements for the FDA. But I guess when you deal with a topic like AIDs the personal inevitably becomes the political whether you intend for that to happen or not. I think the hype and fanfare surrounding Rent turned it into the "stick it to the man" musical when perhaps that was not the creators intention. I honestly don't think he framed it that way...but he's not here to confirm or deny that. And at the end of the day a case could be made for both arguments. I do agree that it's a shame that this overshadows Kramer and Kushner's work when it comes to discussion on art that addresses the AIDs epidemic.
I feel the problem is that people view RENT as a musical about the AIDs epidemic and its impact, where in my opinion it was actually just a geniune modernization of La bohème, which is not a play about TB but one that features TB as a major element, its about bohemians. Johnathan simply chose the AIDs crisis as the closest parallel. Looking back at his life and his work, to me it frames RENT more as just a celebration/romanticizing of this lifestyle that he chose, the people that inhabited it, and art as a pursuit. Its no wonder RENT also seems to be about sticking it to the man, as that was a big part of the young bohemian identity when it was made.
If tick...tick...BOOM is any indication after Superbia (a musical that was about something) failed to get off the ground and Rosa says to write what he knows he focused more on telling a story and less on The Statement, but people just love attaching a Statement onto everything they forget to just look at a musical a story that just so happens to have people with AIDS and HIV living in the late 80s to early 90s.
Unfortunately, as the video points out, setting it against AIDS automatically changes the message. There was no defense against TB at the time Boheme, there was defense against AIDS at the time of Rent. And it's that alone that makes it hard to reconcile their cavalier attitude about it all, spending their time getting upset over concerns like paying rent and selling out, with the reality that AIDS didn't have to be a death sentence. It wasn't an unstoppable force. It just required the government to _do_ something, anything, and instead it chose to sit idly by and watch. It'd be like setting it in the modern day and using COVID as the backdrop. You would be utterly unable to separate the purpose of the disease in the work from the reality of the situation surrounding it, the political issues would by necessity be drawn in as a result of the viewer's own experience.
@@vonriel1822 I don't know people are able to enjoy Come From Away without going spiraling into the War on Terror and everything even remotely related to it, the same with Titanic: The Musical and able to separate it from the topics of travel safety and dozens of social issues.
There's also an unanswered follow-up, which would be, If Larson didn't die before the first preview off-Broadway, would there have been more changes that would have happened during the time it was in the NYTW in 1996 for the transition onto Broadway? There could have been some more of those questions answered, or just more fine-tuning since a lot of shows use that time period and previews on Broadway to make more edits based on how the story would be playing from a critical or audience perspective. Famously, Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George went from off-Broadway to Broadway with basically just the first act, and the second act didn't even come together until near the end of the previews (considering Jonathan Larson's mentor-mentee relationship with Sondheim and the tribute to him in Tick-Tick-Boom.) So I think there could have been more of an opportunity to address more of the musical itself, but without a bigger creative driving force, things mostly went to Broadway as-is, and kind of left things for Rent in the state they are now.
"manic pixie dream-gays going quietly into that goodnight" "fighting and scratching and clawing and quilting..." Dude, I cannot with your brilliant word play😂🙌 I've considered myself a Rent fan for years now, but can honestly say that your perspective has me looking at it in a whole new light. Well done👌👌👌
I can't believe RENT took the position of "having to pay a constantly skyrocketic rate to untrustworthy individuals who will gleefully change the rules at a moment's notice just to get basic shelter, is bad"... ... and somehow made us sympathetic to the *landlords.* You made me sympathize with a landlord, RENT! You're a monster!
Nikol Geier EXACTLY! Compared to these turkeys, Benny looks downright magnanimous! He’s willing to loan out an apartment in NEW YORK CITY for completely nothing, (a move that could only possibly HARM his bottom line) to his closest friends because he cared about them and their worthless ramblings. And even when he welshes on their agreement, (A YEAR-AND-A-HALF IN, might I ad!) he does it so he can fund a studio for ALL OF THEM TO USE. Jesus Christ. What should be the very embodiment of petty capitalist exploitation is the character I most empathize with. Fuck you, RENT. You did this to me.
@@theoneandonlymichaelmccormick And it's sort of implied that THEY'LL STILL LIVE RENT FREE (Or at least cheaper) in the new thing being put up! Shit guys he's offering you a STAKE IN PROPERTY IN NEW YORK.
@@stargate525 he literally says so in his song "you'll see " that of theu convince maureen to stop her "protest" (which wasnt much of a protest but what ever) they could live in their apartment and use his new studio for free with a signed guarantee
As someone who was an active member of ACT UP in the 80s, RENT made me SO ANGRY. It whitewashed and prettified the terror and horror of the AIDS crisis to make it seem like a byproduct of whiny city-dwelling suburbanites who used trans people as props and....GAH! My most "counterculture" friend and I went to see RENT when it first toured to Boston. She was a woman who lived in a squat, made giant, unintelligible sculptures that she wouldn't sell because they were her "children," and regularly held dumpster-dive supper parties. Halfway through Act I, she turned to me and whispered, "Why don't these assholes get JOBS?" That's been my thought on RENT since the beginning.
xingcat As a gay male born in 1987 (like, I'm pushing 30; whoa), I would like to thank you for your participation in ACT-UP. My generation needs an activism injection; people became docile between 1992-2016. It seems the latter half of my generation is start to learn how to act up, but we still need leadership. If it weren't for your work, things might be significantly worse than they are these days.
It's not at all due to me, in particular. I was a kid back then, and we were all really, really scared, even the suburban kids like me. Everyone was dying, everything we knew about the disease (or "knew" about the disease) told us we had no chance at life, nobody was listening. We just made so much noise that people had to listen. It's something I fear we'll all have to learn how to do again in the coming years.
Yes! This damn hashtag generation is the reason America is in the mess it's in. So few people are willing to actually put forth the work to make a difference nowadays, and think they can get away with simply retweeting something. And while that may certainly spread awareness, it doesn't do anything by itself.
"The spread of this was not inevitable, and had the powers that be acted sooner, millions of lives could have been saved. This is what happens when governments fail the people they are sworn to protect." ...y'all. Need to excuse me for a second...I need to lie down.
The "Dear ol' Mom and Dad" line, for me, really encapsulates the vapid façade of rebellion portrayed in Rent: A person wouldn't exist to rebel *without* Dear Ole' Mom and Dad. Yes, shitty parents exist and it's a heady experience to grow up and come to the realisation that they weren't right about everything, and develop your own values, morals, beliefs, and convictions separate from them, or are even directly at odds with the ones you grew up with. But in this story the worst thing the parents have done is... love them? Imagine if this was a conversation between Marc and, say, Angel who I think we can safely assume *cannot* turn to her parents for assistance and she's relating the abusive childhood experience only for Marc to chime in and say "OMG, I know my mom is so annoying! She won't stop CaLlInG!" But also, these characters only have a sense of exceptionalism *because* their peers and communities are carrying on with mundane capitalism and doing the laundry and shit. If the restaurant they terrorize decided "you know, in the spirit of La Vie Bohéme, this is now a food co-op with the model of everyone cooking their own entreé" they would be PISSED; where're they supposed to get their fries now????
"Ugh, how am I supposed to keep up my vapid facade as a struggling artist when my worried mother keeps calling and offering complete financial support?! On a side note, no, gay Black homeless friend whose trans partner is dying of AIDS, I will not be using any of my potential privilege and resources to help you out. I'm living bohemian!"
I mean, given that the restaurant barely let the main cast in to eat because they don’t order expensive enough menu items, I can’t imagine them turning the thing into a food co-op any time soon.
Ive always hated how Rent represents Artists. I always thought it was a hate piece making fun of the "starving artist" until we I did a paper on it in High School and found out it was supposed to be in favor of them... wow, it totally missed the mark
The source material really does go starving artist BY a starving artist. The Mark figure eventually takes up painting signs on an inn for money. The Mimi character dies of tuberculosis in the hospital, and by the time her friends find out about it and go to claim her body, it’s already gone to the medical students for dissection. I did everyone a favor by not seeing Rent. I knew it would annoy me. But Marcello definitely isn’t privileged.
healthcare is not a right. its a privilege granted to you by the wealth of this country. healthcare is still the product of someone elses labor. youre not entitled to that, nor am i required to pick up your tab when the government spends my tax dollars on your visit. so your right hasnt been granted to you yet because its not a right. since the government is incapable of producing literally anything, their only job is to get the hell out of the way while private businesses research solutions to the problems at hand- another thing you dont have the right to, and the government doesnt have the right to commandeer outside of a (REAL) pandemic without due compensation to the company.
As shambolic as the Trump administration's handling of the covid-19 pandemic was, it was still far more comprehensive, far more proactive, and far more compassionate than the Reagan administration's handling of the AIDS epidemic. Let's be clear, that's not meant to be a praise of the Trump Administration. It's meant to highlight just how bad the Reagan administration's response was to the AIDS epidemic.
I mean plenty of people who had signs of covid where mild and fine after a bit. After a bit of signs of aids you would only get worse and die a horrible death I get the point, but the fact that soo many people got better from covid can not really be said about aids. Edit: Point being, if you knew someone who had aids, it meant you knew someone dying a painful death. Alot of Americans saw that painful death and where ok with it cause they where gay. Covid and aids is just not 1 to 1.
@@EGV88 It's a scene from the documentary "How to Survive a Plague" (surviveaplague.com/). The speaker is Larry Kramer (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Kramer). He is criticizing a 1991 gathering of ACT UP (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_UP) activists for falling prey to infighting, negating their ability to gather widespread support in demanding action on the epidemic.
I laughed, but it was a nervous uncomfortable laugh. Because I'm familiar with that speech. It honestly represents what I see as the big problem with a lot of activism. It goes no where because the people arn't organised, they smash windows etc which allows the gov to change the message at will, so their VITAL issue gets ignored. It honestly hurts.
@@Stettafire completely agree with you there. I see this a lot with the activist Left. Group A is so invested in their special interest they'll fight with Group B even though they agree on 99.9% of other issues. Then all of these groups ignore the big picture changes that need to happen in order for their special interests to receive any real attention, all while demonizing the larger organizations and the Democratic Party for daring to focus on the big picture. I'd have gone into activism if I had any patience or tolerance for such petty BS and foolishness.
the sense of entitlement gets worse when you notice how poorly they treat waitstaff, homeless people, and it’s very much a case of punching down when they could actually show solidarity to the working class and turn their frustration towards the 1 percent and those in power who refused to help slow the aids crisis but nah
-We're anarchists, no one can tell us what to do! -Yeah, the government and the corporations should stop oppressing us. -Oh no, I'm talking about the restaurant owner that doesn't want their tables moved.
This movie wants us to hate the landlords for doing their jobs and feel sorry for the main characters who do drugs, have life threatening sex, disrespect the homeless, drink a lot of booze, burn their eviction notices and refuse to pay their rent. I do hope that there’s a sequel to this called, “Evicted”.
I remember my mom saying that one of the best ways to fix Rent would have been 1) not having the main cast have rich families and instead be on their own, and 2) have all the characters be played by teens. She actually liked my high school’s production better than the Broadway version, not because of the singing or acting or anything, but because it felt less weird and off when you saw a group of teens/college freshmen talking about needing to pay rent and not having jobs because they honestly can’t. Maybe they were kicked out of their homes and have to live on their own somehow. It’s just a bit more compelling. Also, a bit more queer rep maybe please?
@jeshala I think what I mean to say is BETTER queer representation. As a queer person myself who is very close to and grew up around survivors of the AIDs crisis (my mom was actually a highly active ally who joined multiple groups to support the community during the crisis), the representation felt very...off, in a way. The queer characters were frequently pushed to the side to focus more on the straight ones, and while most of the characters in general didn't have the happiest of stories, the queer characters pretty much ALWAYS had sad ones or bad endings. Idk, maybe it's literally just me, but it felt kinda weird.
Lindsey, as a hemophiliac affect by AIDS in the 80’s( brother died from the tainted blood supply). Thank you for acknowledging the hemophiliacs affected. It means a helluva lot
Mike White have you read the book April Fools Day by Bryce Courtenay? He was one of Australia’s best authors (and my personal favourite). Bryce had a son who was haemophiliac and contracted HIV from a blood transfusion and died. It’s beautifully written, Courtenay is such a wordsmith and his turns of phrase always take my breath away. Maybe you don’t need read it, but if you want someone to understand your brothers story, it would be a beautiful recommendation. My condolences for your loss
Mike White - oh my God. Are you Ryan's brother?? I remember him! As a child in the 80s he was the first person with HIV or even hemophilia that I ever knew by name, and really taught me so much about both. He seemed like an amazing person. Anyone reading this who was too young should google "Ryan White", he was an extremely important name in the AIDS crisis and deserves to be remembered.
I actually really liked RENT (stage play) when I first learned about it and saw it in high school in the early 2000s. But this video essay addresses a lot of the things about it that made me uncomfortable or seemed a bit..."off." I took it more as the characters generally were more "hedonistic" than actually revolutionary and enjoyed the "catchy" music but couldn't understand what Marc's deal with his parents was (like, what did they ever do to him? care about him too much?) and why he was actively choosing "noble" poverty. But what bothered me the most and that I didn't really have the language to articulate at the time was Angel being treated as a sort of "magical trans or non-binary/latinx" matryr. She was mostly a one-dimensional character portrayed as just good, and sweet, and kind and caring (aside from the dog murder) who, out of ALL the characters with AIDS was the one who "had to die" seemingly just to progress the plot for the other characters in how they all coped (or didn't cope) with her death. And also was referred to thereafter as "looking out for them" (a la Mimi's resurrection) or was repeatedly cited as who they all should emulate. But not until after her death. It felt a little...tokeny/tragedy porn? Like even as a show with more LGBTQ+ and BIPOC representation than typical in that era, you're going to single out the character with the MOST marginalized identities to "sacrifice"? Yeesh
I remember being the only POC in my theater department and when I mentioned how I never watched RENT so many of them forced me to watch it. And once I did watch it, I told them “yeah I didn’t like it, it sucked ass” I was essentially shunned from the entire department because a bunch of privileged white kids thought I was homophobic for disliking RENT 🙃 Needless to say my college experience sucked ass
College kids are like that, especially from privileged backgrounds. I grew up rural and poor, I went to a comparatively cheap college after going to trade school and working 5 years as a plumber and saved up every penny i could (I was also working while at college) I was pressured to go see a performance art piece where some black girl shrieked into a microphone fot 15 minutes (literally, all she did was scream) and I said it was shit and I hated it. Well guess what? Because I'm a rural white boy (from a poor family who was working myself to death just to be there) and she's a black girl (who's a rich kid who's father is on the college board of directors and she's there on a free ride) I was branded as a racist, ostracised and tormented daily. When they learned I was hired by the university to be an in-house plumber while I was studying there they petitioned to have me fired. College kids fucking suck. All of them.
"You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent." ~ W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Many of the great artists of history have been born with at least the basics of a good life and were later patronized by the rich or aristocrats. It's awfully hard to go from a peasant to an artist.
@@squamish4244 well, at the very least, its hard to care about artistic beauty and self-expression when you're both without the expendable income to buy materials and working yourself to the bone just to survive. It's hierarchy of needs stuff. if you dont have your base needs cared for youre much less likely to care about less material things
4:26 that “beyond criticism” line hits hard. I find it real annoying when people find things, almost always dealing with death, to be beyond criticism. U2 Super Bowl halftime because 9/11, Nirvana because Kurt Cobain, and Rent because Jonathan Larson. It all gets under my skin when people try and act like I’m insensitive to criticize anything shrouded in death.
@@shoopmahboop1374 and the thing is, most these losses hurt me too. But nothing is immune from criticism, as sometimes criticism can be constructive and good advice.
The editing of the last 2 minutes of this video still hits hard on a rewatch. It makes my stomach sick by the way it perfectly explains the dissonance between RENT and the actual AIDS crisis.
It's unfortunate that we never got a moment where Fauci finally snapped like Larry Kramer did. With how poorly the US handled COVID, some folks deserved the earful.
I had avoided Rent like the plague it never really addressed. Always figured that the spoof in Team America was basically what I'd see. Finally, I saw Rent (not) Live the other day, and I was appalled; It was worse than I had imagined it must be. I was there in those days- my best friend was a writer who lived in a one room apartment in Alphabet City, who got AIDS- I watched him deteriorate. We had a circle of artist friends. I marched with Act Up. I sat in with him on some of those patronizing group therapy sessions- whose distorted 'feel good' sessions seem to be where the author got a lot of his material from. I can assure you that we didn't engage with the play's mantra of 'live for today' : Every day was in anticipation of the dread of tomorrow, and what could be done to prevent it. No one felt comforted by the idea that as long as you live your life to the fullest, being near death didn't matter. And no one thought that being forced to a squatter was anything but another turn for the worst. You are right- this play is meant to make middle-class feel good about themselves - 'oh look they're singing and dancing' No. We sang . We danced, but never in celebration of our circumstances. But not one of us would not jump the chance of a high-paying career. Who the fuck are these people? The whole thing is based on a smug comforting lie. ...That, and most of the songs were pretty blah and went on too long. And don't get me started on how a man with HIV having a sexual relationship vulnerable needy woman, he just met without telling her his status, is presumably meant to be romantic love. (Yes, by the 90's, we all knew that HIV could be contracted through intercourse). That was repulsive in so many levels. So, thanks for confirming much of what I feel. I thought I might be turning into a crusty curmudgeon, way too soon
That's literally what I was thinking. Beginner screenwriter books literally tell you that harming animals is a sure fire way to make a character unlikable.
"Selling out" is not sacrificing your values for money, but sacrificing your personal agency for money. Killing the dog for money was an immoral act, but something Angel chose to do. A celebrity doing a charity gig because their handlers strong-armed them into it may be "selling out," even if kids' lives are saved as a result. Selling out has a bad name because corporate interests are a lot more likely to be horrible and unkind than are individuals' interests, but that doesn't always have to be the case. There are exceptions on both ends. This is why we hate rapists and murderers and yet don't generally call them "sell outs."
I've never actually seen Rent, but I love Lindsay's essays, and I have a bunch of friends who rave about Rent, so I thought I'd give this a watch. I don't really know much about Angel's character after watching this, but I immediately had her pegged as "the dog murderer." Perhaps I'd develop some sympathy for her if I actually watched Rent, but right now I'm not particularly upset about her loss.
Well, the "Will I lose my dignity?" scene reduced me to tears, but so did the E.T. dying scene and the end of Cyrano de Bergerac, so maybe I'm not the best judge.
You're right about Mark's character. Many artists would give their left leg to work in their field and be financially stable/successful while doing so.
This is one of the million things that bother me so much about La La Land: Mia's whole, "it's not your dream" when Ryan Gosling lands a steady, well-paying gig doing something in his field; if he pursues it for awhile, he could then fund his passion project. But, nooooo, she's determined that he needs to stay true to his dream or whatever. What about being realistic and investing for the future?
The weird thing is though, at that kind of money all he needs to do is save then he can do whatever he wants. Heck, he could rise up in the industry and get respected contracts to help him make his dream documentary. Learn from his peers etc. No one ever said you need to do everything all at once and no one ever said you need to do everything alone! So dumb.
Talk about a sobering moment: "Plague! We are in the middle of a fucking plague!" Probably the most effectively edited video you've done yet. Excellent work.
I think it becomes easier to understand creative decisions in Rent's creation in light of tick tick boom. Remember, this was written by Larson in his 30s, after so much rejection and failure. While it maybe be a fictional scene, I imagine the conversation with his agent about what tourists will fork out money for. He wanted to break new ground and tell the stories of his friends and community around him, saying something about the world he saw around him. look at lyrics in songs on the jonathan larson project like "white male world" and "truth is a lie". At the same time he wanted to be successful and be on broadway. My guess is, (of course we'll never truly know) was that to do both. he had to sugarcoat and water down the subject matter. bits like the homeless woman criticising Mark for using her for image his content and the phrase "silence = death" in the original lyrics of la vie boheme seem like little sprinkles of self-awareness. I can only speculate was that he was trying to play the long game and create more serious projects after having established a following. But we'll never know.
That's essentially what Lindsay was saying, just in the micro (Jonathan Larson having to water it down to sell it at all) vs. the macro (expensive versions of media _always_ have to be watered down enough to the point where an either wealthy - in the case of Broadway musicals or broad - in the case of Hollywood movies - can comfortably engage with them). The sad thing is, building up a following, no matter how massive and devoted, and even over dozens of successful projects, would never have worked. Look at Martin Scorsese - he gets a lot of creative freedom, sure, because he makes excellent movies and is therefore (and this is sadly the critical word that even he seems to struggle to acknowledge) safe in the eyes of Hollywood. His films are _about_ organised crime but, even now, however morally abhorrent the actions of organised criminals might be in his films, the framing _still_ always romanticises the subject matter at least a little. His films have never accurately depicted the sheer depths, not to which the real versions of the people he depicts will sink, but in which they spend every moment of their lives. Whether or not Scorsese is even interested in creating a truly warts-and-all depiction of organised crime, we'll likely never know, but he keeps getting funded because he's never tried (or, worse, he _has_ tried and, even with his following, has been rebuffed). I don't think even 'Tick Tick Boom!' would have been distributed by a major Hollywood studio - NetFlix and streaming allow for degrees of separation between what's invested and what's made that allow them to try things Hollywood never would because, even if 'Tick Tick Boom!' didn't draw in enough subscribers to justify its expense, no-one can really prove that and show that it lost money. ...and this is at a time where a _vastly_ larger number of people are equipped to deal with the subject matter. Now, we can never know if Rent helped, even a little, to create a society where that's the case (and it would certainly be nice to think that it did - I don't think many people would doubt Larson's sincerity of intent) but, ultimately, the lion's share of the credit for that ultimately must go to the people Lindsay talks about at the end (and many other like them) - the people who did it the impossibly hard way, working tirelessly to change the system in the real world, often when it probably _did_ seem impossible. EDIT: Oh, and don't be fooled by Dallas Buyer's Club's impressive cast - it was an indie film that cost $5m to make.
it’s so surreal how the way you described the way the government neglected the HIV epidemic is like the same way the government has been handling the coronavirus, it’s genuinely disturbing
Manas If by “that good night” you mean “the very dregs of the corrupt society they have wrought” or “the indescribable flames of hell”, then yeah. That’s about accurate.
I was 16 in 1981 and while I didn't follow the protests all that much, self absorbed teen, I remember sitting in my civics class listening to kids laugh and say "AIDS was God's punishment for gays" and feeling horribly disgusted at these "good" Christians. And the Ryan White happened. Followed by dozens more cases of "innocent" people who got Aids from blood tranfusions. I remember in 86, the feeling of my stomach hitting my feet, when my then bf said "I'm getting a blood test done tomorrow, the doctor thinks I might have Aids from the blood transfusions when I got shot." I can't reconcile that long ago fear and horror and disgust with a bunch of rich kids refusing to pay Rent because of.... selling out?
You don't have to answer if you don't want to, but was your ex okay? (And if it makes you feel any better, a LOT of Christians, myself especially for personal reasons, are furious about how their parents and forebears handled things in the crisis. Though I'm sorry to say that it feels like even more have decided to cling harder to their awful ideals. Ugh...)
A lot of people gave you flak for starting immediately with the AIDS epidemic, but I think this is one of the best researched intros you've ever written. You gave all perspectives their due time, you brought up that there was more at risk than just being gay, and you treated the situation with dignity and impartiality. That's hard to do. I give you props for that.
Julián Rivera “How to Survive a Plague”. It’s a documentary. And the “PLAGUE! We are in the middle of a FUCKING PLAGUE! And you behave like THIS!” Always gets me. Someone make that a ringtone.
Friendly plug that the play “A Normal Heart” is a brutal, honest, boots-on-the-ground take on the struggles the LGBTQ community had to go through during the AIDS crisis. I haven’t watched the TV show adaptation, but reading the play in HS validated everything I hated about RENT.
i think another problem with the popularity of rent is that it automatically appeals to the lgbtq community (of which im part of) because we have so little representation in media that we're willing to take any that doesn't paint us outright as the villains. so holding hands down the street before going immediately to the bury your gays trope is accepted because there's nothing else, which makes it harder to see the actual issues with the movie that you've outlined. thank you for making this video, while i'll always enjoy rent because of memories i have attached to it, it's important to recognise how shitty of a representation (of characters and issues) it really is.
@@Abonanno24601 It was already outdated when it came out lol. It's a musical glorifying slave owners. I still like it a lot, but it is very problematica.
@@Cube-xm6vt that last point you said "its a musical glorifying slave owners" is one of the reasons why I have mixed feelings on Hamilton. On one hand I absolutely adore and love the soundtrack I can't lie its amazing but knowing the actual history of what happened and then seeing thoes same people portrayed as goofy singing characters is just- weird to say the least. And that's without me even mentioning the fandom..
Actually people besides the ruling class live and die as well it’s just harder to get their voices heard. That’s just a slogan people who aren’t from the ruling class say to pretend they can’t exist and never will do anything worthwhile
Well technically it was the point in Hamilton as well... That he was the most forgotten founding father because he died younger and never made it to the presidency, compared to the others who ruled longer and mostly disliked him
As a gay person with hemophilia B, I just wanted to thank you for actually mentioning that hemophiliacs were effected by the AIDS epidemic, it's literally only a few words spoken but it means a lot. The gay community always recognizes the effects of the AIDS epidemic on gay people but when it comes to hemophilia, we get written out of history so often because we're very rare these days. But literally one of the main reasons that we are so rare is that 10,000 of us were killed by bad batches of blood-distilled factor in the US alone and tens of thousands more of us were killed world wide during the AIDS epidemic. I feel so lucky to have been born and diagnosed in the era of Benefix and Idelvion instead of the era of blood transfusions and blood-distilled factor. I hope to be lucky enough to be living in the era of CRISPR cures being made affordably available to all hemophiliacs by the time I want to have children.
SeabassFishbrains Yup. I’m filled with existential dread every time I consider how many young children would’ve needed to learn that they were afflicted with a disease that boasted a 100% mortality rate, and that every public news broadcasting service claimed was the patron plague of perverts and junkies. Fuck the ‘80s.
This video means a lot to me. Whatever Lindsay does in the future, I'm glad she made this. I hope she can find satisfaction away from youtube, if that is what she needs.
I've always had mixed feelings about this musical but there's some early footage of the 1996 production on CZcams (it's a full show and it was kinda like a preview), it's really bad quality but you get the jist, and honestly it still isn't without its flaws, but it does kinda "work" a lot more when you see it more in the "passion" (cringe sorry couldn't think of a better word) of when it was made. Even Mark was kinda endearing (yes really!) Also the actors being the right age is SO important for this musical, their obnoxious behaviour was so much more forgivable and made so much more sense when they are presented as being in their early 20s. Even the restaurant and table thing was kinda "fair enough" when it's some young hooligans, I'm sure I've done things like that. I think its one of those things you had to see in its time truly experience it fully. I feel the same about Hair. Modern performances can really make me cringe, but I can tell that it was supposed to be really good, once, if that makes sense. I'm sure it was amazing in the 60's but you're just not gonna grasp that same feeling now.
I’m watching this while on break at rehearsal for this show and it’s the pettiest thing I’ve ever done. There are people rehearsing Seasons of Love ten feet from me.
Video Game Drummer Productions Honestly the production we did ended up super well. Somehow they even managed to make ‘Your Eyes’ sound good. Still a terrible story though, all of us were far more invested in the homeless subplots.
Definitely Catherine Larry Kramer was the man who called Reagan's indifference to AIDS exactly what it was, an attempted holocaust. And he did it while Reagan was still in office he's a fucking badass
I remember watching this in the first weeks of the pandemic in March of 2020. I went back to a deserted campus because I knew I wasn’t going to get a refund on housing. I had watched it a few times already, sometimes putting it in the background while doing calculus or procrastinating on my college essays. Rewatching it in March 2020 felt surreal, but oddly comforting? Like we’ve been here before, suffered so much, but still kept going. This channel was always a comfort, so thank you.
As much as I liked Rent as a teen, I totally agree with this essay as an adult. I wonder if Hamilton will fall in the same category and will not age well over the years, as much as I love it.
I will say, if you view this musical as a satire on pretentious art people, it gets muuuuch better, and that would have been a far better angle to write the musical from. As someone who attends an art school, the most obnoxious students are your Marks, your Maureens, your Bennys, and even your Mimis to some extent (I'll give Roger a pass, I actually sort of like him). They are people who should be satirized and made fun of. Collins and Angel always felt like the most grounded characters to me because their arc stays pretty focused on each other and not on "sOciEtY." Even Collins' rewiring of the ATM is at least something he shares with his shithead friends. The fantasy of being "artsy" comes crashing down around the other characters when Angel dies and they remember that AIDS is a very real and deadly disease and not just a thing for them to bond over. The best parts of the movie (in my opinion) are the shots of the support group members slowly disappearing as each of them dies of AIDS and the main group visiting Angel in the hospital. I think there's even a shot of Collins sleeping in Angel's hospital bed, reminiscent of so many pictures from the AIDS epidemic. As annoying as most of the numbers are, "I'll Cover You (Reprise)" is beautiful and heartbreaking because it's one of the only times they all stop being "art people" and mourn the actual tragedy. I will always bring up Chicago because it's one of my favorite musicals and has a great movie adaptation, but in that, Roxie, Velma, and Billy are satirized wonderfully. They're all horrible people, and the media circus is crass and theatrical. And then the Hunyak, an innocent woman, is hanged simply because she couldn't speak English and therefore couldn't plead her case, and the seriousness and brutality of the judicial system stops being so fantastical. They still go back to the satire during the trials, but the stakes are now higher because the only thing played straight is the actual, real danger of the setting. Rent ruins that by playing everything straight, including the parts where they literally sing about starving for attention and hating their parents. Also massive props for your montage at the end, it gave me chills.
This is the angle I'm trying to go for in my high school's rendition of Rent. I'm a senior this year and I didn't want to miss out on being in my final high school show, but I also understand that Mark (the character I was cast for) fucking sucks, along with multiple other characters and the general idea of the show. Especially Mark's idea of living the life of a starving artist while having EVERY POSSIBLE OPPORTUNITY TO GET HIM AND HIS FRIENDS OUT OF POVERTY.
Mark: Roger I know you’re clean and went through a terrible addiction that ended in broken hearts, heroin withdrawal, and death...but dude she has the best ass she even said so...what? No just don’t do the heroin it’s easy for someone with the disease of addiction to say no, so I think you’re good dude. It’s only living a life if you risk your own every day
Ummm... Happy New Year, "I'm gonna leave my vices", signed Mimi? She took her relationship with Roger as an incentive to leave drugs. Roger got a date with her in the first place by turning her away from a drug merchant. She failed miserably, but the relationship would've been good for her if it had worked.
@@runefaustblack I don't remember commenting that to be honest and it's a bit of an incoherent rant but if I know one thing it is that most of the time love is not a strong enough reason to stop a heroin addict truly in the midst of addiction
@@youtubeuser4943 Yeah, but it's not like she has many better options. Can't afford rehab. She took the help and the incentives she could, and they weren't enough.
The characters in this are the types of theatre kids I went to school with. Jackasses even once got us kicked out of an IHOP because they were singing “La Vie Boheme” at the top of their lungs. There are a lot of valid reasons to dislike this show. But that incident is largely why I despise it.
Looking back on this it also strikes me as a... choice... to make the straights with AIDS both the focus and that the straights get to live while the queer couple is broken up because of one dies to AIDS. It's not only a gay suffering trope I am tired of seeing, but straight-washing what is an essentially queer experience of that era
I remember the fear. I spent most of the 1980s living in Europe, and the US university for which I worked in Germany - back when it was still West Germany - didn't provide health insurance. One of my colleagues, a couple of years younger than I, was pregnant by a man who dealt drugs. He swore up and down to her that he never used intravenous drugs. She loved her child, was a great mom, and died within a week of her diagnosis with AIDS. I was already back in the States when she died, but those who were still in Germany when she died said she just stopped eating in the hospital after she found out her daughter was HIV positive, too. By dying her daughter would go to her parents who could get treatment because they had health insurance. She was too old to be a dependent, but her daughter wasn't. I will never forgive the child's father for lying about his IV drug use. By the mid-1980s, it was already known breast milk could pass HIV to an infant. Formula would probably have prevented that baby's infection. Don't get me started on my own scare when I found out the French blood supply wasn't tested and people who'd had blood transfusions from that supply, as I had, were at high risk. There was nearly a decade's worth of people - and thank you for mentioning haemophiliacs - who could have been treated had they known they were at risk. I was lucky, thank heavens, but how many people weren't. I still like a lot of the music from Rent. I think the play is better because the messages on the answering machines, among other things, show how callow, at best, most of these characters are.
Fabrisse ter Brugghe Not enough, if you ask me. In reality, RENT has next-to-nothing to say about the cruel, inhuman society that had facilitated and flat-out encouraged nearly every piece of tragedy of you friend’s story. If Reagan’s America had taken action when it should have, AIDS wouldn’t have become the utter fucking pandemic it became, and wouldn’t have infected that dirt bag drug dealer that poisoned the life of your friend, her child, and her family. Hell, if America’s economic and social system wasn’t as inherently alienating and despicable as it is, that disgusting piece of garbage probably wouldn’t be in the kind of economic disparity that would’ve placed him anywhere NEAR intravenous drugs. Every part of your story was preventable. Every part of it didn’t need to happen. And every part of it was practically ORCHESTRATED by exactly the kind of people who’re still making all the goddamned decisions. You’ll need to forgive me for my crassness and my indignation, but I just hate this show so goddamn much. The LGBTQ+, the afflicted, the POCs, and all the disenfranchised people of America deserve better representation than this tone-deaf, Gen-X, neo-liberal DRECK.
When I first saw Rent as a child, I was completely in the closet about my transgender identity. Due to my catholic upbringing, this was the first story I had seen that had LGBT protagonists that were portrayed in what I then believed, was a positive light. Being my young emotional self, I clung to the musical with all I had. Watching that musical was the first step I needed to eventually come out as a transman and start my transition. That being said, watching this video has gotten me to realize that I've put Rent on way too high of a pedestal. I will still have a special place for it in my heart, but now I can see that it held way too many flaws. Thank you for this. It was hard watching a story I cherished being torn down, but you actually did a very good job at softening the blow by giving all the facts in a logical manner rather than angrily ripping it apart.
It had a big impact on me, too. My cousin came out to me and later revealed his HIV+ status and I was rather lost. Rent was a comfort in a strange way. And I'm OK with it. I will still love it for what it was, but it is an entry point, not an ending. And that's where its value lies to me.
@@derrickwoods1595 what are you in disagreement about? And who with? Just wondering...🤔 It's another person's life & issues. Whether or not YOU believe in it, condone it, or agree with their life choice should have absolutely no bearing on them. How noble that you're at least 'nice enough' to be happy for them being happy. Sorry if that came off bitchy, I've had a crappy day. 🤦😜✌️☮️🕊️😶
@@goldilox369 I dont believe acting like another gender is changing it. I dont believe its possible to change it. I dont think if you call yourself a boy but you were born a girl that it makes sense. There's nothing you can do to make yourself as strong or as physically capable or as built or even have the same hormones as a guy. There is a difference between boys and girls for a reason. Its impossible to cross between them. It really is. There's no medicine, no science or no belief that can help you. Its just logic.
Seeing a group of women in the 1980's chanting "Healthcare is a right" hits a lot different in 2022 watching Roe be overturned. We haven't moved forward at all, have we?
No, we have to fight every day to make sure that a certain group of people in our country don't drag us kicking and screaming back to when "America was great," regardless of the fact that that's completely subjective and changes person to person.
It was really interesting to see just how many points this essay's title ended up tying into. While this one wasn't quite as "fun" as Phantom and Hercules were, it brought up a lot of really interesting points. These videos are always fantastic and they feel so well-researched and thought out. I'm always ecstatic to see them in my subscription feed. Great work as always!
Her, Kyle Kallgren, and (usually) Todd spring immediately to mind. Funny how it's all the ones who left to start their own site . . . (which seems to have completely disappeared? What happened to Chez Apolocalypse anyone? I really miss Nella's readthrough of Tiger's Curse.)
JelloApocalypse Is it a coincidence that I just left watching one of your videos after getting the whim out of seemingly no where only to come to this video despite it's length being much to long for me to watch at this time, then to scroll down into the comments which I haven't done only to come across this comment and write this description of how it feels like more then a coincidence? Yes, yes it is a coincidence.
The juxtaposition of Larry Kramer screaming admonishments and Rent's ridiculous party in the restaurant at the end was brilliant. I'm so glad I came across your channel!
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world-prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. [Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), p. 56]
Fox while I find your comment absolutely beautiful, I don’t think that was Lindsay’s intention in posting that clip. The problem with Rent is that it does not do the work, it only dances. Can Anarchists dance? Of course we can! And we should. But we still must work. We must labour to make a better world. And then we dance to rejuvenate ourselves and express ourselves. (Well, others do, I’m now disabled and can’t dance anymore. It’s a massive loss to me, as someone who grew up dancing, who saw myself as a dancer. I miss it in a way I don’t have words to explain). But Rent isn’t that. It’s all fluff with little substance. It’s all dance and no work.
@@katherinemorelle7115 it's a show. Not a piece of legislation. It's a breath of fresh air, not the revolution in its entirety. Idk why people expect it to be and do everything. It's not like it's harry potter or something seemingly intentionally immune from representating decent political commentary
I'd really like to question where the myth of 'the nobility of poverty' got started in the art community. Every single great artist of the Renaissance tried to get a patron ,because that thing called eating and sleeping comfortably is a great help in artistic development.
Okay, picture this: you're 20 years old, a junior at a liberal arts college-- you're living on your own for the first time in the Big City (well, in a dorm room pre-paid for by some government grant, and it's technically just outside the Big City but it's in the same zip code so it counts). You're straight, you think-- girls are pretty, yeah, but everyone knows that. You're a good year away from even considering the possibility that you might be bi. Hamilton is at the height of its popularity, and you are firmly in the midst of your Musical Phase™. Rent is your favorite. So, naturally, CZcams decides You Must Watch This New Video. Seems like a negative review, sure, but this is why you're in college in the first place: to challenge your ideas. So you watch it, and.... yeah. It's clearly well-structured and thoroughly researched, which you respect, but the heart of its argument just kind of seems like a load of self-important nit-picking about a musical that failed to incite the Revolution. Pft, okay "Lindsay Ellis", whoever you are. Sorry you have such high standards for the entertainment industry. You move on. Although... now, there's this little... itch. In the back of your mind. Reminding you that, hey, maybe you should look a little more critically at this thing you love. Maybe it has flaws-- and that's okay. 7 years of civil unrest the likes of which you have never seen later (half of which the whole world spent being ravaged by arguably the worst pandemic in a hundred years), you revisit this video. It hits different. Obviously. I've done a lot of growing up in the 7 years since I first watched this video. Not just at the behest of a rapidly and violently changing world, but also as a consequence of simply aging. Not That much, mind you-- I'm sure in another 7 years I'll be cringing at my late-twenties self as everyone does-- but enough that I've come to truly appreciate what it means to fight to survive in the midst of a global health crisis; to be a part of the Queer community; to face a government-- no, a world-- so violently hostile to the mere existence of myself and the people I love. I appreciate this essay so much more deeply now. I agree with it, even. I think it may have been the first thing to really get me interested in critically evaluating modern media and exploring the broader socio-political contexts around works of art, and how that imbues them with meaning. Now, I've watched and read and listened to a million film and television and literary critiques that have ignited a long-dormant passion in me for the art of story telling. After 10 years, I'm finally writing again! So I just want to say: I know you've left this platform, Lindsay, and I don't know if you still read these comments, but I hope you know that you've made an indelible impact not only on the CZcams creator community but on random viewers like myself. Even the angry, ignorant Rent-heads. Thank you.
The thing with Rent is the writer suddenly died and because he was young and seemed gay people automatically assumed he died of AIDS and rushed to see the musical thinking this guy died to create this musical and the press ate it up and it blew up into this big thing, the story and characters were weak but the music was very very catchy and gets stuck in your head, people like Rent for the music more than they like it for the meaning, the music is just so damn good that you overlook the words.
exactly!! i remember when i was watching the movie that i was very confused by A LOT of the choices the movie makers chose to made and some stuff didnt make sense but the songs are the only thing good about it
Neato Burrito Yeah I saw Rent when I was 11 and LOVED it despite not knowing what AIDs was and totally oblivious to the adult themes and that Mimi and Roger were recovering ex junkies singing about heroin and addiction, I fucking loved the songs and didn't pay attention to the plot or the message haha it flew over my naive head.
You forget that Larson also PLAGIARIZED the entire story from Sarah Schulman. How do you know? Much evidence, including the way they administer AZT is from 1991 and not 1995 when the play was published.
Jonah Falcon Uh...from what I understand, a few elements of the story (particularly the bisexual love triangle) were probably plagerized to some degree, not the whole story. Plus, how would AZT administration prove anything, given that both stories came out in the 90s and were about the 80s?
The most depressing thing about all this is knowing that the current COVID-19 pandemic is totally gonna be exploited in 10 years to make this same exact shit again.
Some rich, white, upper- to middle-class male is going to write about the global society (read: Western countries) banding together in this time of crisis and how creativity flourished in these dark, desperate times and how humanity once again shone bright after so many years of drudgery. I simultaneously love and hate the idea.
@@hillarywoo4977 I don't want to get into this but can you not make this about skin colour? Why do so many people think that everyone gets to be nuanced but what you describe is exclusive to this number of attributes? Rich, upper class and if you really need it male would surfice. And still be insulting to millions of people - because men like any other group aren't a hivemind. There are already idiots writing this stuff. We all know that. But their opinions are not just formed by their gender or their skin colour but their entire social status and wealth - in other words their whole character and what this translates to is that as a white, male upper middle class guy, the character you describe? That's a clichée but by giving into the clichée you misunderstand the problematic of class divide. If wealthier, black south Africans write the same things when talking about the poorer lower classes in their own nation, we can take away that being naive isn't about skin colour. And as a frequent news reader, more than enough women write the same emotional crap as their male counterparts. Of course, making this about attributes always brings the risk to oversimplify things but to get back to my original point; I don't care about political correctness. But as a German, I know where this kinda talk can end. It's the most dominant aspect about German culture people don't know about but it is everywhere - our ancestors went down this road, the rest is history and Germany is therefore the most cautious nation on the planet when it comes to talking about groups as you did in your comment. I liked what you had to say. I really did. But do me the favor and put it in a better way next time. Thanks in advance.
@@Arcaryon Als ein Deutscher der jetzt im Ausland lebt, ich würde nicht so sicher reden über die kulturelle Situation von anderen Länder wie Amerika. Es ist sehr oft schwer zu unterscheiden swischen Besserwisser und die angeblich 'gut-informierte' Ethik-Polizei Deutschlands.
@@grimble4564 Ich studiere Politik (vor allem internationale), Ökonomie und Sozialwissenschaft, mein halbes Leben besteht daraus, Geschichte zu analysieren, über momentane, vergangene und zukünftige Ereignisse zu lesen und über Gesellschaften und Individuen zu urteilen um nur ein paar Aspekte zu nennen. Ich bin in der Hinsicht kein "Besserwisser" - ich WEIß es schlicht und ergreifend besser als die meisten weil ich mich damit wortwörtlich stundenlang jeden einzelnen Tag beschäftige - ich bin nicht der klügste oder der einzige mit Durchblick. Aber ohne mich aus dem Fenster zu lehnen, die meisten Menschen auf diesem Planeten wären zwar theoretisch nicht mehr oder weniger in der Lage dazu als ich ABER sie tuen es nicht und sind aus genau diesem Grund unqualifiziert um tatsächlich am demokratischen Prozess teilzunehmen. Ich spreche (bzw. lese, sprechen nur 3) genug Sprachen um mir mein Bild aus den unterschiedlichsten Perspektiven zu machen. Die Hälfte der Dinge die ich hier anspreche, habe ich z.B. aus amerikanischen Medien oder meinem Studium, welches zu großen Teilen auf amerikanischer Arbeit basiert, die nicht nur die Grundsteine der Forschung legten sondern bis heute enorm viele der Aspekte prägen. Ich lese täglich nicht bloß ein paar Nachrichten oder Blogs, ich recherchiere die Themen wochenlang, ich urteile NIEMALS weil ich glaube es besser zu wissen als andere sondern weil ich empirisch beweisen kann, dass meine Theorien vollkommen ausreichend sind um meine Darstellungen zu unterstützen - vor allem weil ich hier ja nichts neues verkünde - es ist fast unmöglich einen originellen Gedanken zu haben aber das heißt leider nicht das was für mich und mit mir zusammen Tausenden oder sogar Millionen von Menschen alltäglich und verständlich ist, auch wirklich von den meisten begriffen wird. Politik ist genauso "schwer" zu begreifen wie zum Beispiel Biologie aber genauso wie die meisten nicht über ihr Schulwissen bei letzterem kommen, verhält es sich mit Politik. Menschen sind nicht so kompliziert wie sie denken. Komplex ja aber nicht kompliziert. Aber dafür muss man Zeit aufwenden. Den Luxus oder den Willen dafür, haben nicht viele, was nicht verwunderlich ist. Demokratie war nie ein Massenprojekt, auch wenn viele das heute anderes sehen wollen. Kennst du den Ausdruck "Ich kann das nicht nachvollziehen?" In einem politischen oder ähnlichem Kontext ist das für mich ein Fremdwort. Das mag' arrogant klingen aber es ist ein Fakt das die meisten Menschen der Auffassung sind, ein paar Minuten politische Bildung in der Woche seien genug um eine Meinung zu haben die man öffentlich teilen darf. Nun - ich widerspreche dieser Ansicht und lehne sie ab. Ich glaube, dass ich nicht in der Lage wäre über Molkekularbiologie zu urteilen und ich bin der Auffassung, dass das gleiche für die meisten Menschen im Umgang mit Politik gilt. Weißt du was ich in meinem Leben zu dem Thema gelernt habe? Viele Leute verwechseln Arroganz mit Selbstsicherheit. Ich habe verdammt viele Fehler. Aber in diesem Feld und bei meinem Training bin ich außergewöhnlich gut und gut heißt in beiden Fällen nicht genetisch überlegen oder in sonst einer überheblichen Art und Weise anders aber genauso wie die meisten Menschen nicht 6 Tage die Woche für 2 Stunden in ein Fitnesstudio gehen, verbringen die meisten Menschen ihre Freizeit nicht damit Gesetzestexte und Statistiken zu wälzen und zu versuchen, sich selbst und die eigene Meinung nicht bloß zu hinterfragen sondern so abzusichern, dass sie den strengen Ansprüchen der Wissenschaft genügen. Ich studiere nicht in Harvard und ich würde mir nie herausnehmen zu behaupten das ich in meiner besagten Profession etwas besonderes wäre. Aber hier auf CZcams? Bei dem durchschnittlichen Wissenstandard meiner Mitmenschen oder Bürger bei diesen Themen? Die Argumentation gewinne ich fast jedes mal und wenn nicht - tja, wenn ich nichts mehr zu lernen hätte wäre das in meinem Alter schon recht traurig. Aber alleine wie selten es vorkommt bestätigt was ich gerade angesprochen habe. Und egal welche Sprache(n) man spricht oder wo man lebt, am Ende sind wir alle Menschen. Ich habe Leute wie mich überall getroffen. Russen, Amerikaner, Chinesen, Franzosen, Spanier - such' es dir aus. Ich bin wie jeder Mensch einzigartig aber nicht so einzigartig. Warum ich diesen letzten Punkt anspreche? Weil sogut wie ALLE diese Leute egal welche Meinungsverschiedenheiten es da auch gegeben hätte, in dieser einen Hinsicht einig waren. Das hat dann nichts mehr mit einer "Bubbel" zu tuen. Und nebenbei; ich kann jedes Land auf der Weltkarte auseinandernehmen, auch das eigene. WENN ich genug Zeit habe um mir meine Meinung zu bilden. Niemand ist allwissend. Aber wenn die meisten beinahe nichts wissen, ist Überlegenheit nichts womit man angeben müsste. In a world without sight, the one eyed dwarf is king. Ist so viel Selbstvertrauen arrogant? Nun - das kannst du selbst entscheiden. Aber bevor du dein endgültiges Urteil fällst, frag' dich einfach ob meine Weltanschauung wirklich so falsch ist. Ich behaupte, die Welt zu begreifen ist das leicht wenn man weiß welche Fragen man stellen muss und woher man die Antworten bekommt. Lass' uns ein kleines Spiel spielen. Ich nenne mal ein paar berühmte Demokratien und ein oder zwei Revolutionen. Die römische Republik, die französische Revolutionen, um bei meinen Leisten zu bleiben den Mauerfall sowie die griechischen Demokratien, allen voran Athen. Was haben all diese Ereignisse gemeinsam? Nun, man könnte viele Beispiele nennen. Worauf ich hinaus will ist etwas viel simpler es und zwar die Teilnehmerzahlen. Man stellt nämlich leider schnell fest, dass hier in der Regel, nicht immer aber meistens urbane Eliten gegen ihre Oberleherren rebelierten, dass es häufig deutlich weniger Teilnehmer an selbst den nobelsten Unterfangen gab' als man meine würde und dass Demokratien und Revolutionen nur dann erfolgreich (siehe Bauernkriege z.B. im Mittelalter) entstehen und vor allem erhalten werden können, wenn die Bevölkerung nicht nur gebildet und der Staat relativ stabil ist, sondern vor allem Dinge auch wenn wenn sie aktiv und konstant an besagter Demokratie teilnehmen, über aktuelle Vorgänge reflektieren und somit insgesamt die Institutionen die sie errichten wollen oder deren Fortbestehen angestrebt wird, wahrnehmen, verstehen und am politischen Prozess teilnehmen sowie diese Traditionen weitergeben und im Zweifel dafür eintreten. Eine große Tragik unseres Zeitalters ist der Fakt, dass die meisten Leute vergessen haben, dass Demokratien und ihre dadurch alltäglichenen Freiheiten nicht einfach vom Himmel gefallen sind. Ich "kämpfe" jeden Tag dafür, dass sich dieses Problem ändert. Darin habe ich unter anderem meinen Lebenssinn gefunden. So, ich hoffe das erklärt mich und mein Denken in ausreichender Form. Wünsche noch einen schönen Tag oder eine gute Nacht.
@@grimble4564 PS: Beim nochmaligen lesen von deinem Kommentar bin ich mir nicht mehr sicher ob ich tatsächlich eine Kritik vorgefunden habe oder mich da verstan habe, leider kann man Buchstaben nicht sprechen hören. Sollte dies der Fall gewesen sein, bitte ich um Verzeihung und Verständnis wobei mein kleiner Paragraph trotzdem nicht allzu schlecht gelungen ist. Wie auch immer - auf "Wiedersehen".
21:53 God *DAMN* did Pulp knock it out of the park with Common People _"'Coz everybody hates a tourist, especially one who thinks it's all.. such a laugh.."_
Katie Michel the only character I didn't hate was Joann. She had a real job, was a victim of her friends stupidity and was the victim of a toxic relationship, actually tried to help them achieve their goals, actually put in effort into her relationship but was made fun of by her partner for being too uptight when her girlfriend was too loose
why not Benny? he was willing to give Roger and Mark living quarters and let them stay at his high-tech community center. I mean, that's what Roger and Mark are in it for, right? a validation of themselves? authenticity be damned - that's shot down by the rant the homeless woman has against Mark and Mark, for lack of a better term, bitching about his parents being supportive because "he wants to be a real artist, dammit!"
Hal Emmerich i think the musical changes dramatically when you go from a "friends mindset" (were supposed to like these people and think they're so cool) to a "Seinfeld mindset" (wow this is a show about nothing, they learn nothing, and they're all assholes). I've never seen the stage play, but I like to imagine that all of them are just *the worst* artists and everyone reacts to them the way that homeless woman did. And Benny, move on bro! You're too good for them!
Love her or hate her, Lindsey is an amazingly intelligent woman, and her opinions are the ones of someone who has a strong academic background. I really admire her for that.
Every now and then I return to this video, and every single time I am reminded of Lindsay's talent and brilliance. I hope you're doing better, wherever you are and whatever you're doing.
To this day my biggest confusion about my past feelings for this musical is- how did they ever get me on board with Angel literally killing a dog? It's so jarring to hear now that it's been a few years since I last revisited it.
I can't wait for the Broadway musical romanticizing the coronavirus.
It will probably be the first musical consisting entirely of solo numbers.
@@48917032 Or if there are group numbers, they're staged as if taking place over facetime / video conference.
Lmao 😂😂
@@MortMe0430 Or the performers maintain 6 foot distances and it would be one of the first musicals where the staging marks are part of the narrative.
Dargonhuman that would honestly be fucking brilliant
Rich kids living in the city and refusing their allowance aren't poor, they're camping.
*gasp* Honey, look! It's a homeless person! Awww, he's so cute. Everyone shush, don't startle him. This is a really special moment, you guys. Look, he wants my sandwich, aww hehe no, silly. That's not for you. I got this special because I can't have wheat. My crystal healer said so.
Smaakjeks K Lmaoooo
@@useroffline9999 You know, the internet can disappoint you so often. But sometimes a person reaches across the void to voice their disarmed approval. It feels nice. Thanks!
and if they were minorities they would then be called squatters :D
That wasn't all the characters, though. Not Mimi. Mostly Joanne and Mark. We don't know the backstory of all of them as I recall.
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.
Fellow theatre technician here. I hope that asshole SM got a good punch. And also i hope you're in a much better, more stable place now 💜
@@alim.9801 She continued to get better jobs than me. I actually decided to take a long break from theatre in December (good timing) due to the mass amounts of abuse by a few companies.
Recently I found out a friend actually believed this. He legitimately asked me what kind of lessons he could learn from me given my own poverty. He couldn't comprehend that my suffering _didn't_ make me stronger or more creative or more intelligent. It ruined me. He just glamorized what I went through so much that he genuinely though that I was somehow "better off than him for going through this." Then when I talked to friends I trusted online about it they thought the exact same thing. Suddenly it went from friendship to them telling me what I SHOULD be doing or dismissing everything I say purely because it didn't fit their worldview of what being impoverished is actually like.
@@purplegill10 All I can say is I'm sorry you had to go through that. Both the poverty and the weird-ass "friends".
@@purplegill10 HOLY SHIT that sounds awful. You pulled your shit together and got through something fuckin' horrible then people 'supposed to support you fuckin' dismiss it? I dunno if you're still with em' but I hope they've at least changed, but jesus christ. They owe you a massive apology. Don't know much bout being homeless other than it's traumatic.
"Capitalism is bad!!! Now please pay $200 for our tickets."
-Broadway musicals, basically.
Long live regional theatre.
Why do people hate capitalsm anyway?
Its a bi product of liberty
@@bonfyre4711 most people who think they hate capitalism don't even know what it is. We somehow live in a world where asking for simple rights such as healthcare is constructed as "Communism" for some fucking reason, and as such people who want to have basic rights end up being told all those rights would be communism, so... Yeah, lots decide to claim they hate capitalism.
The only real problem with a free market is that if people are free to do anything, they are also free to take huge advantage of others in worse positions than theirs; we got it mostly right with our legal system, where nowadays most countries focus on the idea that "well, if you're not hurting anyone else or destroying anyone else's property, whatever, do what you want"... But somehow in the area of market legality we still have the stupid belief that asking for something as simple as "hey, could you maybe not knowingly kill people?" would be living in 1950's Russia. We've painted the economic world black and white, and if you don't have a million dollars in your bank right now, you are among the people who suffered for it.
sounds like most of breadtube imo
@@bonfyre4711 Capitalism sucks because it fixes people into hierarchy based on capital, it cant deal with ecological issues it causes, it yo yos from economic crash to economic crash, high stage capitalism causes imperialism, people are sick, illiterate, and hungry and jobless. And its profitted off of human suffering.
"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.
No fucking kidding. I immediately scrolled down here to see if anyone had said anything about it. Ouch.
The protesters shouting, “Healthcare is a right!” hits differently, too, now
@@sugarcakezz if you actively go against cdc guidelines because you feel like you shouldn't have to, fuck you man. covid got rapidly worst, the cdc didn't predict it right away. whatever. it's not that hard to just listen so people don't have to die. carelessness along the lines of "everyone dies anyway, why not" is stupid as hell.
hi!!
I WAS JUST THINKING THIS!
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.
Sadly it doesn't!
I am watching this on the day worldwide cases in 40 million.
This...really hits different this year.
Especially with conservatives in power. They love things staying the same.
this is the Great America that they've Made Again; ignoring the suffering of millions to enrich themselves personally.
as a trans person with considerable access to privilege through my parents, mark drives me up the fuckin wall. does he not realize he could use his resources to help his community? even the smallest things, like having a warm, clean apartment where your friends/community can come stay when they’re in trouble. having groceries and food to share. i don’t understand how you can live among people you love in poverty in good conscience, when you could bring more resources to the table.
I would never be comfortable accepting this help from rich 'friends', first cs they all expect you to do that, to use them (ironic) second, well poor are always in trouble, that's our thing.
Maybe you missed the parts where he offered his apartment as a shelter to friends who were struggling? Also, the documentary showed what it was like to be silenced as a community, what it was like to live with HIV/AIDS, and what it was like to be homeless in the winter. Sure, Mark was imperfect but please direct me towards someone who is.
@@LuanaSantos-rl4sb dude, that is a you problem. your pride isn't justification for the amorality of mark who could and did not do anything that could have actually made a difference in the life of his friends or the community he pretended to be part of so that he could milk it for 'art points'.
when you are part of a community you are _supposed_ to help when you are able to. this is how it works, everyone chips in what they can for each other to float the whole of the group through the hard bits. this guy offered nothing to the community even when he was looking at the people in it struggling
Mark chooses his art over a career a reflection just like that the guy that wrote this Johnathon Larson
@@jessicasevin1870 Jonathan Larson? What are you saying about Jonathan Larson? I'm so confused here.
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?!
I was pretty young when I’d watch this and I had no idea that was why
Yo. I never thought of it that way.
I just thought roger was rejecting her because she was basically a baby-19 yrs old- and he was probably going to die from that disease and he didn’t want to ruin her life with a relationship with him.
Yeah I always found that weird too. Like Roger's anger wasn't irrational. He said no, but Mimi kept insisting (plus she kinda entered uninvited)
Maybe she wasn't making great decisions because of drugs.
Yeah, I found that odd too. I was backstage for my high school's production of RENT, and I remember always being so confused at why the song is written as if Mimi is right: Roger has perfectly good reasons to reject her, even when he realizes that she has HIV. Yet, the song is staged and written as if it's Roger that's being overly angry. Mimi gets the entire female ensemble backing her in the script, while Roger sings alone, making it seem as if her opinion holds more weight, even though Roger has denied her multiple times, which he completely has the right to do. I don't really have much experience with the movie, as I have only watched it once, but from my time helping out with my school's production, those are just my thoughts on the scene.
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?
Well the United States is also the the world major supplier of medical technology and medical research. Medical technology is one of our main exports. So it’s easy to argue for healthcare as a right when you don’t know that our current healthcare system has created untold good in the world.
It’s a tough thing to say. I think we could find a good middle ground somewhere. I don’t want healthcare to be completely free. Rich people buying medicine and getting treated creates a lot of money for R&D.
No, we won’t have to fight for healthcare forever. But we have to fight until we get it
i feel bad for the US, i wish you guys were able to obtain free healthcare. We have free healthcare in my country and just knowing you never have to worry because the system supports you, is much more liberating than the american idea of freedom tbh
@@andrewlitvinov7266 They're still getting paid, dude.
a) An NHS wouldn't be completely free, it'd be paid for by tax dollars, like in every country it's been tried and works in. How does research happen? The same ways it happens in those countries; with medical research like what we have, with government research competing, with bounties, etc.
b) Canada, the UK, Australia, Europe, Japan, and Korea are huge in healthcare technology and medical research and competitive despite having nationalized systems
c) other countries, such as the developing countries and whatever China is, also manage proportionally to their economies. Hell there's a worldwide demand for Cuban doctors, and no one is advocating for the system that made Cuban medicine.
This argument is not only unconvincing, it's honestly starting to become insulting
that intro is one of the reasons I start fuming when people say "You can survive trump, you survived Reagan." no. we didnt.
Can I steal this because it's true. Some of us already haven't.
Thank you for that perspective. Things you don't think about when you aren't in the middle of it. Breaks the heart.
@@notmytruthTHEtruth stop being a doomer and advocate for bernie then, small child
@@notmytruthTHEtruth >tfw people call bernie anti-semetic for fighting the israeli government's blatant right wing nationalist tendencies
stop being a doomer; tulsi literally supported a resolution to defend israel at all costs and spun it as free speech shit when in reality all it does is hurt palestinians and circlejerk the israeli government
twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1155268020723310592
@@notmytruthTHEtruth while I dont love Israel, that's far from the most important, possibly election-deciding decision to make right now. Even if you see that as a lost cause, there are other reasons to decide on a candidate to support.
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.
LMAOOO
yikes
That's kinda perfect, actually.
"We are soooo anti selling out and pro poor people"!
*Proceeds to yeet the f*ck out the poor people and replace them with well paid actors, thanks I hate it!*
That sounds completely withing the piss poor standard of Hollywood engineering. . .
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.
But that is the whole problem, the characters they chose to centralize instead are instead these self-involved entitled straight white boys who are really falsely sympathetic to people who are ACTUALLY oppressed, and act like they are somehow ALSO oppressed merely by association, and by their desire to ACTUALLY exploit them for "art".
Columbus did her DIRTY 🤬
I just can’t get over the fact that angel murdered a dog
I feel like watching tick tick boom gives you the explanation of why the musical doesn't fully focus on that and it's because Larson didn't know how to create those characters without also having himself in the story because of his close relationships to people like that and that creates the characters of Mark and Roger and they also need focus to warrant being in the show.
@@RoaringKetchup its definitely not something I would do or support, but poverty really does make you do crazy shit for money. its why some SWers do (invertebrate, usually) crushing.
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.
:(
Hits hard, man, woman, or NB.
It comes to something when the people a movie like this *should* be for don’t want it...that really sums it up
@@RubyBlueUwU So basically:
RENT: Hey, we made a movie about you, we did good, yes!?
Victims: Thanks, I HATE IT!
@@reganfisher8180 It's not just LGBT people they're talking about. Victims of the AIDS crisis aren't gonna watch a movie where "but muh art" takes priority over "the tragedy of AIDS" when the movie uses AIDS to set up it's drama.
Oh poor baby Mark, affording a pretty big studio apartment while having a good paying job in his field that leaves him time to work on his passion project and maintain a friend group with a family that loves him, I feel so bad for him
I think you've missed the point. 1st off, they are poor. Secondly, they are squatters. Thirdly, its a show about the condition of struggling artists during the aids epidemic in New York. Some of the characters have Aids and struggle with it different.
Roger is defeated and desperate to leave his mark on the world.
Mimi: is going full YOLO, but is destroying herself in the process.
Angel and Collins: Take life one day at a time. Enjoying the time they have and embrace the friends they have. They are scared. But they do not fear.
@@TheReddShinobi13 lol. They are poor, he is not. They are dangling over an endless pit of misery, he's hanging over an indestructible safety net that he could fall into at any moment.
He doesn't want to pay rent because he'd rather do nothing, not because he's in any way unable to.
@@TheReddShinobi13 1. "They are poor." Mark had a well-paying job that allowed him free time to work on his passions. Which he CHOSE to quit. 2. "They are squatters." See previous. 3. "Struggling artist." He decided to be a struggling artist. He literally had a decent job that would have subsidized his art _in his lap._
The other characters' struggles may or may not be legitimate, but Mark's are not. Mark is a douchebag.
@@GoddoDoggo Mark is textbook trustfund babies BEGGING to he opressed while ignoring how lucky and priviledged they are. He could have helped any of his friends with that job.
How is he depicted in the play?
I wonder how long it will be before we get a musical called “Quaran-Teens” or something romanticizing the Coronavirus.
Don’t give them ideas! Lol
I hope they do something like that. I’m really tired of hearing about unemployed folks struggling to survive, and essential workers whining about their jobs being stressful and having to put their lives on the line. I think it would be eye-opening to have a story highlighting the struggles of those who don’t have to work, and especially those who have to work from home. People don’t understand how hard it is motivating myself to put on pants for zoom meetings and not procrastinate while I’m safe at home.
Why would you say that. (Especially because we all know its true.)
That is an amazing title.
"Becky, i cant hear you over the BLM protestors, can you move to another room in your Manhattan penthouse? I know the wifi isn't as good in the dining room but I can barely hear you over the screams as those poor people of color are teargassed."
@@username-mk4qv Bro bad take “ i’m tired of hearing about the people with problems what about the people doing literally nothing”
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
I have seen the musical and only learned this today
omg i died
Bro I’ve seen rent at least 5 times and it still took me till several minutes into this video to remember they are two separate characters 💀
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.
ThejollyFrenchman Yes, poverty is romantic. The Romanticd in the 1800s did exactly what this musical is doing: Mock the establishment while idealizing the lower classes they actually had no connection with often truly absurd depictions of their life. All while never truly challenging the status quo (with the exception of France where Romantic Art was more political) They weren't the first to do so, just the ones who coined the term. So yes poverty is romantic in the purest sense of the word: It is approriated by the middle class in order ti fit into their idealized narratives.
Romantic does not equal romanticized. The image of poverty is romanticized. The state itself is not romantic in any sense.
Kullerva I was getting at the point that Romance itself is an artficial construct and that this construct was created by the values of the 19th century upper and upper middle class. Roses and starry nights are only romantic because they were romanticized as well. As is monogamy.
Concur! However, you're mixing up Romantic and romantic. Romantic (capitalized) has a lot of different meanings; one of the first was as a descriptor for adventure tales like Don Quixote (no, seriously) and, later, grew in meaning to refer to the cult of exceptionalism of the artist and the fetishization of deep feeling as the ultimate goal of life (a la Goethe's Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers). "Rent" adopts the worst parts of Romanticism in spades, but romance (i.e. lovey-dovey bullcrap that men use to get women into bed) is something entirely different, even if it was--and continues to be--constructed in the same way. English is a weird language.
I haven't finsihed the video yet, but does she mention that Jonathan Larson did live in poverty? Or is that an idea in my head that is somehow untrue? I always thought he did and that he died the day before (or a few days before?) RENT opened on Broadway.
Also, RENT's "rage against the machine" isn't...the FDA, CDC, Pharmaceutical companies, The Reagan Administration but...their landlord.
Not just their landlord, their FRIEND who has let them live their rent free for over a year. I hate these assholes.
@@tape-6 He shouldn't have let them live rent-free if he planned to retroactively demand back the money all at once. As their friend, he knows they can't pay it and he knows that Roger has AIDS, yet he turns off their heat in winter and threatens an eviction to make them stop a protest by a mutual friend who he could deal with himself.
In the movie, Benny is played as kind and charismatic, so I get why his friends come off as jerks. But consider that they're cold and sick and they know that Benny is comfortable and only wants the rent money to drive up property value for his new business. It makes sense that they feel somewhat betrayed. On top of which, Benny probably didn't pay rent either when he lived with them.
@@AliciaNyblade I confess, I am a Mark fan. No doubt that he is pretentious and flawed, but he is doing the emotional labour of helping Roger and has to watch his friends die.
But thanks! Benny shouldn't get a free pass to act sleazy. The movie sanitized him when it changed his and Mimi's relationship.
@@AliciaNyblade I think Mark's worst fear is loneliness. As such, he is always in others' business and ready to defend his tribe by any means.
I really really enjoy Lindsey's videos! I think the "woke" style is a way of adding humour and keeping a strong thesis. I get where you're coming from though, since her biases show. I suspect that Lindsey, and a lot of Rent critics, are defending themselves - like, "I'm an artist who works hard and has to pay rent and I don't feel that entitled." Where I really disagree with her is the implied assumption that the play's job is to represent the whole AIDS crisis or have a clear moral. She makes a good point that La Boheme/Rent doesn't exist to tackle politics, but to make us feel for specific characters.
Also, (I'm sorry for getting on a tangent), it bugs the heck out of me when audiences ignore context. I'm not an expert on NYC in the 90s, but what little research I've done explains a lot about the musical and why it's written the way it is.
@@AliciaNyblade I think we're on the same page. Except that I am all for dissociating the work from the author when possible (hard to do in Rent's case!) Maybe death of the author can be a crutch for critics who want to push a single interpretation. My thinking is that, to get to know Rent, I have to really pay attention to the story and part of that story includes knowing about history, AIDS stigma and gentrification. And in my experience, the more I pay attention to a text, the more profound it is. In Rent, like you pointed out, I see characters who value friendship and creativity more because of how fragile those things are. And Benny, the alternative, compromises his friendship for wealth. I agree that the show wouldn't be what it is without Jonathan's need to honour his friends. His story is part of the show's mythology. However, I guess I think death of the author is just acknowledging that we can never know his motives for sure. We can only look at what's written.
Btw, I really appreciate your comments. You've clearly thought all of this through!
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.
If there's one thing Neo-liberal culture will do, it will frame all problems and atrocities that non-standard entities (minorities) have faced as both 'not so bad' and totally over and fixed. This is done for the sake of the standard entity. Take the civil rights movement, specifically Martin Luther King, and how... softened he has been. His edges have been rounded off. His Fight framed as a thing without fire and anger, of politeness and pure civility. Take the nature of Amerind - European 'relations' throughout american history.
All fights are framed as "Really not so bad, just cause of some bad actors. And it's all over and gone now. Totally won.". Just look at the 'racism is over' folks. Like shit man I used to buy into that. Just cause I didn't exactly don a KKK hood myself and no one I knew did either. But it's fuckin not over. The fight hasn't been won, Martin Luther King didn't cure racism. He just dragged a ton of legal protections out of the governments bloated rotting mass against it. But whomever is behind the cultural propaganda would have us believe that it's over, the standard-entity is good to the nonstandard entity now. Except for the few bad eggs. (in this case, White people, to Black people. To be specific) There's no like, concerted powerful systems that act against the non-standard entity. Perhaps luckily, society has paid attention to the recent Police Murders of non-standard entities (and a bit of the police murder of the standard entities too) so it's become harder to push the soft and smooth view of the civil rights struggle. But I'm sure once the passion behind the current Police Murder thing dies down, they'll get back to smoothing it all down.
same sorta thing is happening now to THE GAYS. Pretending that everything is fine now and if it ever wasn't fine it wasn't too bad, and it was fixed quick by the Good Standard-Entities when the Nice Non-Standard Entities asked. There totally isn't a powerful largely religiously motivated political force that actively opposes the gays actively. Has to be that way so corporations can profit off the Gays. They gotta be Shiny and Smooth.
Watch. When Trans People get their foot more in the door as far as 'being accepted' goes, the EXACT same thing will happen to them. I'll give it 10-20ish years before it starts. People will look back now and pretend Terfs barely existed and were just a few bigots that the Good Standard Entities didn't like, and not an active powerful opposing force that is given equal respect and weight by the Standard Entities.
Link to that Tumblr post, please?
This is how I feel about the opioid epidemic and how romanticized addiction is in movies. 75,000 people died of a drug overdose last year alone, and 50,000 of them was specifically from an opioid overdose. The number has increased every single year since the early 2000s. Nothing ever happens...they'll talk about the problem but no one ever makes rehabs or medication more affordable and accessible. But the make prison hell of accessible and once they can get an addict in the system the know the chance of recidivism is sky high and they make a lot of money off prisoner slavery. But addicts and people with mental illness in general are also stigmatized and no one really cares about them. Not really but they do a lot of lip service. Thoughts and prayers thoughts and prayers.
AIDS traumatized our parents in ways they are still working through. I was taught how HIV/AIDS worked and was transmitted in school, but it was always shrouded in this layer of silence and discomfort with the subject. Teachers didn't want to talk about it, parents grew silent, even the videos and readings would make vague allusions to how HIV+ people shouldn't face discrimination, but no real explanation of why they would in the first place (this was especially confusing since they first introduced the topic in sex ed before we learned about actual sex, so it was just this a bunch of stuff about periods and one random video about an autoimmune disorder). It was much, much later that I learned my parents had lost friends to AIDS and that they had been deeply scarred by the hatred and negligence they had witnessed --even though they themselves were not the target. My mother still gets tense whenever there is an outbreak of ebola, bird flu, etc abroad, because she remembers what kind of atrocity a stigmatized disease led her government to commit.
Care to share with the class? I have no clue what you're talking about. "OMG nobody talks about the truth! And neither will I!" Okay?
One of my *MANY* favorite critiques here is that the show builds up this song that Roger is writing as this earth-shakingly poetic, life-altering song - a song that sums up his life of heartbreak & tragedy - and when we *finally* get to hear it...it’s easily the most forgettable song in the entire show. Every other song in Rent is an absolute BANGER, but the ONE SONG that the show actually builds anticipation for...is a total dud.
It’s almost like the perfect metaphor for Rent in general.
Absolutely! It’s so ironic that the song he sings ( One Song, Glory)ABOUT the masterpiece he wants to write is so much more memorable and emotionally impactful than said masterpiece.
I was under the impression that he was lying, saying he worked on it all year to make her feel loved in her dying moments. Then he just pulls a very meh song out his arse in an attempt to be sweet.
But yeah, that song was pap!
I always assumed that was kind of the point. Same with how Mark's movie wasn't great either. It's not about the quality of the end product, it's about the love behind it.
@@introusas I get what you’re saying, but Mark is a bad example of that. He doesn’t actually love anything - he just wants to be subversive for the sake of being subversive. Literally all he does for the entirety of the show is complain about his life, despite the fact that his life is objectively awesome. He has parents that love him (who he completely rejects cuz sOcIeTy), he has a GREAT job **in his chosen field** but he quits it cuz it’s too cOrPoRaTe ew!! And he quits to make his own film, which is absolute horseshit.
Mark is easily the worst character in the whole show. He has almost no redeeming qualities and he’s a complete selfish prick.
@@captross07 Okay, I understand and agree with that, but that literally has nothing to do with what I'm saying. I was simply comparing it to my point about Roger's song. It's very simple, derivative, and the lyrics are boring and basic. But believe it or not that song is the one of the few that moves me MOST because of the emotion in his voice. And I'm talking about OBC because the movie is garbage that similarly has no love behind it. And I can personally relate to that song from Mimi's perspective because I have had someone in my life who has pushed me away out of fear, but whom I knew to have loved me.
Anyway - I'm not here for an internet fight because I hate those. I'm just stating my own perspective and that even though the song is pretty underwhelming, that it still holds meaning to me personally and if art means anything to even one person, that makes it valuable. And I'm not saying you're arguing against that either, I'm sure you agree. I just wanted to add that perspective to the conversation.
I like to think of Rent as that person who says "I'm not voting because all politicians are corrupt." They think they're rising above it all and are so superior, but they accomplish nothing.
If anything, they make the situation worse.
These people think they're better and more intelligent than the rest of the masses because they're "woke" and can "see through the government's lies", so they think that not voting is some profound statement of dissent. When in reality, by not voting, they are effectively silencing themselves and rolling over to let the rest of the masses trample all over them. Their opinion then does not matter because, by not voting, they are choosing to never let their opinion be heard, and are letting the vocal, voting majority speak for them.
Not to say that people who don't vote can't complain, but...they really CAN'T complain, because, in this way, they never spoke up against what they're complaining about in the first place, when it would've ACTUALLY made a difference.
1) "Rent" does not have an anti-political-involvement message. In fact, quite the opposite: "Revolution, justice, screaming for solutions, forcing changes, risk and danger. Making noise and making pleas!"
2) Does the relentless scapegoating of non-voters on the internet do anything to convince more people to get involved in politics?
+jdprettynails I don't think I'm superior, I just don't think the system offers change. If I can vote for brutal capitalism #1 or brutal capitalism #2, I care for neither. The system is designed to ensure the process of reaching the top transforms you into a bastard, unless you are already a bastard; witness Obama's early idealism turn to bombing children & deporting families. I don't think that system holds liberation.
If voting on its own was effective resistance, politicians wouldn't frame nonvoting as a problem or try to get people to vote; they do these things because making people think voting is the sole form of resistance is an effective way to bind them to the system & divert their efforts. By all means, vote! Just please don't stake all your hopes solely on that; please don't do only that. I don't think I'm superior to you or want to be superior to you; if you want this world to be better, you are my comrade.
@@swanscream5152 I assure you that John fucking McCain and Mitt Romney would have been worse for the country and the world at large than Barack Obama.
Voting is triage. It doesn't mean you stop other activism, it doesn't mean you can't protest the person you voted for, but it does mean you keep the worst of two (or more) options out of office. That is not nothing.
The talk about how the American government handled AIDS in the 1980s hits REALLY REALLY HARD watching this now, in the spring of 2020.
well luckily and sadly its being handled better then how aids was initially handled since it affects alot more people, its less about the government not being able to deal with these things but refusing to put effort in the AIDs crisis because they simply could care less if gay people die
think you mean how republicans reacted to the pandemic.
Republicans being careless and not at all bothered about a pandemic that they believe doesn’t concern them and that their focus should be on the luxuries they should be given? I’ve never seen that before!
"First they came for the homosexuals, and I said nothing because I was not homosexual..."
@@armoredp lol ok
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.
One question I would like to pose for discussion: Did Jonathan Larson intend to write a social justice musical that was intended to inspire activism? Or was it simply a love letter to his friends...warts and all? (Side note: In the NYTW 1994 version of Rent, he plays up the fact that these are flawed people alot more: Maureen is selfish, Mark is obsessive over her, Collins and Angel break the law and steal property shamelessly. The opening song is them describing in detail various methods of killing themselves. I find it interesting how Disneyfied the characters are in the 1996 version.) From the few interviews of Larson that exist the only thing I gleaned from his words is that his biggest intent was to bring younger people to the theatre and to inspire a more rock influenced sound in the genre. To me I always thought that his focus was on the interpersonal struggles of the characters and how they coped with the shitty hand that has been dealt to them rather than making any public service announcements for the FDA. But I guess when you deal with a topic like AIDs the personal inevitably becomes the political whether you intend for that to happen or not. I think the hype and fanfare surrounding Rent turned it into the "stick it to the man" musical when perhaps that was not the creators intention. I honestly don't think he framed it that way...but he's not here to confirm or deny that. And at the end of the day a case could be made for both arguments. I do agree that it's a shame that this overshadows Kramer and Kushner's work when it comes to discussion on art that addresses the AIDs epidemic.
I feel the problem is that people view RENT as a musical about the AIDs epidemic and its impact, where in my opinion it was actually just a geniune modernization of La bohème, which is not a play about TB but one that features TB as a major element, its about bohemians. Johnathan simply chose the AIDs crisis as the closest parallel. Looking back at his life and his work, to me it frames RENT more as just a celebration/romanticizing of this lifestyle that he chose, the people that inhabited it, and art as a pursuit. Its no wonder RENT also seems to be about sticking it to the man, as that was a big part of the young bohemian identity when it was made.
If tick...tick...BOOM is any indication after Superbia (a musical that was about something) failed to get off the ground and Rosa says to write what he knows he focused more on telling a story and less on The Statement, but people just love attaching a Statement onto everything they forget to just look at a musical a story that just so happens to have people with AIDS and HIV living in the late 80s to early 90s.
Unfortunately, as the video points out, setting it against AIDS automatically changes the message. There was no defense against TB at the time Boheme, there was defense against AIDS at the time of Rent. And it's that alone that makes it hard to reconcile their cavalier attitude about it all, spending their time getting upset over concerns like paying rent and selling out, with the reality that AIDS didn't have to be a death sentence. It wasn't an unstoppable force. It just required the government to _do_ something, anything, and instead it chose to sit idly by and watch.
It'd be like setting it in the modern day and using COVID as the backdrop. You would be utterly unable to separate the purpose of the disease in the work from the reality of the situation surrounding it, the political issues would by necessity be drawn in as a result of the viewer's own experience.
@@vonriel1822 I don't know people are able to enjoy Come From Away without going spiraling into the War on Terror and everything even remotely related to it, the same with Titanic: The Musical and able to separate it from the topics of travel safety and dozens of social issues.
There's also an unanswered follow-up, which would be, If Larson didn't die before the first preview off-Broadway, would there have been more changes that would have happened during the time it was in the NYTW in 1996 for the transition onto Broadway? There could have been some more of those questions answered, or just more fine-tuning since a lot of shows use that time period and previews on Broadway to make more edits based on how the story would be playing from a critical or audience perspective. Famously, Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George went from off-Broadway to Broadway with basically just the first act, and the second act didn't even come together until near the end of the previews (considering Jonathan Larson's mentor-mentee relationship with Sondheim and the tribute to him in Tick-Tick-Boom.) So I think there could have been more of an opportunity to address more of the musical itself, but without a bigger creative driving force, things mostly went to Broadway as-is, and kind of left things for Rent in the state they are now.
When she said "a system that ignored an epidemic before it came a pandemic" i did a double-take to see what year this video came out
Lol same, this vid hits different now
yup same
Is there going to be a sequel where she talks about how her experiences as an oracle have shaped her life?
Holy shit I didn't saw the date until the end when I read the comments and damn. I thought that part was a bit tongue in cheek....
yep. same. sure hits different now
"manic pixie dream-gays going quietly into that goodnight" "fighting and scratching and clawing and quilting..." Dude, I cannot with your brilliant word play😂🙌 I've considered myself a Rent fan for years now, but can honestly say that your perspective has me looking at it in a whole new light. Well done👌👌👌
no people were literally making quilts
"Why do you hate me so much? What did I do to you? Are you Rent fans?"
I can't believe RENT took the position of "having to pay a constantly skyrocketic rate to untrustworthy individuals who will gleefully change the rules at a moment's notice just to get basic shelter, is bad"...
... and somehow made us sympathetic to the *landlords.*
You made me sympathize with a landlord, RENT! You're a monster!
Nikol Geier EXACTLY! Compared to these turkeys, Benny looks downright magnanimous!
He’s willing to loan out an apartment in NEW YORK CITY for completely nothing, (a move that could only possibly HARM his bottom line) to his closest friends because he cared about them and their worthless ramblings.
And even when he welshes on their agreement, (A YEAR-AND-A-HALF IN, might I ad!) he does it so he can fund a studio for ALL OF THEM TO USE.
Jesus Christ. What should be the very embodiment of petty capitalist exploitation is the character I most empathize with.
Fuck you, RENT. You did this to me.
@@theoneandonlymichaelmccormick LOL
@@theoneandonlymichaelmccormick And it's sort of implied that THEY'LL STILL LIVE RENT FREE (Or at least cheaper) in the new thing being put up! Shit guys he's offering you a STAKE IN PROPERTY IN NEW YORK.
@@stargate525 he literally says so in his song "you'll see " that of theu convince maureen to stop her "protest" (which wasnt much of a protest but what ever) they could live in their apartment and use his new studio for free with a signed guarantee
@@michaelortiz1561 Good point. Makes this even more stupid.
As someone who was an active member of ACT UP in the 80s, RENT made me SO ANGRY. It whitewashed and prettified the terror and horror of the AIDS crisis to make it seem like a byproduct of whiny city-dwelling suburbanites who used trans people as props and....GAH!
My most "counterculture" friend and I went to see RENT when it first toured to Boston. She was a woman who lived in a squat, made giant, unintelligible sculptures that she wouldn't sell because they were her "children," and regularly held dumpster-dive supper parties. Halfway through Act I, she turned to me and whispered, "Why don't these assholes get JOBS?" That's been my thought on RENT since the beginning.
xingcat As a gay male born in 1987 (like, I'm pushing 30; whoa), I would like to thank you for your participation in ACT-UP. My generation needs an activism injection; people became docile between 1992-2016. It seems the latter half of my generation is start to learn how to act up, but we still need leadership. If it weren't for your work, things might be significantly worse than they are these days.
xingcat +
people seem to think sharing something on facebook is enough to actually contribute something
It's not at all due to me, in particular. I was a kid back then, and we were all really, really scared, even the suburban kids like me. Everyone was dying, everything we knew about the disease (or "knew" about the disease) told us we had no chance at life, nobody was listening. We just made so much noise that people had to listen. It's something I fear we'll all have to learn how to do again in the coming years.
Yes! This damn hashtag generation is the reason America is in the mess it's in. So few people are willing to actually put forth the work to make a difference nowadays, and think they can get away with simply retweeting something. And while that may certainly spread awareness, it doesn't do anything by itself.
"The spread of this was not inevitable, and had the powers that be acted sooner, millions of lives could have been saved. This is what happens when governments fail the people they are sworn to protect."
...y'all. Need to excuse me for a second...I need to lie down.
The "Dear ol' Mom and Dad" line, for me, really encapsulates the vapid façade of rebellion portrayed in Rent: A person wouldn't exist to rebel *without* Dear Ole' Mom and Dad. Yes, shitty parents exist and it's a heady experience to grow up and come to the realisation that they weren't right about everything, and develop your own values, morals, beliefs, and convictions separate from them, or are even directly at odds with the ones you grew up with. But in this story the worst thing the parents have done is... love them? Imagine if this was a conversation between Marc and, say, Angel who I think we can safely assume *cannot* turn to her parents for assistance and she's relating the abusive childhood experience only for Marc to chime in and say "OMG, I know my mom is so annoying! She won't stop CaLlInG!"
But also, these characters only have a sense of exceptionalism *because* their peers and communities are carrying on with mundane capitalism and doing the laundry and shit. If the restaurant they terrorize decided "you know, in the spirit of La Vie Bohéme, this is now a food co-op with the model of everyone cooking their own entreé" they would be PISSED; where're they supposed to get their fries now????
"Ugh, how am I supposed to keep up my vapid facade as a struggling artist when my worried mother keeps calling and offering complete financial support?! On a side note, no, gay Black homeless friend whose trans partner is dying of AIDS, I will not be using any of my potential privilege and resources to help you out. I'm living bohemian!"
I mean, given that the restaurant barely let the main cast in to eat because they don’t order expensive enough menu items, I can’t imagine them turning the thing into a food co-op any time soon.
I am bi woman and no woman in rubber has flirted with me 😒😒
same :(
Same. Seriously disappointing.
Same 🙄🙄🖐
Same
So damn what
Ive always hated how Rent represents Artists. I always thought it was a hate piece making fun of the "starving artist" until we I did a paper on it in High School and found out it was supposed to be in favor of them... wow, it totally missed the mark
I think the musical did a better job
This.
The source material really does go starving artist BY a starving artist. The Mark figure eventually takes up painting signs on an inn for money. The Mimi character dies of tuberculosis in the hospital, and by the time her friends find out about it and go to claim her body, it’s already gone to the medical students for dissection. I did everyone a favor by not seeing Rent. I knew it would annoy me. But Marcello definitely isn’t privileged.
Totally missed the what? Oh. Mark.
@@professorbutters Wait, maybe I forgot there were other versions. Which version is the one where MiMi passes away as you just described?
I hate that we're still having to chant "Healthcare is a right" and we're still being ignored.
healthcare is not a right. its a privilege granted to you by the wealth of this country. healthcare is still the product of someone elses labor. youre not entitled to that, nor am i required to pick up your tab when the government spends my tax dollars on your visit. so your right hasnt been granted to you yet because its not a right. since the government is incapable of producing literally anything, their only job is to get the hell out of the way while private businesses research solutions to the problems at hand- another thing you dont have the right to, and the government doesnt have the right to commandeer outside of a (REAL) pandemic without due compensation to the company.
Lindsay: Conservatives would be more proactive about a plague that is perceived to affect straight people.
Conservatives: Hold my beer.
As shambolic as the Trump administration's handling of the covid-19 pandemic was, it was still far more comprehensive, far more proactive, and far more compassionate than the Reagan administration's handling of the AIDS epidemic. Let's be clear, that's not meant to be a praise of the Trump Administration. It's meant to highlight just how bad the Reagan administration's response was to the AIDS epidemic.
I mean plenty of people who had signs of covid where mild and fine after a bit. After a bit of signs of aids you would only get worse and die a horrible death
I get the point, but the fact that soo many people got better from covid can not really be said about aids.
Edit: Point being, if you knew someone who had aids, it meant you knew someone dying a painful death. Alot of Americans saw that painful death and where ok with it cause they where gay. Covid and aids is just not 1 to 1.
To be fair, Trump was less negligent with COVID-19 than Regan was with AIDS. It's a matter of degrees.
They decided to deny its existence instead of encouraging it.
@@DumbIdeaPresentedStupidly Well, nowdays (and even in 2020) we know it also infects CD4+ cells, so might be closer than you think
As a bi woman, I wish there were always women in rubber flirting with me.......
me too
-straight man
Hi. Lol
*hates rent tho
Me too
Me too
Gay man
Did anyone else get chills ?
“...dear old mum and daaaaad”
“PLAGUE...forty million dead and you behave like THIS?!!”
😢
What was that speech exactly?
@@EGV88 It's a scene from the documentary "How to Survive a Plague" (surviveaplague.com/). The speaker is Larry Kramer (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Kramer). He is criticizing a 1991 gathering of ACT UP (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_UP) activists for falling prey to infighting, negating their ability to gather widespread support in demanding action on the epidemic.
I laughed, but it was a nervous uncomfortable laugh. Because I'm familiar with that speech. It honestly represents what I see as the big problem with a lot of activism. It goes no where because the people arn't organised, they smash windows etc which allows the gov to change the message at will, so their VITAL issue gets ignored. It honestly hurts.
@@JohnnyAdroit god doesn't that sound familiar rn.
@@Stettafire completely agree with you there. I see this a lot with the activist Left. Group A is so invested in their special interest they'll fight with Group B even though they agree on 99.9% of other issues. Then all of these groups ignore the big picture changes that need to happen in order for their special interests to receive any real attention, all while demonizing the larger organizations and the Democratic Party for daring to focus on the big picture.
I'd have gone into activism if I had any patience or tolerance for such petty BS and foolishness.
the sense of entitlement gets worse when you notice how poorly they treat waitstaff, homeless people, and it’s very much a case of punching down when they could actually show solidarity to the working class and turn their frustration towards the 1 percent and those in power who refused to help slow the aids crisis
but nah
-We're anarchists, no one can tell us what to do!
-Yeah, the government and the corporations should stop oppressing us.
-Oh no, I'm talking about the restaurant owner that doesn't want their tables moved.
This movie wants us to hate the landlords for doing their jobs and feel sorry for the main characters who do drugs, have life threatening sex, disrespect the homeless, drink a lot of booze, burn their eviction notices and refuse to pay their rent. I do hope that there’s a sequel to this called, “Evicted”.
I remember my mom saying that one of the best ways to fix Rent would have been 1) not having the main cast have rich families and instead be on their own, and 2) have all the characters be played by teens. She actually liked my high school’s production better than the Broadway version, not because of the singing or acting or anything, but because it felt less weird and off when you saw a group of teens/college freshmen talking about needing to pay rent and not having jobs because they honestly can’t. Maybe they were kicked out of their homes and have to live on their own somehow. It’s just a bit more compelling. Also, a bit more queer rep maybe please?
Especially if it highlighted any sort of dissonance with their family being a really real reason to flee them.
more queer rep? The play has a lot of their characters being queer. Benny, angel, joanne, maureen……..
@jeshala I think what I mean to say is BETTER queer representation. As a queer person myself who is very close to and grew up around survivors of the AIDs crisis (my mom was actually a highly active ally who joined multiple groups to support the community during the crisis), the representation felt very...off, in a way. The queer characters were frequently pushed to the side to focus more on the straight ones, and while most of the characters in general didn't have the happiest of stories, the queer characters pretty much ALWAYS had sad ones or bad endings.
Idk, maybe it's literally just me, but it felt kinda weird.
That is a great idea. Make the main cast hard to root for.
Lindsey, as a hemophiliac affect by AIDS in the 80’s( brother died from the tainted blood supply). Thank you for acknowledging the hemophiliacs affected. It means a helluva lot
++
+
Mike White have you read the book April Fools Day by Bryce Courtenay? He was one of Australia’s best authors (and my personal favourite). Bryce had a son who was haemophiliac and contracted HIV from a blood transfusion and died. It’s beautifully written, Courtenay is such a wordsmith and his turns of phrase always take my breath away.
Maybe you don’t need read it, but if you want someone to understand your brothers story, it would be a beautiful recommendation.
My condolences for your loss
Sorry to hear about your brother.
Mike White - oh my God. Are you Ryan's brother?? I remember him! As a child in the 80s he was the first person with HIV or even hemophilia that I ever knew by name, and really taught me so much about both. He seemed like an amazing person. Anyone reading this who was too young should google "Ryan White", he was an extremely important name in the AIDS crisis and deserves to be remembered.
Why did they call themselves “rent heads” and not “renters” or “tenants” 😔
because that would imply they pay rent
@@ThePrimevalVoid so the fandom should be Squatters?
@@skylarjohnson7779 freeloaders😎
Rentoids
Average rentoid
I actually really liked RENT (stage play) when I first learned about it and saw it in high school in the early 2000s. But this video essay addresses a lot of the things about it that made me uncomfortable or seemed a bit..."off." I took it more as the characters generally were more "hedonistic" than actually revolutionary and enjoyed the "catchy" music but couldn't understand what Marc's deal with his parents was (like, what did they ever do to him? care about him too much?) and why he was actively choosing "noble" poverty. But what bothered me the most and that I didn't really have the language to articulate at the time was Angel being treated as a sort of "magical trans or non-binary/latinx" matryr. She was mostly a one-dimensional character portrayed as just good, and sweet, and kind and caring (aside from the dog murder) who, out of ALL the characters with AIDS was the one who "had to die" seemingly just to progress the plot for the other characters in how they all coped (or didn't cope) with her death. And also was referred to thereafter as "looking out for them" (a la Mimi's resurrection) or was repeatedly cited as who they all should emulate. But not until after her death. It felt a little...tokeny/tragedy porn? Like even as a show with more LGBTQ+ and BIPOC representation than typical in that era, you're going to single out the character with the MOST marginalized identities to "sacrifice"? Yeesh
I remember being the only POC in my theater department and when I mentioned how I never watched RENT so many of them forced me to watch it.
And once I did watch it, I told them “yeah I didn’t like it, it sucked ass” I was essentially shunned from the entire department because a bunch of privileged white kids thought I was homophobic for disliking RENT 🙃
Needless to say my college experience sucked ass
College kids are like that, especially from privileged backgrounds.
I grew up rural and poor, I went to a comparatively cheap college after going to trade school and working 5 years as a plumber and saved up every penny i could (I was also working while at college)
I was pressured to go see a performance art piece where some black girl shrieked into a microphone fot 15 minutes (literally, all she did was scream) and I said it was shit and I hated it.
Well guess what? Because I'm a rural white boy (from a poor family who was working myself to death just to be there) and she's a black girl (who's a rich kid who's father is on the college board of directors and she's there on a free ride) I was branded as a racist, ostracised and tormented daily. When they learned I was hired by the university to be an in-house plumber while I was studying there they petitioned to have me fired.
College kids fucking suck. All of them.
Mood
I want to give your comment a like, but I don't want to ruin the number, so this is instead
10:43 “Amercinized the names a little”
“I’m roger”
Don’t know why but that always cracks me up
Fun fact: The name "Roger" originally meant "one who wields a spear". In some English-speaking cultures, it became a euphemism for humping.
Actually, it’s pre “English” and means “Famed spear” - as in a very good warrior, not just a passable hunter
"You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent." ~ W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
That's beautiful. Not the idea they are expressing but the way it is written.
So I guess I'm an artist😏
Many of the great artists of history have been born with at least the basics of a good life and were later patronized by the rich or aristocrats. It's awfully hard to go from a peasant to an artist.
@@squamish4244 well, at the very least, its hard to care about artistic beauty and self-expression when you're both without the expendable income to buy materials and working yourself to the bone just to survive. It's hierarchy of needs stuff. if you dont have your base needs cared for youre much less likely to care about less material things
Love that book.
4:26 that “beyond criticism” line hits hard. I find it real annoying when people find things, almost always dealing with death, to be beyond criticism. U2 Super Bowl halftime because 9/11, Nirvana because Kurt Cobain, and Rent because Jonathan Larson. It all gets under my skin when people try and act like I’m insensitive to criticize anything shrouded in death.
It's so odd to me as well, literally every single person dies so why does that mean you're not allowed to critique their work??
@@shoopmahboop1374 and the thing is, most these losses hurt me too. But nothing is immune from criticism, as sometimes criticism can be constructive and good advice.
The editing of the last 2 minutes of this video still hits hard on a rewatch. It makes my stomach sick by the way it perfectly explains the dissonance between RENT and the actual AIDS crisis.
Thank goodness the same exact patterns didn't play out in the last few years...ha ha...
It's unfortunate that we never got a moment where Fauci finally snapped like Larry Kramer did. With how poorly the US handled COVID, some folks deserved the earful.
I had avoided Rent like the plague it never really addressed. Always figured that the spoof in Team America was basically what I'd see. Finally, I saw Rent (not) Live the other day, and I was appalled; It was worse than I had imagined it must be.
I was there in those days- my best friend was a writer who lived in a one room apartment in Alphabet City, who got AIDS- I watched him deteriorate. We had a circle of artist friends. I marched with Act Up. I sat in with him on some of those patronizing group therapy sessions- whose distorted 'feel good' sessions seem to be where the author got a lot of his material from.
I can assure you that we didn't engage with the play's mantra of 'live for today' : Every day was in anticipation of the dread of tomorrow, and what could be done to prevent it. No one felt comforted by the idea that as long as you live your life to the fullest, being near death didn't matter. And no one thought that being forced to a squatter was anything but another turn for the worst. You are right- this play is meant to make middle-class feel good about themselves - 'oh look they're singing and dancing' No. We sang . We danced, but never in celebration of our circumstances. But not one of us would not jump the chance of a high-paying career. Who the fuck are these people?
The whole thing is based on a smug comforting lie. ...That, and most of the songs were pretty blah and went on too long.
And don't get me started on how a man with HIV having a sexual relationship vulnerable needy woman, he just met without telling her his status, is presumably meant to be romantic love. (Yes, by the 90's, we all knew that HIV could be contracted through intercourse). That was repulsive in so many levels.
So, thanks for confirming much of what I feel. I thought I might be turning into a crusty curmudgeon, way too soon
It's good to hear from someone who was there in those days to give real perspective. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for sharing your story. My generation needs to truth to be passed on and remembered.
Spot on but, what's this to do with the middle-class feeling good about themselves? Middle-class can't even think to afford those fuckin tickets.
Now they can't anymore, back when the show first started they still could I believe.
That’s the essence of the Broadway musical for the Millennial generation....we’ll call it: “Debt.”
TV Tropes brought up a good point: "working for a company you don't like is 'selling out', but killing a dog for money is not?"
That's literally what I was thinking. Beginner screenwriter books literally tell you that harming animals is a sure fire way to make a character unlikable.
"Selling out" is not sacrificing your values for money, but sacrificing your personal agency for money. Killing the dog for money was an immoral act, but something Angel chose to do. A celebrity doing a charity gig because their handlers strong-armed them into it may be "selling out," even if kids' lives are saved as a result. Selling out has a bad name because corporate interests are a lot more likely to be horrible and unkind than are individuals' interests, but that doesn't always have to be the case. There are exceptions on both ends. This is why we hate rapists and murderers and yet don't generally call them "sell outs."
Also the trope "Bury Your Gays"
Frances Webb ok yes but why would we call rapists and murderers sell outs in the first place? They’re not doing it for money.
I've never actually seen Rent, but I love Lindsay's essays, and I have a bunch of friends who rave about Rent, so I thought I'd give this a watch. I don't really know much about Angel's character after watching this, but I immediately had her pegged as "the dog murderer." Perhaps I'd develop some sympathy for her if I actually watched Rent, but right now I'm not particularly upset about her loss.
Well, the "Will I lose my dignity?" scene reduced me to tears, but so did the E.T. dying scene and the end of Cyrano de Bergerac, so maybe I'm not the best judge.
if it's any consolation I cried during boss baby
Me too. That song is the single sincere bit in the whole musical.
I still get all choked up my favourite cartoon robot truck gets gut shot and robot bleeds out colour on an operating table.
The most frustrating thing about RENT is how catchy and singable the songs are
You're right about Mark's character. Many artists would give their left leg to work in their field and be financially stable/successful while doing so.
Right? If someone offered me $3000 a story (I'm a writer), I'd say "Damn, I could purchase a new soul!"
As a writer. Definitely fuck Mark and his bullshit.
I just got a GREAT writing job. It pays SO WELL and it’s helping me break into writing as a career. I can’t imagine giving this up bro, FUCK Mark
This is one of the million things that bother me so much about La La Land: Mia's whole, "it's not your dream" when Ryan Gosling lands a steady, well-paying gig doing something in his field; if he pursues it for awhile, he could then fund his passion project. But, nooooo, she's determined that he needs to stay true to his dream or whatever. What about being realistic and investing for the future?
The weird thing is though, at that kind of money all he needs to do is save then he can do whatever he wants. Heck, he could rise up in the industry and get respected contracts to help him make his dream documentary. Learn from his peers etc. No one ever said you need to do everything all at once and no one ever said you need to do everything alone! So dumb.
Talk about a sobering moment: "Plague! We are in the middle of a fucking plague!"
Probably the most effectively edited video you've done yet. Excellent work.
Agreed.
Coming back in 2021 be like
@@elvellarambles9151 jesus christ lol
When this aged.... Correctly?
I think it becomes easier to understand creative decisions in Rent's creation in light of tick tick boom. Remember, this was written by Larson in his 30s, after so much rejection and failure. While it maybe be a fictional scene, I imagine the conversation with his agent about what tourists will fork out money for.
He wanted to break new ground and tell the stories of his friends and community around him, saying something about the world he saw around him. look at lyrics in songs on the jonathan larson project like "white male world" and "truth is a lie". At the same time he wanted to be successful and be on broadway.
My guess is, (of course we'll never truly know) was that to do both. he had to sugarcoat and water down the subject matter. bits like the homeless woman criticising Mark for using her for image his content and the phrase "silence = death" in the original lyrics of la vie boheme seem like little sprinkles of self-awareness. I can only speculate was that he was trying to play the long game and create more serious projects after having established a following. But we'll never know.
That's essentially what Lindsay was saying, just in the micro (Jonathan Larson having to water it down to sell it at all) vs. the macro (expensive versions of media _always_ have to be watered down enough to the point where an either wealthy - in the case of Broadway musicals or broad - in the case of Hollywood movies - can comfortably engage with them).
The sad thing is, building up a following, no matter how massive and devoted, and even over dozens of successful projects, would never have worked. Look at Martin Scorsese - he gets a lot of creative freedom, sure, because he makes excellent movies and is therefore (and this is sadly the critical word that even he seems to struggle to acknowledge) safe in the eyes of Hollywood. His films are _about_ organised crime but, even now, however morally abhorrent the actions of organised criminals might be in his films, the framing _still_ always romanticises the subject matter at least a little. His films have never accurately depicted the sheer depths, not to which the real versions of the people he depicts will sink, but in which they spend every moment of their lives. Whether or not Scorsese is even interested in creating a truly warts-and-all depiction of organised crime, we'll likely never know, but he keeps getting funded because he's never tried (or, worse, he _has_ tried and, even with his following, has been rebuffed).
I don't think even 'Tick Tick Boom!' would have been distributed by a major Hollywood studio - NetFlix and streaming allow for degrees of separation between what's invested and what's made that allow them to try things Hollywood never would because, even if 'Tick Tick Boom!' didn't draw in enough subscribers to justify its expense, no-one can really prove that and show that it lost money.
...and this is at a time where a _vastly_ larger number of people are equipped to deal with the subject matter. Now, we can never know if Rent helped, even a little, to create a society where that's the case (and it would certainly be nice to think that it did - I don't think many people would doubt Larson's sincerity of intent) but, ultimately, the lion's share of the credit for that ultimately must go to the people Lindsay talks about at the end (and many other like them) - the people who did it the impossibly hard way, working tirelessly to change the system in the real world, often when it probably _did_ seem impossible.
EDIT: Oh, and don't be fooled by Dallas Buyer's Club's impressive cast - it was an indie film that cost $5m to make.
it’s so surreal how the way you described the way the government neglected the HIV epidemic is like the same way the government has been handling the coronavirus, it’s genuinely disturbing
"manic pixie dream gays going quietly into that good night" is possibly the best sentence ever
Oh those 80s just really wanted us to be manic pixies and really really wanted us to go quietly into that good night
Manas If by “that good night” you mean “the very dregs of the corrupt society they have wrought” or “the indescribable flames of hell”, then yeah. That’s about accurate.
I was 16 in 1981 and while I didn't follow the protests all that much, self absorbed teen, I remember sitting in my civics class listening to kids laugh and say "AIDS was God's punishment for gays" and feeling horribly disgusted at these "good" Christians.
And the Ryan White happened.
Followed by dozens more cases of "innocent" people who got Aids from blood tranfusions.
I remember in 86, the feeling of my stomach hitting my feet, when my then bf said "I'm getting a blood test done tomorrow, the doctor thinks I might have Aids from the blood transfusions when I got shot."
I can't reconcile that long ago fear and horror and disgust with a bunch of rich kids refusing to pay Rent because of.... selling out?
You don't have to answer if you don't want to, but was your ex okay?
(And if it makes you feel any better, a LOT of Christians, myself especially for personal reasons, are furious about how their parents and forebears handled things in the crisis. Though I'm sorry to say that it feels like even more have decided to cling harder to their awful ideals. Ugh...)
@@linkwannabe Yes he was. He has since died of unrelated causes.
Mate if you think that's bad
Look up sharia law and lbgt people
Its shocking
It happens in Dubai
@@bonfyre4711 Yes, I know. Deflect much?
@@bonfyre4711 um, yeah everyone knows about their human rights violations. We are currently talking about *America's* human rights violations
"Is he about to sell me a really manly truck?" My first guess was jeans. Manly jeans, naturally.
Your inclusion of Kramer at the end...fucking shattering. May he rest in peace.
A lot of people gave you flak for starting immediately with the AIDS epidemic, but I think this is one of the best researched intros you've ever written. You gave all perspectives their due time, you brought up that there was more at risk than just being gay, and you treated the situation with dignity and impartiality. That's hard to do. I give you props for that.
+
Lindsay, the intercutting between Rent and the AIDS crisis at the end was chilling - truly masterful work. Thank you so much for what you do.
BluenoteNinja agreed. The whole video was great, but I shivered at that.
Agreed! Do you know the source? I'd like to watch it full
I tend to re-watch her videos and I cry at the end of this one every single time.
Julián Rivera “How to Survive a Plague”. It’s a documentary.
And the “PLAGUE! We are in the middle of a FUCKING PLAGUE! And you behave like THIS!” Always gets me. Someone make that a ringtone.
phastinemoon thank you for this!
Friendly plug that the play “A Normal Heart” is a brutal, honest, boots-on-the-ground take on the struggles the LGBTQ community had to go through during the AIDS crisis.
I haven’t watched the TV show adaptation, but reading the play in HS validated everything I hated about RENT.
i think another problem with the popularity of rent is that it automatically appeals to the lgbtq community (of which im part of) because we have so little representation in media that we're willing to take any that doesn't paint us outright as the villains. so holding hands down the street before going immediately to the bury your gays trope is accepted because there's nothing else, which makes it harder to see the actual issues with the movie that you've outlined. thank you for making this video, while i'll always enjoy rent because of memories i have attached to it, it's important to recognise how shitty of a representation (of characters and issues) it really is.
"Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? The ruling class does." wow yes
I hope Hamilton will age well....which I have a fear it will be a product of the late 2010s 20 years from now.
@@Abonanno24601 It was already outdated when it came out lol. It's a musical glorifying slave owners. I still like it a lot, but it is very problematica.
@@Cube-xm6vt that last point you said "its a musical glorifying slave owners" is one of the reasons why I have mixed feelings on Hamilton. On one hand I absolutely adore and love the soundtrack I can't lie its amazing but knowing the actual history of what happened and then seeing thoes same people portrayed as goofy singing characters is just- weird to say the least.
And that's without me even mentioning the fandom..
Actually people besides the ruling class live and die as well it’s just harder to get their voices heard. That’s just a slogan people who aren’t from the ruling class say to pretend they can’t exist and never will do anything worthwhile
Well technically it was the point in Hamilton as well... That he was the most forgotten founding father because he died younger and never made it to the presidency, compared to the others who ruled longer and mostly disliked him
As a gay person with hemophilia B, I just wanted to thank you for actually mentioning that hemophiliacs were effected by the AIDS epidemic, it's literally only a few words spoken but it means a lot. The gay community always recognizes the effects of the AIDS epidemic on gay people but when it comes to hemophilia, we get written out of history so often because we're very rare these days. But literally one of the main reasons that we are so rare is that 10,000 of us were killed by bad batches of blood-distilled factor in the US alone and tens of thousands more of us were killed world wide during the AIDS epidemic. I feel so lucky to have been born and diagnosed in the era of Benefix and Idelvion instead of the era of blood transfusions and blood-distilled factor. I hope to be lucky enough to be living in the era of CRISPR cures being made affordably available to all hemophiliacs by the time I want to have children.
SeabassFishbrains Yup.
I’m filled with existential dread every time I consider how many young children would’ve needed to learn that they were afflicted with a disease that boasted a 100% mortality rate, and that every public news broadcasting service claimed was the patron plague of perverts and junkies.
Fuck the ‘80s.
my brother has severe hemophilia A, and i appreciate this comment and Lindsay acknowledging it
And the generation after you will never be born due to prenatal diagnostics. You very well might be one of the last of your kind!
Taminy Very optimistic of you to assume that there will BE a next generation.
@@theoneandonlymichaelmccormick I produced members of that next generation - I HAVE to be optimistic! And let them march in Fridays For Future.
this honestly aged gorgeously
This video means a lot to me. Whatever Lindsay does in the future, I'm glad she made this. I hope she can find satisfaction away from youtube, if that is what she needs.
In the book on which La Boheme is based, after Mimi dies, everyone gives up their bohemian life and finds regular jobs.
I didn't know that! I didn't read the book, I just know Boheme just kind of... ends after she dies. Boy, that adds some perspective. :p
Chez Lindsay glad I could be of help. Opera is my specialty
Have you seen The Normal Heart?
TheSharbear14 it's on my to do list
Andrew Weinstein o
Came here to see Rent torn apart, ended up being educated.
Props, Ms. Ellis.
@Midgeon Mac **nod**
That's how she does :D
that's what we call a twofer.
That line about being mad at a system that did nothing about an epidemic before it became a pandemic really hit different in 2020
I've always had mixed feelings about this musical but there's some early footage of the 1996 production on CZcams (it's a full show and it was kinda like a preview), it's really bad quality but you get the jist, and honestly it still isn't without its flaws, but it does kinda "work" a lot more when you see it more in the "passion" (cringe sorry couldn't think of a better word) of when it was made. Even Mark was kinda endearing (yes really!) Also the actors being the right age is SO important for this musical, their obnoxious behaviour was so much more forgivable and made so much more sense when they are presented as being in their early 20s. Even the restaurant and table thing was kinda "fair enough" when it's some young hooligans, I'm sure I've done things like that.
I think its one of those things you had to see in its time truly experience it fully. I feel the same about Hair. Modern performances can really make me cringe, but I can tell that it was supposed to be really good, once, if that makes sense. I'm sure it was amazing in the 60's but you're just not gonna grasp that same feeling now.
I’m watching this while on break at rehearsal for this show and it’s the pettiest thing I’ve ever done. There are people rehearsing Seasons of Love ten feet from me.
What did you think of the show's music?
Video Game Drummer Productions Honestly the production we did ended up super well. Somehow they even managed to make ‘Your Eyes’ sound good. Still a terrible story though, all of us were far more invested in the homeless subplots.
King of Crawdads Honestly, you’re valid as hell.
Wow this is a mood right here
Are you playing it loud enough for them to hear it?
The ending of this video is powerful.
+James Parker I found it mesmerizing. I am trying to learn more about this topic. Can you (or anyone) tell me who the man is who is speaking?
I don't know who that man is but he's a damn hero.
Larry Kramer. There's other footage of him on YT speaking about AIDS very early in the epidemic. He also wrote the Normal Heart.
Definitely Catherine Larry Kramer was the man who called Reagan's indifference to AIDS exactly what it was, an attempted holocaust. And he did it while Reagan was still in office
he's a fucking badass
Holy shit I just made the 1000th like. That was intense.
I remember watching this in the first weeks of the pandemic in March of 2020. I went back to a deserted campus because I knew I wasn’t going to get a refund on housing. I had watched it a few times already, sometimes putting it in the background while doing calculus or procrastinating on my college essays. Rewatching it in March 2020 felt surreal, but oddly comforting? Like we’ve been here before, suffered so much, but still kept going. This channel was always a comfort, so thank you.
As much as I liked Rent as a teen, I totally agree with this essay as an adult. I wonder if Hamilton will fall in the same category and will not age well over the years, as much as I love it.
Hamilton will likely age fine. Dear Evan Hansen, on the other hand….
Larry Kramer's speech about the plague never stops shocking the hell out of me how desperate he was to get people on his side.
The sad part is he is speaking to other AIDS activists who saw ACT UP as placating the people in charge.
Roger's song about not being able to write a song is better than the song he eventually writes.
it's MUCH better. that last song is one of the few for the life of me I can never remember how it goes
Chez Lindsay I always forget the song is even in the play
I will say, if you view this musical as a satire on pretentious art people, it gets muuuuch better, and that would have been a far better angle to write the musical from. As someone who attends an art school, the most obnoxious students are your Marks, your Maureens, your Bennys, and even your Mimis to some extent (I'll give Roger a pass, I actually sort of like him). They are people who should be satirized and made fun of.
Collins and Angel always felt like the most grounded characters to me because their arc stays pretty focused on each other and not on "sOciEtY." Even Collins' rewiring of the ATM is at least something he shares with his shithead friends. The fantasy of being "artsy" comes crashing down around the other characters when Angel dies and they remember that AIDS is a very real and deadly disease and not just a thing for them to bond over. The best parts of the movie (in my opinion) are the shots of the support group members slowly disappearing as each of them dies of AIDS and the main group visiting Angel in the hospital. I think there's even a shot of Collins sleeping in Angel's hospital bed, reminiscent of so many pictures from the AIDS epidemic. As annoying as most of the numbers are, "I'll Cover You (Reprise)" is beautiful and heartbreaking because it's one of the only times they all stop being "art people" and mourn the actual tragedy.
I will always bring up Chicago because it's one of my favorite musicals and has a great movie adaptation, but in that, Roxie, Velma, and Billy are satirized wonderfully. They're all horrible people, and the media circus is crass and theatrical. And then the Hunyak, an innocent woman, is hanged simply because she couldn't speak English and therefore couldn't plead her case, and the seriousness and brutality of the judicial system stops being so fantastical. They still go back to the satire during the trials, but the stakes are now higher because the only thing played straight is the actual, real danger of the setting. Rent ruins that by playing everything straight, including the parts where they literally sing about starving for attention and hating their parents.
Also massive props for your montage at the end, it gave me chills.
This is the angle I'm trying to go for in my high school's rendition of Rent. I'm a senior this year and I didn't want to miss out on being in my final high school show, but I also understand that Mark (the character I was cast for) fucking sucks, along with multiple other characters and the general idea of the show. Especially Mark's idea of living the life of a starving artist while having EVERY POSSIBLE OPPORTUNITY TO GET HIM AND HIS FRIENDS OUT OF POVERTY.
Mark: Roger I know you’re clean and went through a terrible addiction that ended in broken hearts, heroin withdrawal, and death...but dude she has the best ass she even said so...what? No just don’t do the heroin it’s easy for someone with the disease of addiction to say no, so I think you’re good dude. It’s only living a life if you risk your own every day
🤣 fr as someone who loves this show I will admit that rational thinking is not any of these characters strong suit aside from Benny and maybe Joanne
Ummm... Happy New Year, "I'm gonna leave my vices", signed Mimi? She took her relationship with Roger as an incentive to leave drugs. Roger got a date with her in the first place by turning her away from a drug merchant. She failed miserably, but the relationship would've been good for her if it had worked.
@@runefaustblack I don't remember commenting that to be honest and it's a bit of an incoherent rant but if I know one thing it is that most of the time love is not a strong enough reason to stop a heroin addict truly in the midst of addiction
@@youtubeuser4943 Yeah, but it's not like she has many better options. Can't afford rehab. She took the help and the incentives she could, and they weren't enough.
A lot of CZcams videos feel like candy; short and sweet. But videos like these, they feel like a satisfying dinner.
Thanks, Lindsay :)
like an afterdinner mint
you worded this flawlessly! I feel the exact same way!
The characters in this honestly seem like the kind of theatre kids that the rest of us threatre kids made fun of.
It’s so true it hurts.
The characters in this are the types of theatre kids I went to school with. Jackasses even once got us kicked out of an IHOP because they were singing “La Vie Boheme” at the top of their lungs.
There are a lot of valid reasons to dislike this show. But that incident is largely why I despise it.
they remind me of my ex
“I eventually burned a bridge with someone who insisted that Rent was beyond criticism because Jonathan Larson died of AIDS. He didn’t.”
I snorted
Looking back on this it also strikes me as a... choice... to make the straights with AIDS both the focus and that the straights get to live while the queer couple is broken up because of one dies to AIDS. It's not only a gay suffering trope I am tired of seeing, but straight-washing what is an essentially queer experience of that era
I remember the fear. I spent most of the 1980s living in Europe, and the US university for which I worked in Germany - back when it was still West Germany - didn't provide health insurance. One of my colleagues, a couple of years younger than I, was pregnant by a man who dealt drugs. He swore up and down to her that he never used intravenous drugs. She loved her child, was a great mom, and died within a week of her diagnosis with AIDS. I was already back in the States when she died, but those who were still in Germany when she died said she just stopped eating in the hospital after she found out her daughter was HIV positive, too. By dying her daughter would go to her parents who could get treatment because they had health insurance. She was too old to be a dependent, but her daughter wasn't. I will never forgive the child's father for lying about his IV drug use. By the mid-1980s, it was already known breast milk could pass HIV to an infant. Formula would probably have prevented that baby's infection.
Don't get me started on my own scare when I found out the French blood supply wasn't tested and people who'd had blood transfusions from that supply, as I had, were at high risk. There was nearly a decade's worth of people - and thank you for mentioning haemophiliacs - who could have been treated had they known they were at risk. I was lucky, thank heavens, but how many people weren't.
I still like a lot of the music from Rent. I think the play is better because the messages on the answering machines, among other things, show how callow, at best, most of these characters are.
Fabrisse ter Brugghe Not enough, if you ask me.
In reality, RENT has next-to-nothing to say about the cruel, inhuman society that had facilitated and flat-out encouraged nearly every piece of tragedy of you friend’s story.
If Reagan’s America had taken action when it should have, AIDS wouldn’t have become the utter fucking pandemic it became, and wouldn’t have infected that dirt bag drug dealer that poisoned the life of your friend, her child, and her family.
Hell, if America’s economic and social system wasn’t as inherently alienating and despicable as it is, that disgusting piece of garbage probably wouldn’t be in the kind of economic disparity that would’ve placed him anywhere NEAR intravenous drugs.
Every part of your story was preventable. Every part of it didn’t need to happen. And every part of it was practically ORCHESTRATED by exactly the kind of people who’re still making all the goddamned decisions.
You’ll need to forgive me for my crassness and my indignation, but I just hate this show so goddamn much.
The LGBTQ+, the afflicted, the POCs, and all the disenfranchised people of America deserve better representation than this tone-deaf, Gen-X, neo-liberal DRECK.
When I first saw Rent as a child, I was completely in the closet about my transgender identity. Due to my catholic upbringing, this was the first story I had seen that had LGBT protagonists that were portrayed in what I then believed, was a positive light. Being my young emotional self, I clung to the musical with all I had. Watching that musical was the first step I needed to eventually come out as a transman and start my transition.
That being said, watching this video has gotten me to realize that I've put Rent on way too high of a pedestal. I will still have a special place for it in my heart, but now I can see that it held way too many flaws. Thank you for this. It was hard watching a story I cherished being torn down, but you actually did a very good job at softening the blow by giving all the facts in a logical manner rather than angrily ripping it apart.
It had a big impact on me, too. My cousin came out to me and later revealed his HIV+ status and I was rather lost. Rent was a comfort in a strange way. And I'm OK with it. I will still love it for what it was, but it is an entry point, not an ending. And that's where its value lies to me.
@ULGROTHA This has to be the wisest comment I've ever read on the internet, especially from someone with an all caps username. Thank you!
I dont agree with transgenders but im glad you're happy
@@derrickwoods1595 what are you in disagreement about? And who with? Just wondering...🤔
It's another person's life & issues. Whether or not YOU believe in it, condone it, or agree with their life choice should have absolutely no bearing on them.
How noble that you're at least 'nice enough' to be happy for them being happy. Sorry if that came off bitchy, I've had a crappy day. 🤦😜✌️☮️🕊️😶
@@goldilox369 I dont believe acting like another gender is changing it. I dont believe its possible to change it. I dont think if you call yourself a boy but you were born a girl that it makes sense. There's nothing you can do to make yourself as strong or as physically capable or as built or even have the same hormones as a guy. There is a difference between boys and girls for a reason. Its impossible to cross between them. It really is. There's no medicine, no science or no belief that can help you. Its just logic.
Seeing a group of women in the 1980's chanting "Healthcare is a right" hits a lot different in 2022 watching Roe be overturned.
We haven't moved forward at all, have we?
2022 Jordan Peele movie title.
No, we have to fight every day to make sure that a certain group of people in our country don't drag us kicking and screaming back to when "America was great," regardless of the fact that that's completely subjective and changes person to person.
This video essay lives rent free in my head
-I am not sorry-
It was really interesting to see just how many points this essay's title ended up tying into.
While this one wasn't quite as "fun" as Phantom and Hercules were, it brought up a lot of really interesting points. These videos are always fantastic and they feel so well-researched and thought out. I'm always ecstatic to see them in my subscription feed. Great work as always!
Lindsey's one of only a few cultural critics on CZcams who I can easily tell had done her fucking homework.
Her, Kyle Kallgren, and (usually) Todd spring immediately to mind. Funny how it's all the ones who left to start their own site . . . (which seems to have completely disappeared? What happened to Chez Apolocalypse anyone? I really miss Nella's readthrough of Tiger's Curse.)
Hi
JelloApocalypse hi I love your videos
JelloApocalypse Is it a coincidence that I just left watching one of your videos after getting the whim out of seemingly no where only to come to this video despite it's length being much to long for me to watch at this time, then to scroll down into the comments which I haven't done only to come across this comment and write this description of how it feels like more then a coincidence?
Yes, yes it is a coincidence.
The juxtaposition of Larry Kramer screaming admonishments and Rent's ridiculous party in the restaurant at the end was brilliant. I'm so glad I came across your channel!
That section gave me actual chills.
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world-prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. [Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), p. 56]
for real, the contrast made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up
Fox while I find your comment absolutely beautiful, I don’t think that was Lindsay’s intention in posting that clip.
The problem with Rent is that it does not do the work, it only dances. Can Anarchists dance? Of course we can! And we should. But we still must work. We must labour to make a better world. And then we dance to rejuvenate ourselves and express ourselves. (Well, others do, I’m now disabled and can’t dance anymore. It’s a massive loss to me, as someone who grew up dancing, who saw myself as a dancer. I miss it in a way I don’t have words to explain).
But Rent isn’t that. It’s all fluff with little substance. It’s all dance and no work.
@@katherinemorelle7115 it's a show. Not a piece of legislation.
It's a breath of fresh air, not the revolution in its entirety. Idk why people expect it to be and do everything.
It's not like it's harry potter or something seemingly intentionally immune from representating decent political commentary
I'd really like to question where the myth of 'the nobility of poverty' got started in the art community. Every single great artist of the Renaissance tried to get a patron ,because that thing called eating and sleeping comfortably is a great help in artistic development.
Okay, picture this: you're 20 years old, a junior at a liberal arts college-- you're living on your own for the first time in the Big City (well, in a dorm room pre-paid for by some government grant, and it's technically just outside the Big City but it's in the same zip code so it counts). You're straight, you think-- girls are pretty, yeah, but everyone knows that. You're a good year away from even considering the possibility that you might be bi. Hamilton is at the height of its popularity, and you are firmly in the midst of your Musical Phase™. Rent is your favorite. So, naturally, CZcams decides You Must Watch This New Video. Seems like a negative review, sure, but this is why you're in college in the first place: to challenge your ideas. So you watch it, and.... yeah. It's clearly well-structured and thoroughly researched, which you respect, but the heart of its argument just kind of seems like a load of self-important nit-picking about a musical that failed to incite the Revolution. Pft, okay "Lindsay Ellis", whoever you are. Sorry you have such high standards for the entertainment industry. You move on. Although... now, there's this little... itch. In the back of your mind. Reminding you that, hey, maybe you should look a little more critically at this thing you love. Maybe it has flaws-- and that's okay.
7 years of civil unrest the likes of which you have never seen later (half of which the whole world spent being ravaged by arguably the worst pandemic in a hundred years), you revisit this video. It hits different. Obviously.
I've done a lot of growing up in the 7 years since I first watched this video. Not just at the behest of a rapidly and violently changing world, but also as a consequence of simply aging. Not That much, mind you-- I'm sure in another 7 years I'll be cringing at my late-twenties self as everyone does-- but enough that I've come to truly appreciate what it means to fight to survive in the midst of a global health crisis; to be a part of the Queer community; to face a government-- no, a world-- so violently hostile to the mere existence of myself and the people I love. I appreciate this essay so much more deeply now. I agree with it, even. I think it may have been the first thing to really get me interested in critically evaluating modern media and exploring the broader socio-political contexts around works of art, and how that imbues them with meaning. Now, I've watched and read and listened to a million film and television and literary critiques that have ignited a long-dormant passion in me for the art of story telling. After 10 years, I'm finally writing again!
So I just want to say: I know you've left this platform, Lindsay, and I don't know if you still read these comments, but I hope you know that you've made an indelible impact not only on the CZcams creator community but on random viewers like myself. Even the angry, ignorant Rent-heads. Thank you.
The thing with Rent is the writer suddenly died and because he was young and seemed gay people automatically assumed he died of AIDS and rushed to see the musical thinking this guy died to create this musical and the press ate it up and it blew up into this big thing, the story and characters were weak but the music was very very catchy and gets stuck in your head, people like Rent for the music more than they like it for the meaning, the music is just so damn good that you overlook the words.
exactly!! i remember when i was watching the movie that i was very confused by A LOT of the choices the movie makers chose to made and some stuff didnt make sense but the songs are the only thing good about it
Neato Burrito Yeah I saw Rent when I was 11 and LOVED it despite not knowing what AIDs was and totally oblivious to the adult themes and that Mimi and Roger were recovering ex junkies singing about heroin and addiction, I fucking loved the songs and didn't pay attention to the plot or the message haha it flew over my naive head.
Definitely though I still can't stand that "Jump over the moon" segment
You forget that Larson also PLAGIARIZED the entire story from Sarah Schulman. How do you know? Much evidence, including the way they administer AZT is from 1991 and not 1995 when the play was published.
Jonah Falcon Uh...from what I understand, a few elements of the story (particularly the bisexual love triangle) were probably plagerized to some degree, not the whole story. Plus, how would AZT administration prove anything, given that both stories came out in the 90s and were about the 80s?
The most depressing thing about all this is knowing that the current COVID-19 pandemic is totally gonna be exploited in 10 years to make this same exact shit again.
Some rich, white, upper- to middle-class male is going to write about the global society (read: Western countries) banding together in this time of crisis and how creativity flourished in these dark, desperate times and how humanity once again shone bright after so many years of drudgery. I simultaneously love and hate the idea.
@@hillarywoo4977 I don't want to get into this but can you not make this about skin colour? Why do so many people think that everyone gets to be nuanced but what you describe is exclusive to this number of attributes?
Rich, upper class and if you really need it male would surfice. And still be insulting to millions of people - because men like any other group aren't a hivemind.
There are already idiots writing this stuff. We all know that. But their opinions are not just formed by their gender or their skin colour but their entire social status and wealth - in other words their whole character and what this translates to is that as a white, male upper middle class guy, the character you describe?
That's a clichée but by giving into the clichée you misunderstand the problematic of class divide. If wealthier, black south Africans write the same things when talking about the poorer lower classes in their own nation, we can take away that being naive isn't about skin colour. And as a frequent news reader, more than enough women write the same emotional crap as their male counterparts.
Of course, making this about attributes always brings the risk to oversimplify things but to get back to my original point;
I don't care about political correctness. But as a German, I know where this kinda talk can end.
It's the most dominant aspect about German culture people don't know about but it is everywhere - our ancestors went down this road, the rest is history and Germany is therefore the most cautious nation on the planet when it comes to talking about groups as you did in your comment.
I liked what you had to say. I really did. But do me the favor and put it in a better way next time. Thanks in advance.
@@Arcaryon Als ein Deutscher der jetzt im Ausland lebt, ich würde nicht so sicher reden über die kulturelle Situation von anderen Länder wie Amerika. Es ist sehr oft schwer zu unterscheiden swischen Besserwisser und die angeblich 'gut-informierte' Ethik-Polizei Deutschlands.
@@grimble4564 Ich studiere Politik (vor allem internationale), Ökonomie und Sozialwissenschaft, mein halbes Leben besteht daraus, Geschichte zu analysieren, über momentane, vergangene und zukünftige Ereignisse zu lesen und über Gesellschaften und Individuen zu urteilen um nur ein paar Aspekte zu nennen.
Ich bin in der Hinsicht kein "Besserwisser" - ich WEIß es schlicht und ergreifend besser als die meisten weil ich mich damit wortwörtlich stundenlang jeden einzelnen Tag beschäftige - ich bin nicht der klügste oder der einzige mit Durchblick. Aber ohne mich aus dem Fenster zu lehnen, die meisten Menschen auf diesem Planeten wären zwar theoretisch nicht mehr oder weniger in der Lage dazu als ich ABER sie tuen es nicht und sind aus genau diesem Grund unqualifiziert um tatsächlich am demokratischen Prozess teilzunehmen.
Ich spreche (bzw. lese, sprechen nur 3) genug Sprachen um mir mein Bild aus den unterschiedlichsten Perspektiven zu machen. Die Hälfte der Dinge die ich hier anspreche, habe ich z.B. aus amerikanischen Medien oder meinem Studium, welches zu großen Teilen auf amerikanischer Arbeit basiert, die nicht nur die Grundsteine der Forschung legten sondern bis heute enorm viele der Aspekte prägen. Ich lese täglich nicht bloß ein paar Nachrichten oder Blogs, ich recherchiere die Themen wochenlang, ich urteile NIEMALS weil ich glaube es besser zu wissen als andere sondern weil ich empirisch beweisen kann, dass meine Theorien vollkommen ausreichend sind um meine Darstellungen zu unterstützen - vor allem weil ich hier ja nichts neues verkünde - es ist fast unmöglich einen originellen Gedanken zu haben aber das heißt leider nicht das was für mich und mit mir zusammen Tausenden oder sogar Millionen von Menschen alltäglich und verständlich ist, auch wirklich von den meisten begriffen wird.
Politik ist genauso "schwer" zu begreifen wie zum Beispiel Biologie aber genauso wie die meisten nicht über ihr Schulwissen bei letzterem kommen, verhält es sich mit Politik.
Menschen sind nicht so kompliziert wie sie denken. Komplex ja aber nicht kompliziert. Aber dafür muss man Zeit aufwenden. Den Luxus oder den Willen dafür, haben nicht viele, was nicht verwunderlich ist. Demokratie war nie ein Massenprojekt, auch wenn viele das heute anderes sehen wollen.
Kennst du den Ausdruck "Ich kann das nicht nachvollziehen?" In einem politischen oder ähnlichem Kontext ist das für mich ein Fremdwort. Das mag' arrogant klingen aber es ist ein Fakt das die meisten Menschen der Auffassung sind, ein paar Minuten politische Bildung in der Woche seien genug um eine Meinung zu haben die man öffentlich teilen darf. Nun - ich widerspreche dieser Ansicht und lehne sie ab.
Ich glaube, dass ich nicht in der Lage wäre über Molkekularbiologie zu urteilen und ich bin der Auffassung, dass das gleiche für die meisten Menschen im Umgang mit Politik gilt.
Weißt du was ich in meinem Leben zu dem Thema gelernt habe? Viele Leute verwechseln Arroganz mit Selbstsicherheit. Ich habe verdammt viele Fehler. Aber in diesem Feld und bei meinem Training bin ich außergewöhnlich gut und gut heißt in beiden Fällen nicht genetisch überlegen oder in sonst einer überheblichen Art und Weise anders aber genauso wie die meisten Menschen nicht 6 Tage die Woche für 2 Stunden in ein Fitnesstudio gehen, verbringen die meisten Menschen ihre Freizeit nicht damit Gesetzestexte und Statistiken zu wälzen und zu versuchen, sich selbst und die eigene Meinung nicht bloß zu hinterfragen sondern so abzusichern, dass sie den strengen Ansprüchen der Wissenschaft genügen. Ich studiere nicht in Harvard und ich würde mir nie herausnehmen zu behaupten das ich in meiner besagten Profession etwas besonderes wäre. Aber hier auf CZcams?
Bei dem durchschnittlichen Wissenstandard meiner Mitmenschen oder Bürger bei diesen Themen? Die Argumentation gewinne ich fast jedes mal und wenn nicht - tja, wenn ich nichts mehr zu lernen hätte wäre das in meinem Alter schon recht traurig.
Aber alleine wie selten es vorkommt bestätigt was ich gerade angesprochen habe. Und egal welche Sprache(n) man spricht oder wo man lebt, am Ende sind wir alle Menschen.
Ich habe Leute wie mich überall getroffen. Russen, Amerikaner, Chinesen, Franzosen, Spanier - such' es dir aus. Ich bin wie jeder Mensch einzigartig aber nicht so einzigartig.
Warum ich diesen letzten Punkt anspreche? Weil sogut wie ALLE diese Leute egal welche Meinungsverschiedenheiten es da auch gegeben hätte, in dieser einen Hinsicht einig waren.
Das hat dann nichts mehr mit einer "Bubbel" zu tuen.
Und nebenbei; ich kann jedes Land auf der Weltkarte auseinandernehmen, auch das eigene. WENN ich genug Zeit habe um mir meine Meinung zu bilden. Niemand ist allwissend. Aber wenn die meisten beinahe nichts wissen, ist Überlegenheit nichts womit man angeben müsste.
In a world without sight, the one eyed dwarf is king.
Ist so viel Selbstvertrauen arrogant? Nun - das kannst du selbst entscheiden. Aber bevor du dein endgültiges Urteil fällst, frag' dich einfach ob meine Weltanschauung wirklich so falsch ist. Ich behaupte, die Welt zu begreifen ist das leicht wenn man weiß welche Fragen man stellen muss und woher man die Antworten bekommt.
Lass' uns ein kleines Spiel spielen.
Ich nenne mal ein paar berühmte Demokratien und ein oder zwei Revolutionen. Die römische Republik, die französische Revolutionen, um bei meinen Leisten zu bleiben den Mauerfall sowie die griechischen Demokratien, allen voran Athen. Was haben all diese Ereignisse gemeinsam? Nun, man könnte viele Beispiele nennen. Worauf ich hinaus will ist etwas viel simpler es und zwar die Teilnehmerzahlen. Man stellt nämlich leider schnell fest, dass hier in der Regel, nicht immer aber meistens urbane Eliten gegen ihre Oberleherren rebelierten, dass es häufig deutlich weniger Teilnehmer an selbst den nobelsten Unterfangen gab' als man meine würde und dass Demokratien und Revolutionen nur dann erfolgreich (siehe Bauernkriege z.B. im Mittelalter) entstehen und vor allem erhalten werden können, wenn die Bevölkerung nicht nur gebildet und der Staat relativ stabil ist, sondern vor allem Dinge auch wenn wenn sie aktiv und konstant an besagter Demokratie teilnehmen, über aktuelle Vorgänge reflektieren und somit insgesamt die Institutionen die sie errichten wollen oder deren Fortbestehen angestrebt wird, wahrnehmen, verstehen und am politischen Prozess teilnehmen sowie diese Traditionen weitergeben und im Zweifel dafür eintreten.
Eine große Tragik unseres Zeitalters ist der Fakt, dass die meisten Leute vergessen haben, dass Demokratien und ihre dadurch alltäglichenen Freiheiten nicht einfach vom Himmel gefallen sind.
Ich "kämpfe" jeden Tag dafür, dass sich dieses Problem ändert.
Darin habe ich unter anderem meinen Lebenssinn gefunden.
So, ich hoffe das erklärt mich und mein Denken in ausreichender Form. Wünsche noch einen schönen Tag oder eine gute Nacht.
@@grimble4564 PS: Beim nochmaligen lesen von deinem Kommentar bin ich mir nicht mehr sicher ob ich tatsächlich eine Kritik vorgefunden habe oder mich da verstan habe, leider kann man Buchstaben nicht sprechen hören.
Sollte dies der Fall gewesen sein, bitte ich um Verzeihung und Verständnis wobei mein kleiner Paragraph trotzdem nicht allzu schlecht gelungen ist. Wie auch immer - auf "Wiedersehen".
21:53 God *DAMN* did Pulp knock it out of the park with Common People _"'Coz everybody hates a tourist, especially one who thinks it's all.. such a laugh.."_
I thought rent was romantic until I ya know actually became a homeless drug addict.
The most sympathetic characters in RENT are the restaurant owner and his waiters let's be real.
Katie Michel the only character I didn't hate was Joann. She had a real job, was a victim of her friends stupidity and was the victim of a toxic relationship, actually tried to help them achieve their goals, actually put in effort into her relationship but was made fun of by her partner for being too uptight when her girlfriend was too loose
why not Benny? he was willing to give Roger and Mark living quarters and let them stay at his high-tech community center. I mean, that's what Roger and Mark are in it for, right? a validation of themselves? authenticity be damned - that's shot down by the rant the homeless woman has against Mark and Mark, for lack of a better term, bitching about his parents being supportive because "he wants to be a real artist, dammit!"
Hal Emmerich i think the musical changes dramatically when you go from a "friends mindset" (were supposed to like these people and think they're so cool) to a "Seinfeld mindset" (wow this is a show about nothing, they learn nothing, and they're all assholes). I've never seen the stage play, but I like to imagine that all of them are just *the worst* artists and everyone reacts to them the way that homeless woman did. And Benny, move on bro! You're too good for them!
Pity the real Life Café closed, at least partly due to high rents I think...
Love her or hate her, Lindsey is an amazingly intelligent woman, and her opinions are the ones of someone who has a strong academic background. I really admire her for that.
Are there people who hate Lindsey?
Carlos Arias her channel is one of the best on CZcams! I wish it was more well known.
She reminds me of the girls I was friends with in high school and college.
Agreed. I actually preferred Lindsey as herself rather than the Nostalgia Chick persona.
Every now and then I return to this video, and every single time I am reminded of Lindsay's talent and brilliance. I hope you're doing better, wherever you are and whatever you're doing.
To this day my biggest confusion about my past feelings for this musical is- how did they ever get me on board with Angel literally killing a dog? It's so jarring to hear now that it's been a few years since I last revisited it.
I have an Akita now and I can’t watch that part of rent anymore.
The song Roger sings about needing to write a song is better than the song he writes. This in and of itself is a crime.