Moonlight, MLK, and the damage we do to each other
Moonlight is hard to watch—but also essential viewing—because of what it reveals about us as humans.
There are scenes of such tenderness in Barry Jenkins’s exquisite film Moonlight that they are almost unbearable to watch. Not because the viewer is made to feel like a voyeur—not remotely—and not because part of the protagonist’s story is his struggle to know and name his body’s desires. In fact, that way of putting it—that Moonlight is a movie about sexual self-discovery—minimizes, I think, both the beautiful sweep of this particular story set in this particular place among these particular people and what it means to know ourselves as desiring beings.
Human intimacy takes many forms and sexual identity is not a term that defines one’s personhood in any way that approaches completeness. One of the most breathtaking scenes in the film is when Juan teaches Chiron (“Little”) to swim. It, like much of the movie, is bathed in blue light. As A. O. Scott writes in the best review I know of, scenes like this are “better witnessed than described.” But one thing that can be said is that in the soft, azure evening light Chiron is given a glimpse—maybe the first—of his belovedness. And Juan, too, who cannot be reduced to stereotype or to any of the tired tropes of lesser films about drug addiction and despair, seems to both reveal and discover his own capacity for selfless love. He sees Chiron. And he touches him, cradling him in warm ocean waves, offering him safety and calm for storms yet to come.
And isn’t that what we all want? To be seen and known, to feel safe and loved in the presence of another who wants our good? To experience the touch of another, in all its forms, that communicates our belonging and belovedness, whatever awaits us in this world?
