Vulnerability, Intimacy, & Grace in 'Moonlight'

Prelude to Oscar Season | A 2016 Review of Barry Jenkins' Moonlight

*Note: I wrote this review in 2016, but never found an outlet to publish it. I am publishing it now in light of the upcoming Oscar season, as ‘Moonlight’ won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017.

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Black screen. Then, we see production company credits. And in the soundtrack, we hear ocean waves crashing as the faintly perceptible sound of Boris Gardiner’s “Every nigger is a star” fades into the soundtrack. The 1973 reggae track that served as the titular song to a failed Blaxploitation film couldn’t be more appropriate for a coming of age story about a young man who struggles to find a real, organic name despite the dehumanizing labels his peers and the realities of crack cocaine-era Miami impose on him. Director Barry Jenkins prefaces each chapter of this tripart narrative with a title card bearing a different name relative to the specific set of challenges and implications inherent in our protagonist’s incremental boy-to-man transition: i. Little, ii. Chiron, and finally iii. Black.

Little

In the first vignette, as the chapter title suggests, we meet the extremely reticent and introverted pre-teen “Little” as he flees from school mates who pursue him and deride him for being homosexual. “Little” finds refuge in an abandoned apartment littered with crack pipes where Juan (portrayed by Mahershala Ali), a local drug dealer discovers him and eventually enlists the aid of his girlfriend, Teresa ( Janelle Monae) in taking the boy into his care. “Little” is a demeaning moniker Chiron’s peers have ascribed to him out of spite and disregard. Bullies regularly assault him and in a surreal moment, Jenkins masterfully combines classical music with a fluid tracking shot from Chiron’s POV as older kids blankly glare at him suggesting that he’s too small to join in a neighborhood soccer game.

“Little” isn’t the only insulting label other children have bestowed upon him as we learn in a poignant scene that takes place in Teresa’s home around the breakfast table. Chiron finds safe refuge in her home as his own home life is rife with tension, despair, and neglect: there’s no hot water, so the boy has to heat water on the stove before he can take a bath; his own mother, Paula (Naomie Harris) often entertains male company sometimes displacing him from the apartment for the night; tv’s come up missing to support his mom’s drug habit; etc. As Teresa, Juan, and Chiron sit silently at the table, the boy looks up and asks Juan, “what’s a faggot?”. After an awkward pause and exchange of glances with Teresa, he informs the young man that this is a derogatory name used to denigrate homosexuals. Chiron isn’t satisfied - he wants to know if he in fact is what the other kids having been tauntingly calling him. Juan then insists, “you don’t have to know that right now…”

Juan represents the presence of grace in Chiron’s life - he doesn’t want the young boy to live under the pressure of having to figure out who he is at such a critically young age. He wants to shield and protect this kid from the realities of the broken world with which the little boy is unfortunately already too familiar. Yes, Chiron has seen and experienced too much for a ten year old, but Juan hopes he can at least save the boy from becoming him - which ultimately fails as Chiron takes on Juan’s very physical appearance and drug selling lifestyle when he reaches adulthood.

Juan wants Chiron to have a childhood, to be able to just focus on being a kid. He wants him to learn to swim…In a beautifully photographed scene in which the blocking suggests a baptismal ritual, the unsteady cinematography palpably places us in the water with Juan as he teaches his unofficially adopted son to swim. Exercising his paternal influence over Chiron, he desperately wants the boy to understand that nobody has the right to assign him his identity. It is during this oceanside scene as they sit on the shore pontificating, that we learn the significance of the film’s title.

Juan recounts an anecdote from his childhood in Cuba in which an old woman accused him and other little boys of running so wildly and rampantly in the moon’s shining beams that they were absorbing all the light and thereby turning themselves blue. Therefore, the woman concluded she would call him ‘Blue’. In one of the first moments in which we actually hear the boy speak, Chiron asks, “so is that your name?” Juan vigorously, yet subtly shakes his head “no” after which he affirms that it is we alone who have to travel the path toward discovering our true name and identity - no can give it to us.

From Chiron to Black

Someone does end up giving Chiron an identity and a name. By the time the second act, ii.Chiron begins, Juan has presumably died and so the young man once again finds himself navigating life without a father figure, without direction - without someone to communicate approval to him. A childhood friend, Kevin who surfaced at least twice in the first act ultimately extends unconditional acceptance toward Chiron. In a definitive moment, the two teens discover they have the same nighttime hideout as they sit next to the ocean and find solace listening to the rhythm of the tides crashing and taking in the scent that Kevin insists permeates the entire ‘hood on a still night.

In the flow of casual conversation, Kevin keeps calling him ‘Black’ to which Chiron replies confusedly, “why you keep calling me that?... what kind of guy goes around naming people?” Kevin assures him the name isn’t meant to humiliate, but rather to affirm. The sexual encounter that ensues in this scene confirms that Kevin’s intentions are not like those of Chiron’s peers. While the other kids chase, attack, and ultimately label him, Kevin touches him in an intimate manner. In fact, Kevin’s first appearance in the narrative occurs in the first act after Chiron in total disinterest has abandoned the soccer game the older kids reluctantly allowed him to join. Kevin walks with Chiron, befriends him, and challenges him through ‘play fighting’ to stand up to the bullies. He even says to Chiron after their first man-to-man rough housing encounter (rife with insinuations of a deeper subtext), ‘see, I knew you wasn’t soft’.

Ever the voice of affirmation and assurance amidst the loud echoing voices of condemnation and rejection, Kevin communicates something to Chiron that he will later acknowledge was unlike anything any peer in his life ever communicated: acceptance. Toward the end of the film, the two friends reconcile as adults years after a critical incident sent them both to prison for their involvement in vicious altercations on school grounds. Succumbing to peer pressure, Kevin had savagely beaten Chiron who in turn violently retaliated against Terrel, the ringleader of a group of high school bullies who instigated the entire ambush in the first place. Years later, Kevin reaches out to Chiron, apologizes for the incident, updates him on his new life as a restaurant owner, and invites him to reconnect sometime. When the two men do eventually reunite, Chiron reflects on that night at the beach and confesses, “no one ever touched me like that” after which we cut to a medium close up shot of Kevin embracing and consoling his broken and weeping friend.

Vulnerability, Labels, & Grace

This scene powerfully concludes a film that portrays vulnerable humans who defy labels, and grace that transcends flawed humanity. Juan is more than a crack dealer - he’s a loving father figure who hates his mistakes and hopes to save Chiron (and redeem himself) by attempting to shepherd the young man from the evils of the world. Paula is more than a crack head - she’s a mother whose addiction eventually has brought her to the end of herself…to a place where after 20 + years of neglecting her responsibility to raise a young man, she can admit her abject failure as a parent and in an old age accelerated by drug abuse, tell her son, “you don’t have to love me… but just know I love you”. Chiron is more than a “faggot” - he’s a scared, confused human seeking acceptance and an identity…like the rest of us.

In our contemporary American culture, the church has unfortunately tended to reduce humans, made in the image of God to theological and social “issues”. Labeling is convenient because it allows us to transform (or rather deform) a fellow image-bearer into a caricature our self righteousness creates. It allows us to distance ourselves from an alien “other” upon whom we can project our own unrighteousness (Matt 7:3-4). Such objectification ensures that we don’t have to identify with someone else’s pain, hurt, or struggle - i.e. we don’t have to come alongside them and bear their burden… as we should. If I can identify an individual or a people group as something for which I thank God I am not, then I can basically self atone. And…we’re all guilty of this. We all label in some capacity based on some set of criteria. We all have our definitions and preconceived boundaries about who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’. We all compartmentalize and reduce complex, multifaceted human beings into easily defined and therefore dismissible categories.

But the gospel gives us better news…While we are willing to project our unrighteousness onto our neighbor that we might minimize our sin, God imputed our unrighteousness on Christ to free us from it. In the gospel, we meet One who was willing to bear all our labels that we might we might be worthy to bear His name. On the Cross, Christ bore the label ‘sinner’ so that through His resurrection, God might give us the name ‘sons’ (cf. Isaiah 56:7).

We are not defined by what labels people assign us…but, neither do we find ourselves by ourselves. In other words, we cannot answer for ourselves or by ourselves the fundamental existential questions that haunt us - ‘do I matter?’, ‘who am I?’, ‘do I count?’, ‘do I have value?’ Someone outside of us has to answer that for us. Chiron feels validated by an external touch - and we can understand why he seeks to define his personhood in the context of sexuality. We are by design sexual beings, as Jesus notes in the gospel of Matthew,

At the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh…’

-Matthew 19:4,5

Writing to the Corinthian church, the apostle Paul conflates such one flesh union with the act of sexuality. Chastising the Corinthians for their lax disposition toward fornication, he challenges them to consider that the sexual act creates a spiritual and physical oneness not to be taken lightly (cf. 1 Cor 6:16). It is very human to identity and connect 'touch', 'sex', and 'sexuality' with love, affirmation, acceptance, and ultimately...existence. Those who give us affirmation and attention in this manner simultaneously contain the power to inform our view of our self worth and dignity. Any spouse can tell you how much more easily their mate can penetrate their defenses and deliver psychic blows to the ego more accessibly than can our friends, family members, enemies, etc. Our suns rise and set on our beloved's opinion and view of us.

Ultimately though, it is Jesus’ touch that defines and frees us - an eternally affirming touch that gives us an identity we didn’t create by exploring or struggling…but an identity He gives us despite our striving to ‘find’ ourselves. It's His soul-healing touch that alone can atone for our self-driven, self-centered journey to create our own identity and find acceptance. He forgives our sexual immorality and sees it for what is: a self righteous attempt to fill our own emptiness. He came into our world as true flesh with Whom we can tangibly, concretely, and objectively interact. St. John reminds us that Christ is the One "which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched” (1 John 1:1). This is the same Jesus who invited his followers to "look at my hands and my feet" and "thrust your hand in my side” after appearing to them in resurrected flesh. While the physical intimacy in which we seek refuge, meaning, and identity is a mere shadow of reality we strive to attain, Jesus alone is the true substance Who came into the world to accomplish the work of redemption for us - i.e. that which we cannot accomplish by trusting in sexual relationships to define us. Only Jesus and His touch can settle the question once for all of "who am I?" The answer is found through the gospel: I am known by Christ and forgiven.