(Note: this is part of an ongoing research project I am doing called Do Places Have Essences; I presented a preliminary version of this study earlier this year at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings in Boston, MA.)
One function of the arts – i.e., theater, film, performance arts, visual arts, etc. - is to see how they represent specific times and places, that is, the essential qualities of particular historical sites and moments.Two recent cases, in which the East Village/Lower East Side are in some way represented, are considered here. One case, the film version of the musical Rent, which recreates a lost era, is considered. A second case, a visual arts show, recontextualizes and thus celebrates the art products of an earlier era.
Rent, a Hollywood film version of the Off Broadway (later moved to Broadway) musical by Jonathan Larson is the story of a group of twenty-somethings of mixed races, genders, and sexual orientations, living (squatting?) in the East Village in the late 1980s. It is a story based on the opera “La Boheme” by Puccini. It is, as one reviewer suggests, “a story of love in a time of HIV/AIDS” (Batson-Savage, 2006). It is also meant to be a prototypical New York story, with a particular reference to the East Village as perhaps New York’s most fertile creative frontier.
Nevertheless, questions arise as to the plausibility of the essential depictions, both of the theatrical version, and in particular for the film version.
The writer Sarah Ferguson, for example, points out flaws in the film, particularly the artificiality and inauthenticity of its depictions. She writes (2005).
Although critics have praised director Chris Columbus’s “painstaking” efforts to recreate the old flavor of Alphabet City, anyone who knows the neighborhood is instead confronted with a made-up landscape of mix- matched locales. Columbus filmed most of “Rent” in San Francisco and Oakland, then pieced in bits of Loisaida back in to authenticate the scenery, sometimes to jarring effect.
The facade of the Marz Bar, that lowdown watering hole on Second Ave. and First St., makes a guest appearance but is digitally rendered to appear midblock instead of on the corner, near an improbably placed Wiz store. Vazac’s bar on Avenue B is remade into Life Café (belying the Vazac’s sign still visible on the side of the building) and there’s an F train subway stop just off Tompkins Square.
And no East Village loft ever had such high ceilings as the one the central characters inhabit, which looks more like an old factory building in Soho or Tribeca circa the 1960s. Meanwhile the favorite drug-copping spot of the junk-addled stripper Mimi (played by Rosario Dawson) looks like it was filmed after hours at the South St. Seaport (or more likely, a lot in San Francisco).
Ditto for the riot scene at Maureen’s ditzy protest performance, which takes place in a cavernous warehouse that never existed down here. Maureen comes off like an annoying cross between Karen Finley and Sandra Bernhardt. And what to make of the aspiring rocker Roger (Adam Pascal) wailing Bon Jovi style in a brief, car-commercial-like detour to the New Mexican desert to mourn his breakup with Mimi? These Hollywood folks can’t help themselves it seems. The impulse to dumb down and deliver a sanitized version of true grit is inexorable.
The reduction of the East Village into a series of bohemian-esque clichés is not surprising. “Rent” the movie is the apotheosis of the Lower East Side as Hollywood movie set, where the local residents are simply off-camera “extras,” and production companies are free to tow your car at will. (I remember them filming the “La Vie Bohème” scene outside Vazac’s and watching them blow plastic snow into the trees.)
It’s interesting that the characters in the movie are only truly fulfilled when they watch themselves projected onscreen in protagonist Mark’s 16-millimeter film, which simply plays back snippets of previous scenes in the movie like a grainy promo trailer for the flick. Given the overmarketing of the East Village as an expensive playground — or “entertainment district” — for wannabe hipsters, even these movie characters seem to find the celluloid version of themselves more appealing.
In sum, the film appears to be offering a revisionist and watered down, or glossed over, history. While it touches upon elements that made the East Village unique, it appears not to fully capture these elements.
A second case is of a recent art show. As reported in the Village Voice, an alternative newsweekly, published now for the past fifty years in New York City, The New Museum, a museum at West 22nd Street in Manhattan, organized a multi-art program at the beginning of 2005 entitled “East Village USA.” This program was devoted to the underground art of the East Village which was done, by and large, starting in the late 1970s and continuing through the 1980s. Reviewing the show for the Village Voice, writer Jerry Saltz comments
if you come away thinking the East Village was just a bargain basement of second-stringers, you're looking too narrowly or haven't adjusted your filters to appreciate artists who, while not "major," are or were quite gifted. Viewers with open minds and gentle hearts will discern ideas and attitudes that were put into motion then that are still in play today…Admittedly, the place emitted a tang of cultishness, desperation, and squalor. This scene was all trial and error and delusions of grandeur: ego, libido, unexamined ambition, adolescent energy, creepy collectors, crazy critics, obnoxious middlemen, burnout, and ferment. Everything was built bottom-up and was thrilling for 15 minutes before it was spun into success and out of existence. Artists, dealers, and hangers-on who had no other choice, weren't worldly enough, weren't part of the more established scene, or just wanted to try it another way had one brief fling at bohemian royalty, success, and excess. This motley crew created the overhyped twinkling star known as the East Village art scene.
The artists, whose work was displayed, included Keith Haring, Philip Taaffe, Peter Hujar, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nan Goldin, and David Wojnarowicz, as well as perhaps lesser known artists such as Gracie Mansion, New Math, Civilian Warfare, and Piezo Electric.
While the art products of these artists depicted various subject matters and dealt with a variety of themes (including the theme of transgression), the grouping of them together under a single roof suggested that, at the very least, they shared a common history, and helped to symbolize the East Village as an arts center. As Saltz puts it, “for a time the East Village was the art world's duodenum—no matter how it came out, almost everything passed through it.”
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