by Hannah Feldman
Orlando Weekly
January 14, 1999

Big smack attack: The cast of "Rent" belts big numbers about being down and out

So "Rent" is coming to town, and naturally I’ve started thinking about tuberculosis.

Remember tuberculosis? Operating under the alias "consumption" during the Victorian era, it killed off vast numbers of people, both real and fictional. It was a favorite method for getting rid of secondary characters, such as Mimi in "La Bohème," the opera upon which "Rent" is based. So there you have it.

"Rent" author Jonathan Larson believed AIDS was the tuberculosis of today. In fact, he made half the characters in his musical of modern-day bohemians HIV-positive. Which seems, pardon the expression, like overkill, considering that only Mimi has tuberculosis in the original opera. But "Rent’s" Mimi does suffer from one disease that differentiates her from the rest of her housemates: She is a heroin addict.

Ah, heroin. You can’t get away from it these days, can you? It’s all over the movies and modern fiction, and heaven help you if you want a smack - free hour on modern - rock radio. The number of heroin-overdose deaths in 1998 in Orange and adjoining counties nearly doubled the 25 counted in 1997. For all the indignant politicians getting up on their hind legs to denounce "heroin chic," strung-out-looking, pale-as-death models still hawk fashions on glossy magazine pages. Teen-age girls are still striving for that ethereal, hollow-cheeked, listless look that your average movie junkie (a more common screen presence than drag queens these days) seems to possess. Youngsters of a century past strove for the exact same look so they could appear -- you guessed it -- tubercular.

Larson was wrong; AIDS could never be the New Consumption. For one thing, when AIDS first came into our consciousness it was widely considered a gay man’s disease, whereas consumption was considered a disease that could strike anyone (though it was believed to have a predilection for the overly sensitive and artistic). For another, AIDS was never considered a pretty way to die -- perhaps because our first images of the disease were of desperately skinny young men covered in lesions. No one wanted to look like an AIDS victim. But plenty of people have aspired to the haggard beauty of the heroin addict, as seen in such fine representations as "Drugstore Cowboy" and "Pulp Fiction."

Then as today, it’s a ridiculous fiction. Anyone acquainted with a real-life junkie knows the nasty skin and drawn faces, the stink of infected tracks. Consumption involved the same type of decay; tuberculosis leaves its victims cadaverous, with rotten breath and lungs full of the grossest goobers you could possibly imagine. And yet people remained convinced of the disease’s beautifying effects. The mid-19th-century pre-Raphaelite artists chose the tubercular Elizabeth Siddal as their model of feminine grace because she was "strange, pale, livid, gaunt, silent, and yet in a manner graceful and picturesque," according to Henry James. She was also idolized because she was dying, and evidently death is a beautiful thing if it happens young enough. Even -- perhaps especially -- slow, wasting death.

Death makes you interesting. Think how much more interesting Sid Vicious is than, say, Dee Dee Ramone, how much more so Kurt Cobain than Eddie Vedder. Death makes you an individual -- run the comparison through again. Consequently, those who approach death gradually, with a resigned consciousness, are the most interesting individuals of all because they are, in effect, the walking and willing dead. So the heroin addict, that pale ghost-in-the-making who, in the words of "Trainspotting’s" Renton, "chose not to choose life," has become the poster child for ’90s individuality -- just as Mimi once stood for 19th-century victimhood. In the 1890s we had the Cult of Consumption; in the 1990s we have the Cult of Heroin.

In either century, we’re left with a pile of shit. The truth is that consumption was not a symbol of one’s inner turmoil or sensitivity, as portrayed by writers of the day. Nor is heroin abuse a signal of ’90s alienation or artistic talent, as it seems to be portrayed. Tuberculosis was a nasty and fatal disease. Heroin is a nasty and often fatal drug. That’s the truth, and we attach our myths to such deadly facts at our peril.

I’m not saying that Nancy Reagan knows best or that a single kid out there is going to suck anything up her nose because Leonardo DiCaprio looked so cute in "The Basketball Diaries." I’m just saying there is power in image, and we’d best look twice at the power we give to our current cult. In the early 1800s, the ideal of ruddy, boisterous beauty gave way to the ethereal pallor of the consumptive. Women began to starve themselves in order to appear tubercular, and to dress in sheer pale material regardless of the season or weather. The resulting flu epidemic became known as "muslin disease." Men got on the consumption bandwagon too: Byron hoped to die of the disease, "Because the ladies would all say, ‘Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying!’" (No such luck; he was stricken with fever in 1824.)

The romanticization of the consumptive lasted a good century. The thought of having to similarly suffer through 100 years of considering musicians, actors and artists brilliant simply because they chose one excruciatingly drawn-out and idiotic form of suicide fatigues me beyond belief. Even if we start the count from 60 years ago, when heroin became the drug of choice of the jazz hipsters, that still leaves way too many years to go of images such as Matt Dillon with a rubber hose around his bicep and Ally Sheedy starving herself to look like a scag whore.

It’s also too many years left of losing friends, but that’s not the point. After all, the end of the cult of consumption was not triggered by the end of consumption itself; even today tuberculosis afflicts the poor, the malnourished and the weak worldwide. In the same way, heroin abuse will be with us years after the phrase "heroin chic" has been relegated to the scrap heap of media mal mots. No, consumption merely lost its cachet, replaced by the brutal and unromantic juggernauts of mechanized progress and World War I (around which time, ironically, heroin was marketed as a treatment for, among other things, tuberculosis).

What’s more disturbing than the projected shelf-life of the heroin-chic trend is that it’s dangerous to tell people their deaths mean something other than their dying. Especially when -- and this is a major difference between heroin and tuberculosis -- that death can be avoided. When death becomes symbolic, it’s easy to give it more meaning than life, which is a pretty twisted way of looking at things.

Take Mimi, for instance: In "La Bohème," she is a soft, gentle, naive seamstress. In "Rent," she is a drug-addicted S&M worker. In both stories, she is the sacrifice art pays to remain removed from the mundane world. But, according to René J. Dubos’ book "The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man & Society," the real Mimi was a flower girl and wife of a shoemaker. She ran off with a young architect, who introduced her to the bohemian life of 1840s Paris. There she left her architect for Henri Murger, whose successful novel "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" came out right around the time of her death from tuberculosis. By the time Puccini got hold of her character, all that was left of the original person was her beauty and her death.

And so now we have our new Mimi, prancing around in latex and stilettos, telling us she was born bad and standing for all that is nihilistic and lovely in our modern world. She sings, she struts, she wastes away. It has all been done before. And as the curtain goes down and the hankies are shoved back into pockets, I wonder if the real Mimi is still lurking somewhere above the audience, watching what she has become. I wonder if she finds it at all romantic.