Buckeye Road

Everybody Has AIDS

[More comments on Rent here -- if you haven't seen it, you might not want to read on just yet!]

The movie's great delight, and the reason you really must see it, is Rosario Dawson's sublime turn as Mimi. Now, I always hated Mimi in the original. I found myself annoyed whenever she was onstage (or the original cast recording), with the exception of a few songs -- in particular, "Another Day."

Rosario Dawson is spunky, irreverent, and can that girl sing! For the first time, I loved "Light My Candle" and "Out Tonight," which works marvelously with the transition into "Another Day." Perhaps it's telling about this film (and what Dawson adds to it) that one of the strongest moments (that was so annoying in the stage show) is "I Should Tell You," at the end of the first act, when Roger and Mimi discover they're both on AZT, and it's okay for them to love each other completely. This never moved me before, but it was utterly gorgeous in the film (even though Adam Pascal is so much older than her).

This leads to the major problem with the film (other than the inept treatment of musical numbers). For some reason, the filmmakers decided to set the movie in 1989. The original took place in the present day (1996), at the moment when finally there were meds that were very effective and widely available. In the last chapter of his excellent book, Acts of Intervention, David Roman talks about this moment -- 1996 -- and the shift in AIDS theater and performance from talking about people with AIDS to people with HIV.

The only deliberate reason I can come up with is that in 1989, we had a president named Bush. In one scene in the loft, someone (I believe Collins) is reading a newspaper with a negative headline about Bush the father.

1989 makes a lot of the references in the lyrics anachronistic. How can Angel sing about the Akita, Evita, making "like Thelma and Louise did when they got the blues" if that movie won't come out for another two years? Would someone really be building a "Cyberarts" studio in 1989 -- when for most people (other than a handful of computer science geeks) anything "cyber" was the realm of science fiction?

There's also the not-small problem of NYC gentrification, a major theme of the stage show and the film, with the police and city government implicated in Disneyfying the city. There's one word associated with that: Giuliani. Yet 1989 takes us back before Giuliani, back when the city was dangerous and country boys like me were not allowed to set foot on the island.

Setting the film in 1989 turns Rent into a kind of AIDS nostalgia. I hate using that phrase, but unfortunately it's very apt. Rent was really a transitional work, one of the last big AIDS plays to play in New York (I believe Love! Valour! Compassion! was later that year). To my knowledge, there has not been a major AIDS play since. In a way, this makes sense, as what we would have now are not AIDS plays but HIV plays.

Pushing Rent back into 1989 locates it firmly in the era before protease inhibitors, when there were still funerals every week and a lot of young people died painfully and horribly, as Angel does in the film. I'm not saying that people don't still die of AIDS in America, but those deaths are now rare, a miniscule number compared with those at the height of the epidemic in the 1980s.

Setting Rent in that era -- rather than in its own time, or in the present -- lets it join the company of all the plays and movies about AIDS from that era of the late 80s/early 90s. I'm thinking, perhaps first and foremost, of Angels in America, and also Longtime Companion. We can let that latter film off the hook, seeing as it was made in 1990 -- of, and about, its own time.

But what does it say about HIV/AIDS in America when two of the landmark works of 1990s American theater -- Angels in America and Rent -- are made into movies (ok, one a TV movie) in the 2000s, with both set in the 1980s and both incredibly reverent of their stage origins? There is a nostalgia for the stage originals, of course, but certainly in the case of Rent (and I dare to say for Angels, too) a nostalgia for that earlier era of AIDS, when the epidemic was far-reaching and seemingly insurmountable, when it seemed the conservative government was at best united in its indifference to the sick and dying.

This nostalgia disgusts me. It's a nostalgia of old men, and this is a not insignificant thing, since it is in large part the absence of elders in the gay community that has led to our present circumstances, where the virus keeps spreading. Perhaps I shouldn't even say "community," since in addition to the lack of leadership from the elders, there's also a massive failure of community. We could stop the spread of HIV today if we all accepted responsibility for ourselves, and for the way we treat other people. But that would require a real sense of something greater than the self -- and it's hard to see how our gay culture, in its present state, could ever accomplish that.

So, instead, we get occasional blasts from the past, the voices from earlier days returned with the same old sturm und drang. Last year, Larry Kramer wrote a column in the Advocate celebrating the death of "Adolf Reagan," who he called "our murderer." This is nostalgia as historical amnesia, and utterly misses a key point: how can we start to build a responsible and engaged community if we go around calling people murderers?

Last year also saw Kramer's wonderfully angry play, The Normal Heart, revived at the Public Theater in New York. His play was a key work from the early moments of the AIDS epidemic, when it seemed like the only responsible thing to do to stop from killing each other was to stop having sex. Kramer's play is an important historical artifact. Yet it is as relevant to the present cultural moment as Oedipus Rex. With the realities that young gay men are facing -- in a world of Internet hookups, where it seems no one actually has AIDS, and HIV is a very manageable disease, compared by some to diabetes -- telling them not to have sex (or calling them murderers) is about as useful as telling them not to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers.

One of Rent's most celebrated lines -- and its last lyric -- insists upon "No Day But Today." To deal with the problems and realities of life today, we need to talk about today. Now perhaps it's too much to expect Rent to do this in any kind of way, though I don't see why the filmmakers couldn't just as easily have moved the musical forward, from 1996 to now, as they pushed it back into 1989.

When the film ends, the characters are singing "No Day But Today," but they are entombed firmly in the past. Perhaps the most jarring insistence of this is an establishing shot, midway through the film, of the Twin Towers, office windows here and there glittering against the night sky. Rent is all about Before. Now we live in Another Day -- and a brave new world.

posted by BT @ 12:33 PM