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I get fairly annoyed when I see criticism of Rent that’s just ‘they’re lazy and should just pay their rent’ because it completely overlooks the fact that the reason they hadn’t paid was because Roger was 1) sick 2) dealing with withdrawal while trying to get clean 3) traumatized from finding his girlfriend’s dead body and 4) cripplingly depressed, and all these factors meant he literally could not bring himself to leave the apartment, and even if Mark had a better paying job he probably wouldn’t be able to cover it all, so Benny, their good friend who owned the building was like ‘Oh jeez, this is a shitty situation so I won’t charge you anything because I care about you guys’
Now, obviously before the start of the show the three of them grew apart, and listen…I like Benny. I really do. I don’t think he’s as much of an asshole as people say he is. But it was incredibly shitty to give them no forewarning, just turned their power off in late December and said ‘if you can’t pay up a years worth of rent in a week then I’ll evict you’. They had a verbal contract, which does in fact count. And the only reason he was threatening them was because he was mad at a different friend who wasn’t even involved with their living situation. He then spends the rest of the show wondering why everyone thinks he’s a dick, because it’s supposed to show you that he’s oblivious now. It’s a comment on people who Make It™ but then forget what it was like before when they were struggling and suffering.
But anyway the main point of this little rant was. Just. Criticisms for this show exist, obviously, but can you all not focus on the one that screams ‘Roger’s mental illness is fucking irrelevant, he’s just lazy’ because uh! that’s a shitty opinion my dudes!
I’ve gotten some messages like ‘well Mark still should have gotten a job sooner!’ And uh! Let’s chat!
Mark had a job for the entire time before the show starts out- the whole year where they weren’t paying rent- it’s referenced in literally the opening line ‘From here on in I shoot without a script- see if anything comes of it….instead of my old shit’. Later in the song rent he burns old screenplays that he had filmed and Roger reads the reviews of them. Later in la vie boheme b he sings about how much being a filmmaker sucks.
Point was, Mark had a job, but literally? Y'all ever tried to live in New York? There’s no way in hell he was gonna be able to cover the rent for two people while also getting food and also buying the azt for Roger. Hello?? Roger literally couldn’t leave the house how do you think he was getting his medications? Mark clearly sees himself as Roger’s caretaker.
Likely what happened was in between constantly worrying about Roger and working on a bunch of shitty meaningless films, Mark started feeling a little stifled emotionally and creatively, which is, you know, bad for an artist. Add Maureen cheating on him and dumping him to that mix and he probably wasn’t in the best headspace. So he probably thought to himself, ‘Wow, since Benny is being extremely cool about our rent because he cares about us, maybe I can get away with not working on bullshit for a few months and make a documentary that speaks to me! Also, Roger’s not been getting any better, and now that Maureen moved out he’s got even less company, so working by myself with flexible hours would make it easier for me to keep an eye on him! This is a great plan!’ And then like IMMEDIATELY Benny pulls his bullshit with 'cancel a protest you aren’t involved in or pay me a years worth of rent in one week’.
Mark tagged along to the Life Support meetings because of how fucking stressed out he is- I know the movie had him filming for some reason but that’s not what happens in the stage direction. He gets convinced to go because Angel says it’s 'for people coping with life’ and Mark’s like well uh! I sure could use some fucking free therapy right now!
Mark shows signs of depression all throughout the show, but it’s never focused on as much as Roger’s depression, or Mimi’s addiction or Angel’s sickness, because the show. Is supposed to be the documentary he’s working on. Mark does not view himself as a character in this story. Other than some commentary here and there which you’d expect from a documentary filmmaker- he never turns the camera on himself. We see him going to therapy meetings and not talking. It’s not until Halloween and Goodbye Love that he snaps and starts talking about how he feels. This is after he’s already accepted another job that he feels stifled by, and in 'What You Own’ when he quits, it’s a very freeing moment because it’s the first time we see him go 'this is what I need to do to get better’. It’s literally the first time we ever see him putting himself and his needs first and not focusing on what another person needs from him.
Tldr: stop calling Roger and Mark lazy for not paying rent, it wasn’t realistic for them to pull off due to poverty and mental illness, also verbal contracts hold up in court and squatters have rights, thank you, goodnight
The “they’re lazy” critique confuses me greatly because… from what I could tell the whole point was to critique the system that got them stuck, while acknowledging that they were flawed too.
Like… did we watch the same show?
Also like – even if they were just lazy, even if they were just blowing off responsibilites to sit at home and fuck around, a huge theme of the show is trying to thrive when everyone around you is dying. I do not judge anyone living in such a festering epicenter as early-’90s New York, seeing so much illness and death and wondering when it’ll come for you too, for saying “fuck it” and deciding to live on your own terms while you can.
So, to be clear: Rent is a good show that is very much a product of its time, produces cultural reactions now that were very much not the ones that its author could have anticipated, and preening righteousness-in-hindsight takes are as dumb as they always are.
That being said –
Even completely tabling anything that comes before it, there’s a moment in Rent that is unavoidably going to cement Roger and Mark as insufferable spoiled lazy fucks in the eyes of a modern audience. This is the moment where Benny offers them lucrative creative-class jobs that will solve all their concrete financial problems (and maybe the financial problems of some of the people around them too), and they turn it down, because…something something artistic integrity yuppies are scum.
Roger maybe has an excuse, if not a justification, due to all his issues. Mark definitely doesn’t.
There has definitely been a lot of lost ground, since the 90s, in terms of “what do we think it’s fair to expect from the world?” I am not a fan of throwing around words like “entitled.” I think it would be better if we could all expect a lot more than we do, right now. But I understand what is causing people to say “Mark was offered everything I am struggling to get and he threw it away because it wasn’t presented in a manner that flattered his bohemian ego enough, he can get fucked.”