Moonlight – Coming of Age in the Ghetto

This is a violent film.  Not as overtly violent as the reluctant wife feared - though there are powerfully, intimately violent scenes and it was no surprise to discover that Brad Pitt, who starred in the even more violent film Fight Club that addresses similar themes, is a producer – but there is a great deal of implicit violence.  It is a film about identity – about how we build an identity and how, in the process of doing that, we preserve our core identity – one that may be at odds with the identity that we construct.

The film is billed as a film about the development of a gay identity within contemporary American Black culture – and it has been billed as a coming of age film about African American Men in the Ghetto (heck, I even referred to it that way in my title).  Each of these characterizations is problematic.  It has been hailed as a great film – and I think it is, at the very least, a very good, if flawed, film; and, in so far as it is a great film it is because it deals with universal themes by dealing very directly with a particular culture – and the flaws seemed to me at least partly motivated by political wishes to change a culture rather than to acknowledge it, while simultaneously closely articulating it.

This movie follows the development of a small, rail thin and very dark African American kid as he grows up in and eventually moves away from the ghetto of Miami to the ghetto of Atlanta and then, ultimately, his brief return to his earlier haunts.  The cinematography is surprisingly uneven for a big budget American film; the herky-jerky quality of the film – the raw, unfinished quality of some scenes – seems to be articulating the internal experience of this isolated, lonely and sensitive boy.  We first meet him when he is being pursued by a pack of bullies after school.  They chase him into an abandoned apartment building where he locks himself into an apartment to be discovered by Juan (Mahershala Ali), the Cuban drug lieutenant who oversees a distribution network of crack cocaine through street dealers that he mentors.  He refuses to talk to Juan, who feeds him and then takes him to his girlfriend, Theresa (Janelle Monáe), where he is fed again.

We discover there, in this weird family configuration with a kind of random father figure and a very sexy maternal figure, two of the three names of our hero.   He acknowledges that he is called by others “Little”.  This leads Juan to tell a story about being seen while playing in the moonlight by a woman who noted that all blacks look blue in the moonlight.  Little asks if his name, then, is Blue.  Juan responds by saying that you should not let someone else name you – your name is your own and his name is Juan.  Little, we then discover, is actually named Chiron.  Soon we discover that he has another name.  His friend Kevin calls him “Black”. 

The film is divided into three sections.  The first section is titled Little; the second Chiron, and the third, obviously, is Black.  The hero is played by three different actors – one for each section (Alex Hibbert is the young Little, Ashton Sanders plays the teenage Chiron, and Trevante Rhodes plays the adult Black).  Similarly, his friend Kevin is played by a similarly aged trio (Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome, and André Holland).  The titles, and the reference to who should name you underscore that this film is about identity.

We are introduced to Kevin when Little wanders away from a game of what was called “Smear the Queer” when I was raised in South Florida a generation or two ago and Kevin follows him.  Kevin encourages Little to stand up to the bullies in order to get them to stop tormenting him.  He and Kevin then wrestle in a friendly way and run together across a field – the best of friends.

Kevin is a spot of light in another wise dark life for Little.  Not only is he tormented by bullies, but his Mother (Paula played by Naomie Harris) tanks more and more deeply into a world of crack, turning tricks to afford it, and ultimately taking Chiron's money to pay for it – crack that is provided indirectly by Juan – who, when Juan confronts Paula about how unavailable she is to Little, acknowledges that the crack she gets through Juan is partly to blame for that, but also alludes to Chiron's increasingly apparent (to her) sexuality – something that she wants to know how Juan will handle telling him that this is why he is picked on.  So, in what I think is one of the politically motivated and therefore incredulous moments in the movie, Juan responds to Little’s question about what a faggot is by telling him that it is a name of derision for someone who is gay – as if someone asking about faggot would know what gay is – but more fundamentally problematic is that Juan, as a lieutenant in an army that is notoriously homophobic (When Little becomes Black he enacts this homophobia, as if to underscore how aberrant this supportive moment is) would be able to provide this much needed support.  So the moment is both tender and feels oddly instructional – as if we drug dealers are being told how to parent a gay child…(Post Script:  In his next release, Brad Pitt takes all the air out of an important movie, War Machine, by preaching instead of letting the story tell itself)

The tender moments for Chiron peak in a moment when he, driven from his home by another crazy night with his mother, finds Kevin at the beach.  He and Kevin kiss and, almost incidentally, also have a sexual interaction.  This scene is a moment of respite that is both sweet – Kevin can respond to him in the way that he most needs – and brief – Chiron is besieged by his mother, the chief bully at school (Terrel chillingly played by Patrick Decile), and by the loss of Juan, who dies, presumably violently.  He remains connected with Juan’s girlfriend Theresa, but he is haunted, even when he retreats to her house from his mother’s craziness, by the knowledge that Kevin is having sex with a girl – Samantha.  The final blow occurs when the bully, circling the school play yard in truly scary state of shark frenzy, enlists Kevin to be the instrument of both physical and psychological pain in an unbearable intersection of what would be a betrayal were Kevin not so clearly torn by the role he is forced into. 

Chiron, this shy, retiring, skinny and vulnerable child, has had enough.  He becomes enraged, and his rage ends the Chiron chapter.  We meet Black – a carbon copy (pun unintended but applicable) of Juan, functioning as a drug lieutenant – a Trap – who is apparently hardened by a stint in prison in the wake of his rage, has rebuilt himself in the weight room. 

A friend of mine – an athlete – refers to the weight lifting that football players do – the weightlifting that increases not just strength, but bulk – as building body armor.  And we have a hard time seeing Charon through the person that he has become as Black.  He is defended against the world.  He has taken on street dealers, just as Juan did, and he mentors them with the same tough love that Juan offered.  He has grown through the ranks and learned the trade, but also learned the values of the trade – including the homophobia referred to earlier.  He is, like Juan, still warm – but tough.  He has mimicked him in surface ways: the car, the shaved head, the head gear, and we almost see Juan in front of us – and the question is how deeply that mimicry goes.

In psychoanalytic terms, Black has identified with Juan.  He has emulated him – internalizing aspects of his psyche as a means of augmenting or enhancing his identity.  But we, like Kevin when they have a reunion, wonder whether he has used Juan as a means of obliterating himself in favor of becoming someone else.  Kevin asks him repeatedly – “Who are you?”  After having fed Black (as only Juan and Theresa have done before), in the final scene, in what is a true tour de force of acting, we discover that Black is the persona that has allowed Chiron to be – not annihilated – but preserved deep within the armor that Black/Juan provide.  He is there – tormented, vulnerable, and able to be open with Kevin – the Kevin that he has stayed true to through all that has transpired since the moment when Kevin served as the instrument to open the door to Black.

Wow.  How do we preserve that which is most true, most central, most key about who it is that we are in the most brutal environments – and what allows us to access that part of ourselves when we have learned over and over that it is not safe to do that?  The Reluctant Wife, who has worked effectively on an inpatient drug and alcohol unit, has seen that this occurs, consistently, when there is, indeed, a sense of psychological safety – that the buried self – the self that we connect with in our childhood friends and, sometimes in embarrassing ways, with our parents and siblings, the people that we knew before we and they built our armor – the self that they know we can see – and our own self that we know that they can see – when we live as ourselves again in the moments of being together again – for good and ill – that hidden self comes to the surface again.  This is part of why family reunions at the holidays can be simultaneously so joyful and complicated – we “regress” to being who it is that we more essentially are.  We play old roles.  And this is both good and bad – Little was incredibly vulnerable.  To see that vulnerability bubble up - to be visible through the armor that Black has created - is a powerful moment.  Wow.

In this film, we are brought up short by Black.  What happened to our lovely, shy, retiring Little?  Where did the sensitive Chiron go?   I think the second political intent of this film is to say something greater about the African American Male that we, as culture, have created – the angry and dangerous Black man who will wreak vengeance for the ways in which what it is that he has been has been stolen from him.  The Dangerous Black Man who needs to be imprisoned - to be kept at arm's length and under control.  The Black Man whom James Cone, in an alternate narrative in the The Cross and the Lynching Tree, maintains that the African American Man is a true Christian who can be understood as the oppressed Jew that Jesus was in the Roman Empire.  This same Black Man whom Ta-Nehisi Coates, in yet another alternate narrative, maintains has built our country – paying our Revolutionary War debts by picking cotton and paying through taxes for a system of social services that he had no access to under segregation.  This film, in its own narrative, maintains that, despite the tyranny of those African Americans like Terrel who have become like the Roman Empire/White American Sharks, despite being abandoned in a dangerous ghetto, despite being betrayed through death, drugs, and coercion, by those the he most needed to rely on, that there is a preserved goodness.  

And I think there is psychoanalytic credence to this narrative.  Little/Chiron/Black did not get much - but we don't need to have a perfect world to sustain us, to help protect the person that we are, we need a world that is, as pediatrician turned analyst Donald Winnicott maintained, good enough.  L/C/B's mother was far from perfect - and, despite her manifolds faults - she loved L/C/B.  Juan - who would not live to see Little's transformation into a version of himself - was available in ways that he needed (even without the softening of the word faggot - an unnecessary moment) and Theresa served as well.  But it was Kevin - and the power of his friendship - something that seemed almost puzzling to L/C &B - that seemed, ultimately, to be the thing that allowed him to both preserve and to express something fundamental - something heartrending and viscerally real about who it is that he is and always will be - despite his muteness - despite his isolation - and despite the armor that he has built to protect it.

L/C/B's goodness is not clean any more than yours and mine is.  It is polluted by all that has taken place.  But it is still present.  On the way to Kevin’s apartment at the end of the film, L/C/B notices the beach at the end of Kevin’s street.  He and we are drawn to it – to the time on the beach with Kevin – and the time before Kevin appeared when Chiron breathed in the Ocean air – salty, clean and cleansing – and he felt – What? – that in spite of all that had happened that day – that week- that month – that year – and despite all that was to transpire – in this moment, he felt – what?  Centered?  Relaxed?  Hopeful?  Alive?  He still yearns to be there – to be on that beach – to be in touch with the ocean – where Juan taught him to swim -  among the waves that come in and carry away all that is bad, the waves that constantly replenish the coastline – with new sand, washed fresh by their action. 

Would that this movie ended with a clear picture of how the preserved Little and Chiron were able to be expressed under the watchful eye of the powerful Black.  It ain’t that simple.  And leaving things up in the air the way that it does is necessary.  We cannot tie up the complicated ends of a person this complex – and simple – so easily.  The friends that I have known well – the people who have given me access to their essential (and good) selves – either by virtue of our shared innocence (we were both young and stupid) or as the result of intimate relationships as adults – have complex and complicated interactions with others – and with me - and I with them – it ain’t easy being an adult.  Even – or especially – adults of relative privilege who have a difficult time leading lives of integrity.  I don’t know how Kevin and Little/Chiron/Black are going to move forward.  But they, and we, are better for the connections that they have made.  And we as individuals and as a country can move forward, muddling our way through and out of the convoluted messes we have made – we will act as new waves who will come in and help us clean things up.  It won't be pretty and it won't be easy, but we will move forward - if by fits and starts.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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