“Who is You?”: on “Moonlight”, Chiron, and Identity

I’ve struggled with how to recommend Moonlight to others. There’s not a lot of promotion around the film; few know what it’s about. Also, I am not poor, black, or gay, so I have struggled with what to say about a film that includes these elements, and have struggled if I am even allowed to. To strip the film down to these elements in a description of it not incorrect, but it is inadequate. It’s about so much more than just that. “It’s about masculinity, too,” I have said, which is also true, also not enough. “It’s fucking good. It’s brilliant. You need to watch it,” is how I end it, which isn’t a fully fleshed out thought, but is perhaps the most visceral way to promote this film in a short period of time. Also, Chiron, the main protagonist, wouldn’t want me to speak for him. As a viewer of Moonlight, you need to figure out Chiron for yourself, to take the elements of Chiron in each act depicted of his life, and to determine what that says about him as a whole individual. That’s the journey that Chiron is on, and the film demands you go on that journey with him.

There is plenty in the film for one to comment on the socio-economic aspects of the world that Chiron lives in, but that’s not what the film is about. It’s about Chiron. And while an inter-disciplinary understanding of the world he lives he wouldn’t detract from the viewing experience, the film offers an end-to-end experience where requiring a closer view for the characters within. With each viewing of Moonlight — I’ve seen it twice now — I understand Chiron just a little bit more, and by doing so, I understand what the film is about. And I understand that most of my mostly white friends probably won’t watch Moonlight, and resign myself to the fact that they will probably watch La La Land instead, and we will all suffer for it.

But this essay isn’t about me. And neither is Moonlight. Saying it was would be an easy shortcut to self-identify with the film. It would also be wrong. Also, saying that my limitations as a white privileged male prevented me from giving an assessment of the film would also make it about me and would strip the narrative of some of its power.[1] This selfish tendency was pointed out by A.O. Scott- a white male critic for the New York Times, in his review of the film and again as a guest on the New York Times affiliated podcast “Still Processing”: “To insist that stories about poor, oppressed, or otherwise marginal groups of people are really about everyone can be a way of denying their specificity,” Scott writes. And, as is pointed out in Creative Writing 101, specificity is not everything, but it might be the most important thing. And Moonlight is anything but general. “He does not generalize. He empathizes,” Scott goes on to write. Scott found the he found the open-endedness of the film equally beautiful and frustrating, and ends his review by homing in on Chiron:

What strikes me now is less the pain of Chiron’s circumstances than the sense that, in spite of everything, he is free. A bullied, neglected and all-but-silent-child, he grows toward an understanding of himself and his world, and though it is agonizing to witness his progress, it is also thrilling. To be afforded a window into another consciousness is a gift that only art can give. To know Chiron is a privilege.[2]

It would have been easy for the film to have focused more on the living conditions of Chiron, and the problems inherent within, that living as a gay minority in the projects might lend itself to. And, indeed, the film gives space for these issues, but the emphasis “is not placed on the problems of the characters. It’s placed on the humanity of the characters,”[3] a point that New York Times critic Wesley Morris makes on “Still Processing,” which he co-hosts with Jenna Wortham, And it would have been easy for Scott to focus on the problems these characters faced, instead of the characters themselves, or on his own relation to the film, which I, too, have struggled not to focus on.

Like any original piece of work, Moonlight teaches the audience how to watch it, but it doesn’t hold their hand in the process. The film is about Chiron. Barry Jenkins, the director of Moonlight, says as much an interview with The A.V. Club that his first film, Medicine for Melancholy “was overtly a commentary on gentrification and race in San Francisco whereas (Moonlight) is a commentary on Chiron and the life he leads.”[4] Jenkins comments about his intention for the film aligns the critical interpretation of the film, that Chiron is the both the subject and the point of Moonlight. The film is about him, and Moonlight is consistently, and artfully, pushing to know Chiron. Know him through everything that is depicted on screen.

Ok, then.

Chiron, the protagonist of Moonlight, is portrayed by three different actors at three different times in Chiron’s life (Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes, respectively), and, that, even with the passage of time, would never be mistaken for the other. This is a conscious choice. Each actor capture something true about Chiron in that time of his life, the different ways he is stuck inside himself, the way he communicates with his eyes and body language, and the different ways he adapts to the world around him, sometimes with tragic results. it also speaks to the specific nature of Chiron, the way his body changes, as does his understanding of himself, but the kernel of him that remains. That even when he does change my outer self, he will nevertheless be a product of who he is relation to others, which creates the person he in that moment. There are aspects of Chiron that are fluid and ever-changing. There are aspects of Chiron that are constant.

This push and pull between fluidity and permanence is present throughout “Moonlight.” It’s telling that the film doesn’t open with Chrion, but Juan (Mahershala Ali), the local drug dealer who will become a father figure to Chiron after finding him in the “dope houses on 15th” to escape the school bullies. His duel role may be archetypal, and that he sells drugs to Chiron’s mother may coincidental to the point of cliche, but the role Juan plays in Chiron’s life is instrumental in shaping the man Chiron will become, and the boy that he is. After Chiron asks him and Juan’s partner, Theresa (Janelle Monae), what the word “faggot” means, and how would he know whether he is gay or not. “You just do…I think,” Juan says, in a conversation he’s probably never had before, but which he handles with deep sympathy. “You don’t have to know everything right now,” Juan says to him, as a way to ease Chiron’s anxiety and speaking to the side of Chiron’s sexuality which, as a boy is not yet present in his life. And which also speaks to Chiron’s understanding of himself, and everything that comes with it, which includes sexuality, masculinity, and race, and which will evolve over time. But Chiron is Chrion.

In each of the three “Acts,” there is a corresponding dream sequence or vision that Chiron has, each representing his current relationship to people in his life as it relates to sexuality. In Act One, “Little,” his vision is of his mother. In slow-motion, bathed in purple light, she seethes at him, bends over, yells at him, then walks into her bedroom and closes the door. The vision of his mother represents what he is perhaps not yet conscious of, either, that needs the love and affection of his mother, who is unable to give it to him, or even to herself. Only later, in Act Three, after Chrion is able to confront his mother for her neglect, do we learn that what she was yelling: “Don’t look at me!”, after which Chiron immediately looks down, then looks up at her again. This act of defiance goes against the wishes of the person that he needs affection from, a conflicted desire and action that speaks to the way Chiron is in conflict with himself.

If Chiron’s dream in Act One is about affection, or emotional intimacy, the one in Act Two relates to growing understanding of his sexuality, and his need therein. In the dream, he walks out of his bedroom and into the backyard, in search of the sounds he is hearing, to discover his friend Kevin “banging the back out” of a girl, a personification of the tale Kevin had told Chiron about earlier that afternoon about why he was in detention. Chiron will dream about Kevin (Andre Holland) again, in Act Three, and though his reaction to it is sexual climax, the dream itself is not sexual, but a simple portrayal of Kevin smoking a cigarette outside his restaurant, world weary, and looking straight into the camera with consideration.

Chiron’s need for Kevin, at this point in his life, is a combination of his need for his mother in Act One and Kevin in Act Two. His relationship with his mother by now is severed. She loves him, but can’t take back what she did. She won’t be able to provide security for him now because she didn’t before. And although Kevin betrayed him, the memory of their intimacy remains, as does the hope for redemption and understanding. In Kevin, Chiron can perhaps find a more comprehensive intimacy, both sexual and emotional, which causes him to “get on one and just drive” down to Kevin’s restaurant in Miami.

In addition to Chiron’s evolving sexuality in each of the Three Acts, so does his understanding of himself with relation to race and masculinity. In Act One, Juan tells Chiron a story about growing up in Cuba, running around with his friends at night. His neighbor told him that under the moonlight, Juan’s black skin looked blue. “So that’s what I’ll call you: Blue,” she says to Juan. “Your name is blue?” Chiron asks? “Nah,” Juan says, smiling. Notice how Juan didn’t say that he thought his own skin looked blue, or that he or his friends thought each other’s skin looked blue (although he does not mention what race his Cuban friends are); it was an outsider, an adult that told him this. From her perspective, and in a certain “light,” Juan looked different to her than he looks to himself. Her perception of him didn’t change his perception of himself or the objective color of his skin. The same holds true for Chiron. Others might call him names — faggot, for example — or think he’s something that he’s not — Kevin challenging him about his chosen life of “Trappin’ — but, when it comes down to it, though Chiron needs other people in his life, in the way that we all do, he will have to discover who he is for himself.

Chiron is black, he is gay, he is a man. He is loved by his mother (Naomie Harris), but the damage she did to him in Act One happened and is a part of him. The closest thing he had to a father figure was Juan. This is a part of him, too. In the first scene of Act Three, we see a crown in the dashboard of Chiron’s car, a clear repetition of the crown in the dashboard of Juan’s car, shown in the first scene of Act One. Juan is a beacon of manhood to Chiron. Not only is Juan the only father figure that Chiron had — albeit a conflicted one — he is the person to whom Chiron first admitted his sexuality to. Juan has a blue car, Chiron a blue backpack. When Juan is teaching Chiron how to swim, he holds his head up in the ocean in fashion similar to baptism. Later in Act One, Chiron draws a bath with a humorous amount of blue dish soap. If Juan dipping Chiron into the ocean was Baptism, the bath is Confirmation, a sacrament that Chiron performs through his own will and his alone. He will wear this superficial film of manhood, the true nature of which he will only understand over time, the more his constructed self is stripped away, and the more he understands himself for who he really is.

Chiron’s emulation of Juan is a result of his life decisions, and restrictions both economic and educational, but it was also trying on the only lasting model of manhood that he encountered as a child. Chiron’s admission to Kevin in Act Three (“You’re the only man that every touched me. The only one.”) is a true act of vulnerability, a dropping of the guard he holds us as a drug dealer in Act Three, honestly speaking to his intimacy with and betrayal by Kevin in Act Two, and finally admitting to someone else what Chiron admitted to Juan in Act One. A lot hangs on that moment, which Kevin is aware of.

But before driving down to see Kevin in Act Three, and after talking to Kevin on the phone, Chiron makes a somewhat successful attempt to make peace with his mother. He then drives to Miami and arrives unannounced at Kevin’s restaurant. By this time, the details of which we will soon learn, Chiron has been released from jail after taking a chair to the high school bully that convinced Kevin to beat him up, and has built his way up on the streets of Atlanta dealing drugs. Chiron not only looks like a different person, he is a different person: new actor, new life, and a literal suit of armor that he uses to protect himself from others. He scopes out a deal going down with a gun by his side, and berates a worker under him for getting the count wrong, until finally ‘fessing up that, nah, the count is good, he was just fucking with him.

Andre Holland, who plays the adult Kevin, sat down for an interview with Brian Tallerico, a writer for RogerEbert.com, to discuss the film. Including this interview may seem to go against my original belief about the film as an end-to-end experience, and, indeed, I don’t intend to go off on a tangent about the history of black manhood in modern America. That’s a separate essay unto itself, or a separate lens through which to view this film. But Holland’s insight is important to understanding the film. He speaks to his own experience as a black man, an experience he brought with him to his portrayal of Kevin, and which Chiron is struggling with as well, the struggle to find a definite version of himself, but often finding himself middling between:

As a black man, I’ve always felt that we had to negotiate this very fine line. We’re brought up to be tough. Don’t cry. Man up. That stuff. But then you step out out into the street and the world tells you, “Well, don’t be too tough” because we’ve seen again and again that has very real ramifications. I think black men often get caught in this middle place. [5]

Throughout the film, and up until the end, Chiron is caught in this middle place. He has suffered the consequences of being too vulnerable in Act One and in the beginning of Act Two, and over corrects with a vengeful act against one of his bullies that lands him in jail, changing his life. At the beginning of Act Three, he has transformed into a hyper-masculine individual, a coping mechanism that helps him in his new life as a drug dealer, helped him in jail, and helps him deflect and try to compensate for the memories of his childhood. By the end of the film, Holland points out, Chiron is “trying to live a more authentic life. More vulnerable life,” which is seen in his willingness to reunite with Kevin in the hope that understanding their past interactions with each other will help him to understand how to get out of that “middle place” and choose to live on the side of the line and in a space that directly reflects Chiron’s true “authentic” self. This is the question the movie hinges on. And it’s not a small question. By investing in the character of Chiron, and employing the audience to do the same, the question of who Chiron was, who he is, and the man he will become is as incredibly intimate as it is emotionally resonate.

After Chiron sits at the counter of the restaurant, he and Kevin reunite, and it’s the second time that we see the vulnerability in the Act Three Chiron, the first when his mother told him that he didn’t have to love her, but she loved him. Kevin pokes fun at Chiron’s quiet nature, and we see the vulnerability in Chiron again. A lot is at stake in their reuniting. Kevin isn’t just an old friend or flame; he was the first man that Chiron had ever been with — the only one, as Chiron will later state — and who was coerced into beating up Chiron, an act that had irreversible consequences on Chiron, and which also weighs heavily on Kevin. And though Chiron can still prove to be shy around Kevin, he is first one willing to turn the conversation real: “Why’d you call me?” he asks, meaning, why did Kevin stir up this conflicted past, to what end, what were his intentions? It’s a past Chiron has been trying to forget, but will never get away from. His past is as much a part of him as it is a part of everyone. He has a crown on his dashboard, after all.

Kevin is just as baffled about Chiron. “Who is you?” he asks him. “I’m just me,” Chiron responds. “I’m not trying to be anyone else.” That’s all Chiron can be. In the “moonlight” of their history together, and from his outside perspective, Kevin might think that Chiron’s skin is blue; it’s black to Chiron. Chiron is stuck between his own two eyes, and cannot see the changes in himself in the same way that someone like Kevin or the audience can. The audience seen the snapshots of Chiron in three acts of his life, and his transformation therein, from the shyness of “Little,” to his boiling over as “Chiron”, to the now careful harness that he has on himself as “Black.”

At each stage Chiron has a different understanding of himself, the people around him, and how those two understandings should relate. His mother was there for each of these three acts, as well, and is the only person in his life who can penetrate the defense mechanisms that Chiron has put up to cope with himself and the world. Kevin has been there, too. Chiron bristles at Kevin confronting him about his life of drug dealing, after which Kevin stands up to tend to other customers of the restaurant, letting Chiron alone to eat. Chiron looks at the open door of the restaurant, and contemplates how easy it would be for him to walk through it and leave. But, whether he likes it or not (at this point he isn’t sure), he understands the role Kevin has played in his life, for better and for worse. They both made mistakes with how to understand and assert themselves in their specific culture of hetero-normative masculinity and both want redemption for what happened between them.

After returning with Kevin to Kevin’s house, and Chiron makes his confession to Kevin, they stare at each other. These are the final moments of “Moonlight: The film then cuts to an image of Chiron as a child, standing in the moonlight, facing the ocean. The last scene shows Kevin, cradling Chiron’s head against his chest, in a manner very similar to their interaction on the beach, though the scene ends, as does the film, before it becomes sexual. This is a conscious choice. The scene with “Little” Chiron standing in the moonlight is not one the audience has seen before, but is a representation of the story that Juan told him about standing in the moonlight as a child in Cuba. For Chiron’s entire life, he has struggling to determine who he is and what that meant, which has been based, in part, on what the other people in his life have been telling him, that, in the moonlight under which they saw Chiron, that he was different. In the last shot, Kevin will accept him in spite of these differences, and Chiron will accept Kevin in spite of their past, just as Chiron must accept himself in light of the boy that he was, the man that he is, and the man that he will become. The act of sex is a part of this understanding, but it’s the understanding that will allow him to finally accept his own sexuality.

Through the advice of people much smarter than me (A.O. Scott, Barry Jenkins, Andre Holland, etc) I have previously prescribed making the viewing experience of Moonlight about Chiron, and not about you. I was especially guilty, at first, of making the experience about me. I am, in part, guilty still. Like Chiron, who struggled to understand himself, I struggled to understand Chiron, because I’m not him, and because I don’t have first-hand experience with his life. Like Chiron, I have struggled to understand myself. I struggle still. It does not escape me that I am a white, privileged, heterosexual male writing about a movie that is about a protagonist that is black, marginalized, and gay. In many or most respects, I couldn’t be more different from Chiron, and yet my initial reaction was to say that Chiron’s story was my story, too. That it was a universal story. That notion is incorrect and offensive, to say the least. More correct would be to say that while I can’t connect with Chiron’s particular struggle, I can connect with the idea of struggling, and that I can connect with Chiron. And that I strive to view Moonlight through the correct lens.

Being the person that I am, and seeing what is such a new story, has shed light on race, masculinity, and sexuality that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about. It was the humanity of the characters that I connected to, which allowed me to understand their story, and Chiron’s, to the best of my ability. Chiron’s story is his and his alone, but Moonlight knows that by sharing his story, it is giving up this privacy in the hopes of understanding. This is not a task to be taken lightly. The film demands that we strive to see Chiron in the right light, just as Chiron has struggled to see himself in this way. Neither will succeed completely. But we’re trying.

[1] A.O. Scott The New York Times. “Moonlight: is This the Year’s Best Film?”

[2] Ibid.

[3] Wesley Morris The New York Times “The Striking Humanity of ‘Moonlight’”

[4] Zuckerman, Esther. The A.V. Club. Barry Jenkins on making the magnificent Moonlight.”

[5] Tallerico, Brian RogerEbert.com “Changing the Conversation: Andre Holland on ‘Moonlight’”

Works Cited

Morris, Wesley and Wortham, Jenna. “The Striking Humanity of ‘Moonlight.’” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/podcasts/the-striking-humanity-of- moonlight.html. 3 November 2016. Accessed January 15, 2017

Scott, A.O. “’Moonlight’: Is This the Year’s Best Movie?” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/movies/moonlight-review.html?_r=0. 20 October 2016. Accessed January 15, 2017

Tallerico, Brian. Interview with Andre Holland. “Changing the Conversation: Andre Holland on ‘Moonlight.’” Roger Ebert, http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/changing-the- conversation-andr%C3%A9-holland-on-moonlight. 01 November 2016. Accessed January 15, 2017.

Esther, Zuckerman. Interview with Barry Jenkins.“Barry Jenkins on Making the Magnificent Moonlight.” The A.V. Club http://www.avclub.com/article/barry-jenkins-making- magnificent-moonlight-244615. 24 October 2016. Accessed January 15, 2017.