So the thing about Jonathan Larson’s work – and this is most visible and central in tick, tick…BOOM!, but also very important to Rent – is that it is 100% about the zeitgeist of the ‘90s. 

Which means something more than “a lot of people are dying of AIDS.” 

I’m a fair bit younger than Larson, and younger than at least some of my readers, but I do actually remember the ‘90s.  Things felt very different then…for everyone, I’d imagine, but certainly for bright young middle-class folks.  There was more hope and a lot less fear. 

For both Jon and Mark, and even to some large extent for HIV-positive Roger, the great enemies on the horizon are ennui and mediocrity.  Selling out, which is to say “giving up on Ultimate Fulfillment by getting a lucrative mainstream-prestigious job and a luxurious lifestyle,” is the worst ending.  They are worried about becoming Michael or Benny.  Not about whether they’re going to be able to find jobs, not about whether they’re actually going to be able to make rent for realsies, certainly not about becoming homeless. 

That sounds impossibly sheltered and privileged, now, but…it wasn’t, then.  Not nearly as much.  The economy was roaring, American liberal-democratic hegemony was unquestioned, our political battles mostly involved stupid symbolic shit, the social contract seemed to be holding together pretty damn well.  Fukuyama’s “end of history” hypothesis seemed at least kinda plausible, in the ‘90s, and so did the idea that every talented kid with a degree could aspire to at least a life of wealth and contentment. 

And on the flip side, when the world seems to be working pretty well in mundane terms, Ultimate Fulfillment doesn’t sound like a matter of “maybe we’ll revolutionize everything and then all the Crushing Awful Problems will go away.”  It is something more personal, more transcendental, more ineffable.  These yearnings might well have been henotic or mystical if ‘90s kids had been capable of any interest in religion, but they weren’t, so we got endless attempts at artistic and sexual epiphanies. 

So: yes, the main characters of Rent are mostly poverty tourists, who are very definitely not pushing for any kind of systemic revolution.  And why should they have been?  What in their world would have given them reason to think that systemic revolution could be a meaningful answer to anyone’s problems?