Last Saturday I sat down with my father and watched a film (which has been a tradition of ours every weekend since I was young). This act of sitting down and watching a new wonderous work of art is always much anticipated, but this night was different, this night we both knew that we were watching art that was changing history.
Through bated breathe in the comfort of reclined seats, not purposefully tilting, but from wear, and the aroma of savory and sweet goods, my dad turned to me and said, "this is what I've been talking about all these years, a movie that transcends the barriers of race and gender, and orientation, and is just an incredible story about life that anyone can appreciate and see." I smiled and nodded, nervously awaiting a movie that I had waited for too, and that wait had felt agonizingly extensive, even through the short previews.
Three chapters disentangle the complexities of a life, and in its unfurling, it by no means reduces a life down to something that can be surmised in an hour and fifty minutes. Barry Jenkins masterfully shows us the life of Chiron, and how he touches many lives and how many lives touch him. Moonlight wields the camera as a sensory weapon like a song grabbing you without asking and leading you to a lover you can't quite forget, but don't want to. We meet Juan (Mahershala Ali ) in the first chapter, i. Little, who is visually the evocation of the hypermasculine black male who sells drugs cliche, yet because of this extreme representation of stereotypical concepts of how black men move and exist in the world, it is all the more powerful when Jenkins uses this as a tool to vitiate the projected expectations of the audience and society to how Juan will interact with Chiron. The scene that shook me in the film is when Chiron has just been chased and cornered into an abanded drug den, and forced to lock himself in because the other children had been yelling homophobic slurs at him. Chiron asks Juan, sitting at the dinner table, not once looking up, "What's a faggot?" When this line was delivered, by Chiron who spoke scarcely to deliberately to avoid having to talk more than he liked, I sharply inhaled and felt a pain in my heart. Not only for Chiron but for what Juan would say to him. Juan's eyes dart down and then quickly adjust focus back to Chiron and he utters, "A 'faggot' is a word used to make gay people feel bad. " With that short sentence, my fists unclenched and my breath became steadier. Chiron quickly asks another question, "Am I a faggot? " Juan replies that he isn't and that he could be gay, but he isn't that slur. What could have easily been a homophobic character, quickly becomes the father figure in his life who shapes Chiron's idea of what it means to be a man. The scene was so beautifully crafted that I didn't realize how affected I was by the fear that Chiron wouldn't be accepted just as I hadn't been many a time, that tears were rolling down my cheeks the entire scene. I felt immense pain but incredible amounts of hope, which happened in this scene and throughout the whole movie.
The way that hypermasculinity is used in this film is so beautifully subversive that it allows the audience to feel warmth when usually depictions of black masculine men are rooted in homophobia and sexism, and in Moonlight are swapped for tenderness and love. After Chiron leaves the table we see Juan breaking down and about to cry and his girl Teresa, stoically comforting he was a pure and impeccably executed.
Kevin, Chiron’s childhood friend, who is a character in the film who doesn’t quite know how to love, even in the second and third chapter of the film we see how he struggles (ii. Chiron, iii. Black). He isn’t closeted or anywhere near the complex repression of passion and love that Chiron is at in the third and last act, but Kevin doesn’t know how to be present in the world being black and queer and in love with another man. This goes back to the scene with Chiron and Juan at the dinner table. You can feel the love between these two men, but you also know that they don’t know what to do with it. When you are queer, especially when you are black and queer no one teaches you how to love, what that is supposed to look like. How do you flirt? How do you have sex? How can you be tender? How can you be strong? What does any of that mean? Love becomes elusive, it runs from you, or in most cases you run from it. Kevin and Chiron have been running until they have a moment where they both try to learn how to hold one another, and just be. In the last scene where Chiron tells Kevin that he was the first and the last man to ever touch him, the scene cuts to Kevin holding Chiron just like he did when they were younger, except with more purpose and understanding. These two men needed each other and now saw that their love was never lost.
Moonlight ends in a way that is beautiful and dreamlike just as it started. The scene after Kevin and Chiron hold each other we see Chiron when he is young, looking out at the water, wrapped up in blue, and just like when Juan takes him swimming for the first time and he learns how to stay afloat, Chiron has found his way of staying afloat with love. The love for himself, Juan, for his mother, and for Kevin. It goes back to when Chiron wasn’t exteriorly big and tough, but when he was with Juan and around him, in that water, and cloaked in his affection he was free, and at the end when he made that step to drive out and be with Kevin that made him the freest he had ever been.
A question I asked myself after I left the theater as a queer woman of color was, Are there ways in which I too, don't know how to love? Those questions that were asked I asked myself again; When you are queer, especially when you are black and queer no one teaches you how to love, what that is supposed to look like. How do you flirt? How do you have sex? How can you be tender? How can you be strong? What does any of that mean?
Moonlight is the type of art that provokes and illuminates the delicacy of the human existence. I felt moved, understood, and inspired. This film is the reason I create, why I aspire to make something so precisely human. This movie is a must see and a tour de force of human connection, self-exploration, the intricacies of intimacy, and destruction of stereotypes. Watch it and reflect the delicacy and complexity of your existence, I know I did.
