The movie musical Rent does something similar. It has a song where the male singer, Roger, is clearly in the wrong and needs to change. The music becomes discordant when he sings, the style he uses is very harsh, the framing portrays him as separated and confined and in shadow. The girl, Miami, is free, her music soars. She’s clearly in the right.
Objectively, here’s the situation. Roger and Mimi both have AIDS. Roger already lost his previous girlfriend to it. Mimi is a stripper and a junkie who nearly dies later in the musical. Their key song together, whatever it happens to be about in plot and character terms, is in plain terms a matter of a very sick drug addict barging into an apartment and trying to seduce a man she recently met who has clear fears and doubts about the wisdom of getting involved with someone living that life and how it might distract him from his creative work.
Now, maybe Roger had a lesson to learn, maybe he did have a wrong or incomplete perspective that he needed to grow out of; but those are some legitimate concerns, at least. He’s not being crazy and repressed. And it’s not obvious apart from the contextual framing that Mimi is really the one we should sympathize with. After living off of charity and struggling to survive for much of the runtime, Roger breaks up with Mimi and gets a job, and Mimi continues her drug addiction and almost dies. Eventually Roger learns his lesson, quits his job, and goes back to Mimi, who wakes up from her apparent death to hear his song.
The argument the musical makes for your heart is actually quite strong. And I love Roger and Mimi’s song and sing it quite passionately. Even apart from all the ways you can use music and context and characterization to direct the audience’s sympathies, there’s something there in their story that people fundamentally respond to. The characters all have AIDS and are coming to term with it. They’re all afraid of dying. Mimi teaches Roger how to let go of fear and live for the moment. She’s untamed. She trusts her soul.
Why does Rent resonate, apart from the pathos of the story and quality of the music? Because it is our story. We are all dying. We all have a terminal diagnosis. We are all struggling with this question: can we do something to justify our lives and give them meaning before we die? Is that meaning to be found in work or in relationships? Will life present us with new opportunities only to snatch them away? These are all universal fears and struggles. That’s why the story appeals. And we all have to figure out how to live in this moment.
The question, “Who actually lived in that situation better, Roger or Mimi? ” is much less clear than the musical makes it seem. To its credit, I think it does try to show that there’s some sort of balance needed. Mimi’s life was clearly out of control and it cost her her life, however glorious her philosophy of living in the moment according to her passions sounded when she sung about it. And Roger had been burned by life and was filled with fear and it was holding him back. He was living in denial and holding life at arm’s length. Nevertheless, he kept his life together far better than a lot of the other characters, partly because of his concerns about the consequences of the cost of living heedlessly.
Let’s be honest, if you have a terminal diagnosis and are struggling with meaning, if you’re fighting to grasp what little bit of life you can for the short moment you have it, it’s hard not to see the appeal of living in the moment, forgetting about restrictions and limitations and what anyone else thinks, and living your desires to the fullest. And it’s hard not to see why you wouldn’t be upset with anyone or anything you saw as standing in your way and holding back your hand while you wait for the gallows. That’s just cruel. It’s unjust. On the other hand, it’s also hard to deny the appeal of caution learned from the burned hand, the care and reluctance to take risks that comes from the realization that you only have a limited number of minutes to live. But what’s the point of squirreling away today and delaying gratification when the future is so uncertain and so short lived?
So why not let go of regret and live for the now? Realistically, why would you do anything else? That’s been a hard question for humanity to answer for thousands of years. We know what we are. Fragile little animals who know how the world treats such creatures. And that’s a colossal burden to bear. The immense consumption of alcohol by the human race has done a lot to get us through it and help us forget our troubles and live in the moment. It helps us disable the higher functions that keep us from fully inhabiting the present and our unrestrained impulses, something we wish we could do. Other drugs and little pleasures have helped, as well.
Life clearly is a kind of tightrope we walk, between abandon and paralysis. I don’t think we can clearly side with either Roger or with Mimi. The movie adaptation in particular seems to want us to side with Mimi. Our culture seems to want us to side with Mimi. She’s the prophet of the story. She holds the light, literally and figuratively. She’s dying, but she passes on her lesson to the fearful and more beourgois and cautious (relatively) Roger.
And that’s part of the problem with Rent, as well as with the postmodern narratives of successful intellectuals and authors. The hypocrisy. They preach a gospel of utter ruin to a dying, impoverished people, to soothe their own self-consciousness, while living off the benefits of their own carefully calculated and curated lifestyles. Mimi’s life philosophy was the direct cause of her problems, not merely a balm to soothe an inevitable existential quandary or some injustice forced on her by others. Or even if they were not in some way the direct cause of her situation (giving her the benefit of the doubt), they kept her trapped in it. They made it far harder to escape.
Life philosophies are just after the fact reflections on and rationalizations of your experience. They also have a causal effect. They might only be one factor among many, but what you believe produces as well as interprets your behavior and your relationship to your environment. People who believe it’s fine or even good to engage in a behavior are much more likely to engage in it. Obviously.
It might seem nice to toy with the idea of Mimi’s philosophy, to soothe the anxiety of being a Roger, but as carefree as Mimi was, her lack of concern and impulsiveness and passion was also her prison. That’s a dangerous toy to wield for a bit of self improvement or relaxation, a bit of self empowerment. Maybe you can only take as much of it as you need to balance yourself out. Maybe not. That’s less like righting the ship than it is like hurling half the cargo over the other side to balance it out. That like trying to burn off a chill.
There’s a very old saying that two wrong don’t make a right. And it was worth making it a saying because that is not actually the instinctive wisdom of humans. We think two wrongs does make a right, or rather that whatever is opposite a wrong must cure it. In reality, both poles are capable of being either wrong or right. And getting a bit of the wrong end of the other pole won’t make you more balanced or corrected or independent, it will just diversify your distortions. What people really need to learn to do is to find the value and the distortion in either pole, and learn how to correct for it whichever they inhabit, to learn how to live is wisdom and health whatever the situation demands.
Making Nobody Happy 