RENT -- "How about love?"

    Of late, I have been considering not seeing the RENT movie when it comes out next week.  Yes, I am a musical nut, but I've never really liked RENT.  I only enjoy about four songs on the cast album and I find the message weak and lacking.  Here you have these rebellious bohemians who care only for their art (and -- so they say -- each other).  They refuse to be responsible and pay rent (however devious their landlord has been), they sleep around and contract AIDS, one is an S&M dancer at a local club, some cheat on their significant others, and half of them are decidedly not heterosexual.
    Yes, this sort of thing is "real".  Yes, New York City was like this at one point (probably still is in a lot of areas).  But do we really have to glorify it?  Do we have to lift up the actions of the reprobate in order to tell a good story?  Is it really a good story or is it the secular world's idea of a good story?  Somehow, I find it very hard to see the redemption in RENT.
    Unlike it's predecessor, La Bohème, RENT fails to show the consequences of the characters' actions.  The RENT-bohemians, like the La Bohème-bohemians, live the life of the poor.  They are cold, tired, weary, and can't find work to make money.  La Bohème shows what actually happens to people in this sort of situation; RENT sugarcoats it . . . glorifies it. In both shows, Mimi is terminally ill -- in RENT she has AIDS, in La Bohème, tuberculosis.  But AIDS, unlike tuberculosis, is usually contracted through less-than-blameless activities.  RENT's creator, the late Jonathon Larson, not only replaced the one sickness with another, he gave it to Roger/Rodolfo, to Angel/Schunard, and to Collins/Colline in addition to Mimi.  Instead of keeping it the tragic love story of two flawed people, he made La Bohème into a mock-tragedy more about a group of rebellious friends than love.
    Why do I call RENT a mock tragedy? You cannot present something as tragedy without the actual death of a character.  If Mimi is going to die, let her die.  The story will be stronger for it.  While I understand and love theatre's heavy reliance on "suspension of disbelief", when a playwright asks me to accept what he presents as what happens in the real world, then brings a main character back to life, I can no longer suspend that disbelief.  Larson crushed his own world and I can no longer believe in it.

    RENT chronicles a year in the tumultuous, self-serving, drug-filled, and sometime sodomic "love lives" of a group of friends; La Bohème follows the love of one man for one woman and how its comedy and tragedy helped bring a group of friends closer together.

    So, is it worth my while to watch this movie?  Will it instruct as well as entertain?  If so how will it instruct and will it be worthwhile instruction?  Will the learning be so valuable that it's worth watching Mimi pole dance in skimpy clothing, Maureen propose to another woman, Collins and Angel (two men, one a transvestite) kiss and profess their love for each other?  It's not that I think this movie will change my staunch position on certain topics like homosexuality, only that I'm not sure it's worth it to fill my mind with such filth in order to receive the movie's over-generalized moral: love.