Analysis 4: Everything is Rent: Rent, Marxism, and the Plight of Artists

“Everything is rent,” is a quite accurate way to sum up most of the points of Marxism in three simple words. Thus, the musical Rent provides us with a highly compelling example of a world in which capitalism has “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’” (Marx 659). As the song that begins the musical, appropriately titled “Rent,” asks, “How can you connect in an age where strangers, landlords, lovers, your own blood cells betray?” In an age and country where capitalism dominates, the characters of Rent find themselves struggling to live with their chosen lifestyle, that of the bohemian artist. Throughout the musical they are constantly in a battle between two opposing forces – their need to find connection and free expression as artists, and their need to make ends meet. To explore these themes, the songs of “Rent” and “What You Own” provide two powerful examples, both in terms of their lyrics and, in the motion picture adaptation of the stage musical, the visuals that accompany them.

The song “Rent” begins with Mark filming part of a documentary on the streets of New York. Right before it starts we are already introduced to the issue of making a living – a homeless man attempts to make some money by offering his surfaces cleaning the windshield of a car at a stoplight, to which the driver yells at him to get off. As Mark witnesses this and the song begins, he remarks that “real life is getting more like fiction each day,” unbelieving of the effects that capitalism “in its blind unrestrainable passion” (Marx 671) has upon the world he sees around him. He continues on this theme by telling us that “headlines, breadlines blow [his] mind.” This point becomes all the more violently displayed later in the song, when Mark’s friend Tom is attacked by muggers, again displaying the lengths to which those in poverty must go in order to survive, often leading to brutality. The song, and musical as a whole, continues to drive this point home: a capitalist mentality leads, in all areas of society, to humans treating each other with a cruelty necessary to make profit, make ends meet, obtain basic needs like shelter and food.

We are then introduced to Mark’s, and his roommate Roger’s, personal plight – “and now this deadline / eviction or pay / rent.” We see Roger attempting to write a song in his and Mark’s apartment, when the lights are turned out, one would assume as a consequence of the rent not being paid. “We’re hungry and frozen / some life that we’ve chosen,” the two tell us, as they wonder whether the costs of living the way they are are truly worth it for the reward – their freedom to be independent artists. “As part of its ceaseless search for ways to induct workers in their own exploitation, capital, it might be said, has found the makings of a self-justifying, low-wage workforce” (Ross 2592), and this is the place in which Mark and Roger find themselves, choosing a life in which their inability to make the wages sufficient to pay rent is beginning to cost them the very basic things they need to create their art in the first place – a warm and lighted place to work and basic nourishment. In a symbolic act, Mark and Roger warm themselves by making a fire, and, with nothing else to burn, they are forced to “light up a mean blaze / with posters and screenplays,” sacrificing the art they own and have made in order to fulfill their need for warmth. At the end of their rope, Mark and Roger are forced to succumb to the fact that their art won’t, in the capitalist society in which they live, provide them with the basic things they need to survive – it has no exchange-value, and thus eventually it must be used in the only way it can, by its use-value of providing warmth.

“As the industrial division of labor everywhere sought to convert artisans into machine operatives, artists recoiled from being treated like any other trade producer…the artist was called on to represent, if not wholly embody, those imaginative qualities, skills, and virtues that industrial civilization was systematically destroying” (Ross 2586). Here, we see the struggle of the character’s of Rent on the larger scale – attempting to find a way to do that which gives their lives meaning and worth, while forced by the nature of their society to give it up in order to make enough money to live. The song “What You Own” makes this dilemma clear:

Mark begins by instructing: “Don't breathe too deep / don't think all day / dive into work / drive the other way,” the things that he has learned to do at his new job as cameraman for a news corporation. He continues, bitterly and nearly sarcastically assuring us that, “That drip of hurt / that pint of shame / goes away / just play the game.” As we see Mark preparing for work, we see that he finds himself stuck now “regard[ing] part-time commercial work as a vile meal ticket that expedites [his] true calling” (Ross 2596). However, although his reasons for taking the job in the first place were to pay his rent and ensure he could continue to work on his own documentary in the comfort of his home, he now finds the new work distracting from his own film. Mark realizes he must learn to “play the game” of the worker in a capitalist society and hope that it gets easier. In the chorus, he identifies the central issue that causes him “drips of hurt” and “pints of shame”: “when you’re living in America / at the end of the millennium / you’re what you own.” All he really owns of worth in terms of exchange-value is himself as a worker and his labor-power to be sold, that he is “nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power…to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital” (Marx 671). Mark’s life as a worker first and artist second has caused him not only to lose time in which he could be working on his own film, it has deprived him of his very emotions and passion: “I escape and ape content / I don't own emotion – I rent.” By the end of the song, he finally concludes that he will quit his job so that he can finish his documentary, ultimately preferring his life as an artist to the stifling nature of the capitalistic world that he finds to be destroying his creativity, regardless of the security of shelter and resources it provides him.

As Jonathan Larson, lyricist, composer, and writer of Rent, has pointed out, the word “rent” doesn’t just signify the monetary issues related to capitalism – it “also means torn apart” (Wikipedia), and herein lies Rent’s strongest criticism of capitalist society and what it creates. As the song “Rent” ends, and the chorus of tenants sing in unison a declaration against the notices of eviction, “we’re not gonna pay rent / cause everything is rent,” the double entendre of their meaning adds to the power of their statement. In a capitalist society, everything truly is rent – human connection, on some level, is always related to monetary profit, and personal worth is based solely on exchange-value (Marx 659). Thus, “rent” is everywhere in that money runs every corner of society, and, as a result and perhaps most importantly, humans are torn apart from each other. True connection between people as people, beyond any worth related to their ability to provide labor-power and create profit, becomes something lost in the business of the day, the struggle to get by. Here is where the true plight of the characters of Rent takes place, as they strive to connect on a deeper and more meaningful level through their art. Thus, as the musical ends and Mark’s finished documentary is finally shown, we see the harsh streets of New York not just filled with the despair of the homeless, but also with him and his friends, dancing and laughing, putting aside their financial troubles and connecting on another level.


Works Cited

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 657-60. Print.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “Capital, Volume 1.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 663-74. Print.

Ross, Andrew. “The Mental Labor Problem.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 2578-97. Print.

Rent. Writ. Jonathan Larson and Stephen Chbosky. Dir. Chris Columbus. Columbia Pictures, 2005.

Rent (musical). Wikipedia. 22 April 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rent_(musical).