Nearly a decade ago, my parents came back from a trip with the music to the musical “Rent.” I was hooked. I quickly memorized the lyrics, the plot, the little quips between songs. When my parents came to Cambridge last week for Thanksgiving, we saw the new “Rent” movie, and I loved it. I’m not gonna lie: I blubbered for most of the film. I fell for every cheesy line and every truly beautiful song. There’s just one problem: much of the film’s message is absolutely absurd.

For those of you who have been living under a rock in outer space, “Rent” is a movie about young artists living in New York’s Alphabet City at the beginning of the 1990s. It starts with the diverse cast explaining that it doesn’t want to pay its rent for the previous year, the next year, or, presumably, any year after that. The action accelerates as the protagonists battle Benny, a former friend who has sold out by buying the building they all live in and occasionally asking them to pay to live there.

But what makes “Rent” politically troubling isn’t the notion that artists should be able to live for free in the heart of Manhattan—or that anybody who thinks otherwise is yuppie scum. The trouble with “Rent” is the face it puts on poverty. Poverty is a serious problem, not a lifestyle choice. But “Rent”’s main characters accept poverty as both a necessary byproduct of refusing to sell out and a hip way to spend one’s youth. The characters live their bohemian lives right next to a massive homeless community, but the homeless enter the film—with one exception—only as extras or in rhetoric. The makers of “Rent” understand that homelessness is a problem in Alphabet City, but they choose to focus their energies on the artists next door.

To be fair, not every character in “Rent” seems to have chosen poverty. Nor does the film completely ignore the homeless. “Rent” was clearly made by people with real compassion for the city’s poor. The problem is that the role of the victim in this story is filled by characters who seem like they could be doing better. By casting nerdy Jewish filmmakers and talented musicians as the proletariat of New York City, “Rent” trivializes real problems. Poverty, for most Americans, is not something that could be escaped by “selling out.” The reality of poverty for the homeless New Yorkers who get so little play in “Rent” is fundamentally different from the picturesque poverty that “Rent”’s main characters experience.

“Rent” isn’t just about poverty. It’s also about the horror of living with AIDS in the early 1990s. On this topic, “Rent” both succeeds and fails. On one hand, “Rent” may have succeeded in reducing some of the stigma associated with the disease. Students may find it difficult to understand the degree of stigma that used to be—and to some extent still is—attached to HIV and AIDS. To this day, foreign nationals with HIV cannot visit the U.S. When “Rent” was being written, political leaders could still talk about AIDS as a punishment for gay people or a plague on the immoral. In this context, “Rent” should be credited for providing likable HIV-positive characters without self-congratulatory flourishes.

But the film does largely gloss over the enormous suffering that the disease has caused in the U.S. and elsewhere. People die from AIDS in “Rent,” but their deaths are so achingly beautiful and full of meaning that something is lost. The long, dirty, painful, and fundamentally base march of the disease is largely ignored. Unlike “Angels in America,” or even “Philadelphia,” “Rent”’s pop-rock songs and video montages fail to show the horror of AIDS, losing the essence of what is, at its heart, a terrible tragedy.

“Rent” is at its most disgustingly absurd where HIV/AIDS and poverty intersect. The film’s characters can’t afford to pay rent, but they have no trouble getting expensive medications. For a film that claims to be about poverty and disease, “Rent” is shockingly silent on the ways poverty interacts with illness to make HIV a death sentence. In a world where millions still die from these combinations, this silence is unconscionable.

This is not to say that “Rent” doesn’t achieve anything worthwhile on a political level. The film’s defense of alternative lifestyles (which, in this case, is not simply a code for “gay people”), its willingness to portray interracial relationships without drawing attention to them as such, its portrayal of non-stereotyped BGLT characters —all these elements and more make the film politically interesting. And “Rent” is, ignoring a few melodramatic excesses, a compelling and deeply moving piece of entertainment.

And that’s the problem. “Rent” succeeds largely because the characters are so gosh darn easy to like. “Rent”’s characters make the movie work. But they are compelling because the audience can recognize them. They look, sound, and feel like us. They read social theory. They switch from grunge clothes to knit sweaters for funerals and weddings. One of the main character’s mom calls to remind him not to leave the hot plate on. “Rent”’s setting may be Alphabet City, but most of its main characters seem straight out of Westchester.

“Rent” achieves quite a bit by focusing on characters that its audience can get along with. It opens up a world that had been stigmatized and makes it palatable to the respectable viewers of Broadway plays and Hollywood cinema. But a movie that wants to truly tackle issues of poverty and disease in America would have to give itself a harder task. It would have to step across the street in Alphabet City to the homeless community. It would have to ignore the Westchester rebels and focus on the New Yorkers who are trapped in poverty. It would have to leave out the comforting music and show the hopeless, sweat-filled, shit-stained, long, and agonizing reality of disease. “Rent”’s problem is not that it takes on this difficult task and fails. It is that it never tries in the first place.



Samuel M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.