Friday, 10 January 2020

10/1/20 - Favourite Character Praise Friday - Mark Cohen


Hello and welcome back to Favourite Character Praise Friday! This is one of my absolute favourite posts to write and I hope you enjoy my picking apart of my favourite characters enough to stick around while I examine my next victim, I mean, character. Don’t worry, I do not rank these characters in a particular order, it just so happens that some characters are better worth sharing praise for at a different point in time to others! Remember, every fifth instalment is Least Favourite Character Praise Friday, so keep an eye out for me probing at characters I can’t stand and raving about how well they were written in order to evoke such a reaction.

So, who is the subject of my next Favourite Character Praise Friday?

Mark Cohen from the movie-musical RENT



Warning: The following will contain spoilers!

Mark Cohen is one of the six central characters in the story RENT. He and his friends are struggling artists living off scraps, unable to afford to pay for their homes. The struggling bohemians all have dreams of success, but are struggling to get the means to achieve those dreams. Mark Cohen is a filmmaker, who is reluctant to sell out and go and produce content for mainstream media, instead wanting to create a documentary about the true way that New York’s poorest people live.

One of the reasons I love Mark as a character is that he is willing to compromise in order to help those around him. His morals are flexible and he does make mistakes and contradict himself. When Mark’s ex-girlfriend Maureen’s protest about the repurposing of a space the homeless use to squat, ends up being violent, Mark records the events that take place with the intention of putting them in his documentary, as the footage depicts the police force using riot gear and attempting to physically overpower and arrest people that were partaking in what was a peaceful protest, with homeless people being beaten bloody. When he realises that this information ought to be spread further, he willingly sells the footage of the riot that took place to the 11 O’clock news in order to let the reality his camera captured be shared further than a documentary would have been. He and his friends acknowledge that that was the right thing to do. His loyalty to his friends is further exemplified when he and his friends are made homeless by their landlord for not paying their rent. Mark had been given an opportunity to be a cameraman for a tabloid newscaster and was originally going to refuse, but due to he and his friends no longer being able to afford their living space, he decided that his morals were worth the compromise in order to help everyone stay alive.

Another aspect of his character that I love is how reluctant he is to be honest with his friends about his own emotional wellbeing. In the song Goodbye Love, which is cut short in the film, Mark and his housemate, former heroin addict Roger, argue about whether he is right to be angry about Roger leaving. In which Mark loses his temper and says that he should be allowed to be angry because he is “the one of [their social circle] to survive”. The bitterness in his tone reflects the fact he resents the fact his friends are all suffering from life-threatening illnesses. Angel, Collins, Mimi and Roger canonically have AIDs and with Maureen and Joanne are people that Mark feels he isn’t really friends with. He cares for Maureen but doesn’t want to intrude on her relationship with her new girlfriend as it’s not fair on either of the women. He is angry that his friends have put themselves in a situation where they are likely to die. Angel had already passed away and he acknowledges that Collins, Roger and Mimi are all, in a way ticking time-bombs, their relationships more intense due to the fact that they have no idea when they could lose a friend. Mark seems more reluctant to do so, because the idea of losing his friends is too much to handle. He classes his point of view to be selfish and refrains from acknowledging his emotions.

The last reason I adore Mark’s character is that he is so dedicated to capturing the essence of a moment to reflect upon. Throughout the film, Mark is recording the events that occur around him to preserve for a documentary, which, when revealed to his friends in the finale, appears more like a tribute to the friendship he shares with the people around him. He has no idea whether his friends might die and doesn’t want to forget them and feel like their deaths were in vain. This is demonstrated in Goodbye Love, where he calls Roger out for leaving New York to escape from the gravity of his own condition, and the fact that the woman he’s in love with is “running out of time” even though one of his friends just died too. The fact that they could die so quickly gives Roger anxiety. Mark seems to feel the same, but he doesn’t want to make his friends feel alone and instead decides to stay behind and be with them, recording their happiness, their motion, their laughter, their existence so it doesn’t just fade away like they didn’t live. This idea of wanting to capture the moment is something I relate to immensely due to wanting to remember the good times as opposed to the bad. I felt that Mark encapsulates that essence.

Please, if you have opinions on Mark Cohen, feel free to share them with me! Don’t forget you can check out my previous Character Praise by looking through the hashtags below.

And remember!

Per Aruda Ad Astra

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