#in case anyone here is a renthead

[jelliclekay]

I'm the accidental owner of a Rent Playbill with the original cast?

[johannaquartet]

Re: “Rent is plagiarized and Jonathan Larson was BAD”

There’s this popular tiktok about the “Jonathan Larson stole from Sarah Schulman” thing and I think it ended up polluting the conversation about Rent, especially how it pertains to Larson. The guy who made it literally said “Jonathan Larson was a bad person who shouldn’t be celebrated,” and his defense for this was “he plagiarized People In Trouble and all the queer/POC characters in the show play second fiddle to the white guys.” It was also implied that he shouldn’t have written Rent because he was a white guy who didn’t have AIDS, but we’ll get into that later.

All of this feels like very bad faith criticism. No, the queer/BIPOC characters aren’t the best, but that’s in large part because the show came out in the 90s when representation was much less of a thing and there was less consciousness around telling the stories of the marginalized. This argument feels like a fancy-worded way of saying “Rent isn’t woke enough,” which is a criticism that gets lobbed at anything with any kind of representation in it. At a certain point you have to learn to acknowledge that something can be important even if it doesn’t live up to your exact individual standard.

As for whether or not it was “allowed” for a straight white man who didn’t have AIDS to write Rent…to be brief, success in the theatre industry is inextricably tied to whiteness, and sometimes stories about the marginalized have to be delivered from a privileged place in order to have any kind of future (think of West Side Story and Pacific Overtures.) That fucking sucks, like I cannot stress enough what a colossal injustice that is, but sometimes one has to work within the confines of the system in order to start opening doors. I am completely confident in saying that Rent would not have gotten off the ground at all, let alone have gone on to be one of the most important pieces of theatre in Broadway history, if it was written by anyone other than a straight white man.

And to be clear: I don’t like Rent! My renthead days are FAR behind me, in fact most of the time whenever it comes up in conversation I have to restrain myself from being too scathing. But as a literary criticism student, it’s important to me that criticism come from the right place and seek to make the right points. And that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Rent was an incredibly important piece of theatre. It is also Not Very Good, and it is not exempt from discussion about why it’s Not Very Good. That doesn’t mean Jonathan Larson was a malicious person. By all accounts, it seems like he was a well-meaning dude with unrecognized privileges who wrote something rife with flaws and died before he had the chance to learn from/revise them. You shouldn’t have to drag Larson’s name through the mud in order to be critical of Rent. There is PLENTY to be critical of already.

This whole thing feels reflective of the way we as a society now equate media quality to a judge of moral character. “If this thing is bad/has something in it that’s bad then the person who wrote it must also be bad, and if you like it too then that makes you bad and you deserve to die. I’m the good one, I’m the right one, I am the arbiter of un-problematic-ness.” You’re not going to get anywhere in life if you maintain that ideology. As a former fandom anti, I learned that the hard way.