How Will You Pay Your Rent? Award Winning Musical Speaks to Contemporary Issues

In the film adaptation of the musical Rent, bohemian cynicism of post-modern ideologies about economic development and traditional American values clash with the realities of poverty, addiction, disease, and disenfranchisement. This film, produced by Chris Columbus is the realization of the brilliance behind Jonathan Larson’s musical. We begin at the apartment of Mark and Roger, aspiring artists whose dreams take a back seat to the reality of the fact that life’s experiences haven’t prepared them for the struggles that are set to bring out the best in them. 

Their old friend Benny, is in a fight with Maureen over his plan to build Cyberland; which would allow him to use the neighborhood to create films, though it would also disrupt the artists’ chaotic lives as well as displace hundreds of homeless individuals who would have no other place to go. He is also willing to evict Mark and Roger from their apartment in order to get this accomplished, yet is willing to call it off, and allow them to live there rent free if they interfere with Maureen’s protest; though their doing so conflicts with their hippie values.

Rent is not entirely original in the fact that in the sixties and seventies the same independent spirit of social commentary that infected Hollywood had also taken form in Broadway in the form of such products as Jesus Christ Superstar, Company, Fame and Hair. Yet while Broadway may have adopted Norman Lear’s aesthetic, it wasn’t enough to convince America’s youth to visit Broadway, and Jonathan, who felt that the gulf between the high society and the disenfranchised needed to dissapear, found a way to write a play that had more of a universal appeal than most. Ironically, he found it through interpreting La Boheme.