Barry Jenkins's "Moonlight" and the idea of experience
Often the most compelling stories are revelatory of a particular world in ways that simultaneously have something of the abstraction that gives them a universality or at least generality. I know that sounds trite; but it isn’t. In my reading, in “Moonlight” this lies in something like an idea of experience (in a strong sense that is visual and aural and that I associate with directors like Antonioni and Malick) and the way it is linked to motifs of oppression and liberation.
In this film “about” a gay teenage boy in a poor Black American community, filmmaker Barry Jenkins brings to the screen something that is at the same time as old as the modern novel: the social alienation of the modern individual, more often than not (from Cervantes to Beckett and beyond) an antihero, often an artist type, who is unusually sensitive and may have to painstakingly develop a working set of social skills in a milieu in which it seems to him almost as if this is something everyone else is born with. At least, they all seem to think it is. Chiron does not become an artist, and at the end I think the question of becoming is still unanswered, though it seems to have something to do with the redemptive capacities of love. His being gay is doubtless not merely the particular character his vulnerability and isolation have taken, but they do seem related. It would be too easy to say that he is a person who has been ruined; maybe the question is, as T. S. Eliot suggested, what fragments of our experience, interpreted in what way, will enable our surviving forms of ruination, and living on in a way that one can affirm.
The key to the main character is that he is an impressionable cipher, someone to whom things happen and who never really, never quite, develops much of a sense of self. He never acts, except once, when the violence that did not seem prefigured by any personal traits is catastrophic. His friend Kevin says in the final scene, “Who is you?” Chiron has no answer, though he tells Kevin, with obvious double meaning, “No other man has touched me.”
Chiron reminds me a little bit of Ettore, the teenage boy in Pasolini’s “Mamma Roma.” His defining character trait is insouciance. His mother, whose status as whore is, typically for Pasolini, a condition of possibility of sainthood, loves him like the Madonna, while he hangs out with a gang of small-time thieving hoodlums. He just does not seem to care much about anyone or anything, until the end when we see him dying on a hospital bed that is more a wooden pillar with his arms stretched out as if on a cross, and calling out to his mother. Chiron, whose own mother is preoccupied with what she herself needs, which seems to be mainly heroin, and who understands motherhood as something her child must do for her, does not hang out with any group of other boys, but is pretty much solitary throughout the film. And, while he first appears at the beginning of the film running from other boys and hiding in (what is surely also a metaphor) an abandoned building (this is echoed in the second segment when he is hiding from the homophobic bully, and contrasted by a short scene, played to stirring music, in which he is kicking a papier-mâché soccer ball with some other boys), he is basically timid and shy by disposition. It is not so much that he doesn’t care about anyone as that he doesn’t really have anyone to love. All this helps to explain the fragility and near absence of whatever sense of self he will develop in the course of the film.
The tragedy of his relationship with Kevin stems partly from the fact that Kevin is the opposite kind of person. He seems supremely self-confident, someone whom you could imagine working parties as a social butterfly. The taciturn Chiron (raising the question: does he keep his own counsel or is he just so completely lost that it is almost as if he were not there?) doesn’t easily get people, and Kevin does; he’s clearly gifted, but the ease with which he “seduces” Chiron is linked to his own relative insouciance: two forms of not being there. (Chiron, in contrast, is innocent: it is more that he cares and does not know than, like Kevin, knowing and not caring). For Kevin wants the acceptance of the other boys and is glad he has it. Kevin is the most proximate cause of Chiron’s going to prison, in a manner that, obviously a bit to Kevin’s chagrin, will change Chiron by giving him something like a thick carapace of self-armor in the literalized form of a weight-lifter’s body (visualized metaphors again) which, we surmise, is the shape he gave to a certain rage in prison, since prison makes men harder, not softer. Obviously he learned in prison to deal with other men, but in a way that surely was mere survival then and expresses only resignation now. The crucial event in Chiron’s tragedy is the teenage Kevin’s reluctant willingness to beat up Chiron on behalf of the bully who orders him to do so. Kevin understands that it is either Chiron or himself, and he likes Chiron but is not willing to risk himself on his friend’s behalf, which would probably be a losing battle anyway. Having refused to name names presumably to protect Kevin, Chiron returns to school soon thereafter and attacks the homophobe who ordered his beating at the hands of Kevin from behind with a chair, and this leads directly to him being take away, the next scene beginning with his return from prison.
It may be worth noting that our culture's individualism includes a prevailing morality according to which it does not matter what anyone else has done to you or is threatening to do, if what you do is violent or otherwise wrong when considered in abstraction, then you are as wholly to blame as if you alone were responsible for your own actions and experience alike. And of course, in a way you are and in a way you’re not, but this is denied by the uncompromising and simplifying moralism usually at play. (In philosophy, this is that of Kant, whose ethics does not include any idea of love because desire and inclination are for Kant irrelevant in the face of moral obligation.) Here there is an advantage of film, which provides experiences with a visual and aural intensity that literature and theater lack, because its approach to social realities can, especially when stylistic clichés are avoided and what we see is unexpected or strikingly vivid, emphasize experience over judgement. This is also one of those many stories whose ending opens on to some unknown but hopeful after-life, both for Chiron and his world.
One filmmaker whom “Moonlight” reminded me of is Terence Malick, who has a way of using the camera to suggest an idea of experience, which in his case is generally linked to a love of the visible world figured as love of God. Jenkins uses camera movement, music, and sometimes decor to signal moments of intensity that are identified with the character’s emotions. One device Jenkins makes occasional but always striking use of is a circling camera, at times centripetal and at other centrifugal, thus showing either the character as surrounded by the gaze of others looking at him or his own gaze looking out at them. A totalizing gaze that expresses entrapment, this device, which is an instance of what Pasolini in discussing Antonioni's "Red Desert" called the "free indirect style," in which the film itself takes the point of view of a character, also helps to structure our vision of him and his world as in opposition. These moments of intensity are not redemptive. There is a slight dizzying effect of some of these pans, and with music, sometimes classical, suddenly flaring up, what this seems to give us first of all is a sense of Chrion’s world as one in which he is susceptible to things happening to him. Often, of course, bad things. This makes me think of the preoccupation in late 20th century European philosophy with ideas of “the event” as something that happens not within a world, but to it, transforming it and its denizens irrevocably, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, for better or worse. Chiron is a character to whom things happen. And that is most of who he is. It draws us in as viewers in a form of intensified identification.
Another device that Jenkins is fond of and uses in two scenes, one of which is repeated, is an expressionistically, almost neon, colored hallway at the end of which we see a wall or a door. The first, repeated, shows his mother in front of it as she pops in and out of a bedroom to the side by the rear wall. She is in and out of the scenes of his life, and its paths to an elsewhere that are blocked by this wall. Like the circular pans, the device here indicates and manifests a moment of affective intensity. Such are metaphors that function not as signs but as fully material and experienced realities, giving the implied ideas that are revealed on a moment's reflection a sense of the incontestable and necessary. It is notable how absent is anything like this in the scene when Chiron attacks the bully from behind with a chair; here action contrasts with experience as passion.
The second is of Kevin, and like the repetition of the doorframe scene, it appears as if it may be within a dream. Kevin is at a phone booth in a corridor, which appears to be the restaurant where Chiron knows he is working. Here the colors remind me of some of the films of Wong Kar-wai, and interestingly Jenkins elsewhere (while Chiron is driving along a highway in an empty landscape) uses a song that is also quoted by Wong in his gay love story, “Happy Together,” Caetano Veloso’s famous renditioning of "Cucurrucucu Paloma,” perhaps one of the most moving songs in all of pop music. The effect of these scenes is also to suggest an experience felt with a certain intensity. The corridors suggest a path, but it is one that, for all the passion associated with it, leads nowhere.
The first time I saw the film I was saddened by the character of “Black.” It’s a terrific provocation of the filmmaker to give Chiron's third successive incarnation in the film that nickname (which was given to him by Kevin). Does he represent his race, either for the constructed position of the viewer (who must include Americans who are and are not Black), or for others around him, such as Kevin? I found Chiron’s post-prison persona terribly sad on the first viewing, though on the second I thought I could see in him, behind the mask, so to speak, a tenderness, and an ability to care. Kevin, who is married now and proudly shows Chiron a picture of his daughter, seem to believe he can help his friend by bringing this out in him. Which probably is what love can mean in brief encounters where a "relationship" is impossible. Ironically Kevin, always so cool, suave, knowing what to say and do, now admits to Chiron that he never had much self-respect, though this claim is now belied by the slightly but notably impassioned manner in which he describes his involvement with his present life, which is good after all, involving his wife and child and even his job. Kevin is more easily satisfied, while Chiron remains a figure of possibility.
The film does end on a moment of hope. With the pietà of Kevin cradling the body of Chiron after love-making, nothing is said about what Chiron will do or experience next, what he will become. The aesthetic situation here is that Jenkins has shown us characters who are complementary opposites as ways of dealing with the problem of how to live as a gay Black man in America today that is also a drama with some of the poetic abstraction of many great figures in modern theater, fiction, and film. And it heightens this with a deft use of certain resources of visual style. The central idea here is the focus on the theatrical idea of a self that is constructed unstably between the non-being of emptiness or alienation and that of the mask. It probably is not possible in America today to view or make a film like this without also attributing to it the almost documentary realism that drives to want to ask such questions as: (for white viewers) Could it be that men like him deserve a chance? or (for black viewers): Will it always be like this? The film's ending with the cliché of the redemptive character of love is rendered ambiguous and uncertain, if only because Chiron cannot marry Kevin, their love is fleeting, and the question of Chiron's identity and possible mode of life remains unanswered and merely posed. The question of the future destiny of the Chirons will seem to many one upon the answer to which a great deal concerning American society today depends. Though it is not as if this question has not been posed before. Maybe politics, and therefore the future, belongs to society's losers.