Pretty Boy Front Man

It has been a long standing rule for me to mention very little on this site pertaining to films I see and my thoughts of them. This is because I have a site entirely dedicated to films and my thoughts on them I am working on and don’t want to sell my chickens before they’re counted, or whatever.

Tonight, however, is a special occasion. Tonight I went to see Rent. Rent, for those of you who haven’t experienced its glorious presumption, was a play – a musical – written at some point in the very late eighties about a bunch of twenty-somethings that haven’t discovered the WB yet. It was made into a film by Home Alone’s Chris Columbus in this, our 2005th recorded year on this rock. This is the film I was taken to see.

I have a personal relationship with Rent, you see, because my age and interests have placed me, astrologically perhaps, in line to have dated only people who have somehow found themselves entrapped in the content of this piece. I look at it like the average 1330s gentleman’s social circle and its relationship with the bubonic plague. If you were a guy, in his mid twenties around then, the likelihood that the chick whose ear your tongue had found frequent purchase within was carrying at least a tiny case of the black death was almost assured; a ‘wrong place, wrong time’ situation at an epidemic level.

As though by way of fate, those girls in whom I’d had vested interest were in their haughty teenage angst period when Rent went crazy popular. I spent the latter part of my youth in an upscale county with way too much money, a great school system and kids who never knew what it was to be poor. This is why Rent was their anthem. To them there was some mystic frivolous allure to the tale of a bunch of irresponsible artist junkies getting high, complaining about the world and dying of AIDS. I seriously doubt those kids that I spent the earlier part of my childhood – the ‘slender’ years – with would have the same reaction. I am pretty sure, in fact, that those kids who spent their young lives in East Detroit, Roseville and the Lesser Detroit area would give no pass to the selfish and ignorant anarchists in the film. That is not to say they wouldn’t relate to the glorification/representation of an impoverished lifestyle – but the soundtrack would be Busta and Missy, not some ex-barista’s idea of hip up-temto jazz-rock-opera.

Rent, if you follow the film version, is the story of a small group of thirty-somethings pretending to be in their early twenties. They have become angry with the world for some reason or another and attempt to take it out on themselves and an unwitting paying audience by singing terribly written songs about nothing while battling the daily question of weather or not they should do drugs, have meaningless sex or find another way to spend their time in the gi-fucking-gantic penthouse studio apartments each of them seems to get, ironically, rent free. They hate their friend, the one who offers them a free place to stay and a studio in which to do their art if only they don’t partake in a pointless protest of the loss of a performance place that they were never paying for in the first place. They all have very personal very boring stories about why they can’t get up and get a goddamned job and why the whole wide world sucks. All but one of them has AIDS, and none of them got it by blood transfusion. Every one of them is some sort of minority, except for the white dirt-assed Bon Jovi wannabe who spent 2 hours of my life singing songs about how he couldn’t sing a goddamned song, and every single one of them thinks that doing anything but taking drugs, having sex and protesting the man is a sellout.

Now before you think I have gone all come-to-Jesus on you, let me explain that I support the underlying view of each and every one of these characters. I think that the writer originally had a very solid tale of people and their struggles; especially with impoverished youth. I think, however, that his vision was distorted and sold, ironically, to those who have not experienced this life and who appreciate only the anti-establishment rhetoric of the film. Much like Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting or Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, those who have made these pieces cult hits are not those who would directly relate to it, but those who are attracted to the acts represented which the inertia of suburban life does not allow them to know.

I agree with homosexuality with the same veracity with which I believe in heterosexuality. I believe drug use to be an impediment to an otherwise totally brilliant inherent natural gift, but I don’t give a shit if you choose that path for yourself. Though personally not promiscuous, I’ve got nothing against you being so, and am fairly lascivious in my monogamy. None of these things are anything I take issue with. What I take issue with is the uselessness of the struggle held by this group of people. I don’t get it. Angst for angst’s sake doesn’t cut it for me.

Though my mother worked hard for me to never taste eating-out-of-the-trash poverty, we came close on a number of occasions in my early youth. I grew up in a situation that, were it not for her constant and unending effort, could have ended very badly for anyone at all. I think this may be part of it. Also part of it is the fact that I’ve always felt I had a purpose, valid or otherwise. I never lost myself to chemicals or engaged in any situation that had the opportunity to disease me for life. That is not to say I was Mr. Goody Two-Shoes by any stretch, I just never got AIDS by shooting heroin, so it is difficult for me to relate. At 19-22, the age these people are supposed to be, I was plotting total world domination by way of zealotry driven sociological coup d’état and not worrying about weather or not the man knew I didn’t like his position on me living rent free in buildings he had legitimately purchased on the open market upon which our economic structure is based. I guess I just didn’t connect.

And neither should anyone I have dated. That is the disgusting point. I suppose they connect to it like I connect to RoboCop. It is a story about some shit they’ll never experience unless the world goes to hell and it is interesting to see; except I didn’t spend the majority of my young life singing the RoboCop theme song and crying about Murphy’s hand. The chicks I am talking about all lived in Rochester, MI.

Rochester, MI is in Oakland County. Look that up, kids – you will find that is has hovered between the richest and second richest county in the goddamned country for the last 20 years. You only got hooked to heroin if you couldn’t stand the pressure of mommy and daddy wanting you to be a lawyer or your friends pressured you into it at a party at your parent’s winter cottage. You only tried to live an anarchistic or bohemian lifestyle because it pissed off your parents. It is ok to admit that, they did the same thing to their parents you goddamned hippy.

Back to topic; again, I agree with the underlying story. The camaraderie and genuine friendship expressed by the piece is not only respectable but notable as being exceedingly enviable. It is served terribly, however, by the immature and self-defeating situations these people are described as being in. The dichotomy is most blatant when an almost sickening homage to La Bohème is interrupted so that two of the main characters can take their dose of AZT together. Here they are, belting about their idea of anarchy and how the normal everyman is afraid of real life and rallying against the man and they actually cut to these people taking a drug researched and developed, paid for and produced by the very society they are railing about. This drug they take to stay alive is provided to them, freely and without question or commitment, by those whom they would seek to destroy. This kind of shit is almost entirely what the film is about.

I walked away trying to care about a bunch of kids who didn’t want to make a way for themselves and were so strikingly myopic in their views that they were actually DYING because of it.

It also didn’t help that the special effects – the ONLY special effects – interrupted every frigging sequence of this film.

You see, they were supposed to be cold. Poor = cold. It was winter and they were poor so a point was made to digitally insert steamy breath at every line or exhalation in the film. Every one. I am not kidding you in this. I was going to count them so that I could wow you with the figure, but I stopped at 612. The sets looked like they were themselves built out of balsa wood, but the breathes were digitally inserted.

I wish they’d just loaned the Rent kids the effects budget and a copy of The Big Chill and asked them to report back in 60 days with a clear understanding of how camaraderie is best served in a visual medium.

That is to say by Brundle-Fly, Sniper and the Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil.