23 Dec 2020, 2:03 am
Why do some people hate Mark from “Rent” and Sebastian from “La La Land?” We all have characters who are intended as sympathetic that we can't stand, but this goes beyond that. The critics of these characters treat them as the ultimate example of human evil and I don't understand why.
This post deals with fictional characters but it also touches on politics, so I thought I'd post it here. It was inspired by years of reading near-identical critiques which come from a particular viewpoint that's popular online. I don't know quite what to call it. It's usually presented as progressive liberalism, but many these critiques strike me as the polar opposite of that. (When somebody essentially yells at a character “get a real job, hippie,” I once would have expected that to come from the Right, not the Left. Boy, was I wrong.)
My main sources for this post are Lindsay Ellis' video essay “Rent: Look Pretty and Do As Little As Possible," and Christi Esterle's (a.k.a. “Diva's”) recent “Musical Hell” review of “La La Land.” Ironicaly, I'm a still a fan of Ellis and I'm a former fan of Esterle.
The main complaint against both these characters is that they have a “White Savior Complex.”
NOTE: SPOILERS FOR BOTH "RENT" (stage version) AND "LA LA LAND"
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"RENT"/MARK:
Ellis and Mark's other critics mainly focus on a two-minute scene (out of a two hour+ musical) that has little bearing on anything else in the story. In the scene, Mark films a police officer who's about to beat a homeless woman, which convinces the cop to walk away. The homeless woman is angry that Mark intervened and tells him off. (Ellis leaves the cop out of her description of the scene.) This is the low-tech equivalent of taking a cell phone video of police brutality, something which you'd think would be praised from a liberal progressive point of view. But Mark does it with a camera, so it's pure evil?
Mark has no counter-argument, he just stands there and takes it. He and his friends then sing about moving to Santa Fe, which Ellis spins as them turning their backs on the problems of New York that they claim to care about. They then proceed to stay in New York, but they fantasized about leaving, so apparently that counts as crimethink.
Ellis suggests that Mark's entire character arc should focus on that one scene, instead of the fairly spelled-out character arc he actually has, which is about him using his camera to create distance between himself and other people. This ties into the show's main theme of people connecting to each other (or not) and how technology complicates that. “Rent” means “torn apart.” (I swear, Larson knew some kind of technology like smartphones was coming, he just didn't know what it would be.) The scene with the homeless woman is kind of the inverse of an earlier scene with Mark where he meets his ex's new girlfriend and things are very awkward, but the two surprisingly become friends. Ellis pretty much leaves that theme out of her video.
Ellis attempts to paint Mark as a representation of “privilege” because he “chose to be poor” while the homeless woman had poverty thrust upon her by forces beyond her control. Here's the problem with that – we know absolutely nothing about the homeless woman's backstory. I don't think we need to know that for her brief scene. The only thing Ellis has to go on is that Mark is white and the homeless woman is usually depicted as a “PoC.” Ellis points to Mark growing up in the suburbs and having a “support network” (his parents, whom Ellis requires him to get along with, BTW, because he's not allowed to have emotional human relationships?) while the homeless woman does not...I suppose, because all “PoC” spend their lives in the inner-city and all their families are dead? Isn't that stereotyping? For all we know, the homeless woman could have grown up in the suburbs too. Furthermore, Mark is Jewish, but nobody ever seems to consider the “optics” of saying that a Jewish man had things too easy and poverty is all his fault. Later in the show, Mark's fellow Bohemian Mimi, a female “PoC,” becomes homeless. (Despite her having a “support network” because her mother calls at one point.) Ellis suggests that this isn't a harsh enough punishment for Mimi's transgressions and that the author should have killed her off. But the homeless woman whose backstory we don't know is a saint. Because she yelled at Mark and Mimi didn't?
The show also has a built-in representation of wealth and privilege, Benny's wife and father-in-law, who are implied to come from old money. (“Allison Gray, of the Westport Grays.”) But they aren't Mark, so they're off the hook.
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"LA LA LAND"/SEBASTIAN:
Esterle and Sebastian's critics typically point to a speech where he claims that Jazz is “dying” and he wants to save it. I can see where this could be viewed as pretentious or self-aggrandizing. I think it's supposed to be, to some degree. Also, it's a movie, so they probably wanted it to sound more dramatic than “I want jazz to be super popular again because I like it.” However, the problem these critics have is that Sebastian is white and Jazz is “PoC culture.” (The funniest to me is a comment I read complaining this fictional musical set in the present is “historically inaccurate.”) Thus, in their view, he isn't allowed to want to re-popularize an art form that he admires deeply. He isn't allowed to have “PoC” as his heroes or appreciate the musical style they created on its own merits. I find this view incredibly racist and segregationist and I have no idea how it's seen as progressive. Later in the film, Sebastian gets a job from his more successful friend Keith, a black jazz fusion musician. (Thus, the “White Savior” is financially saved by a black man.) Keith tells Sebastian off for being a purist and not embracing newer forms of jazz. Esterle brings up that “Keith is Right” as if this were a hot take. But the film doesn't say Keith is wrong. He's not an antagonist. As with Mark and the homeless woman, both sides can have a point. In the end, Sebastian doesn't save jazz. He opens one jazz club in one city and he only got the money for that because he compromised and took that job. Also, in real life, the film didn't re-popularize jazz music. So the “White Savior” didn't save anything. But again, I suppose the very idea that he wanted to was crimethink.
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I could rant on and on on this topic, so believe it or not, this is the succinct version 
. Now, my bias on this topic is that I'm an artist, as these characters are, and I'm trying not to take these criticisms so personally. But what do you think about this? Do you agree with Ellis, Esterle and the other people who hate these characters? Or are you as mystified by all this as I am?
23 Dec 2020, 12:12 pm
24 Dec 2020, 4:33 am
