Moonlight knows how to boil water
Tea kettles are woefully obvious. You’ll notice them, often, when a character grows emotional, heading towards some tipping point, at which point she will finally, cathartically make a decision or break a silence or be catalyzed into taking an action. Meanwhile, what’s that in the background, rising in volume and pitch? What’s that, first hissing, then whistling, and now screaming as a thick, heavy scene inevitably breaks towards resolution? It’s a weirdly literal manifestation of pressure mounting and being released. It’s an obnoxiously rotund noise-monger proudly doing at least half of the work that actors are supposed to do. It’s a dumb tea kettle.
So, in the last scene of the last act of Moonlight, when director Barry Jenkins goes out of his way to show that Kevin, one of a few satellites orbiting the polyonymous protagonist, boils water for tea not in a kettle but in an open pot, we can read that decision a few different ways. We quickly glean that Jenkins trusts his actors to communicate the scene’s affect (and rightly so — god damn this cast put in some good work) and trusts the audience to pick up on those actors’ finely tuned posturing. Structure and performance are Moonlight’s rhetorical tools of choice. But then, if that’s the reasoning behind the no-kettle decision, why bother showing the pot? Why linger on it? Jenkins could have saved time by letting that water boil in our subconscious, if that’s all there was to it. Instead, he plopped that pot down in the center of the frame and fired up the stove.
And then we, enlightened and mature in the habit of interpretation, think to ourselves while scratching our chins and nodding slowly, “maybe… this is symbolism?” Do me a favor: take seven minutes and watch some water boil in a pot. Then keep reading if you don’t hate this whole thing yet.
I’m sure you noticed, if you paid attention (as I hope you did), that that took a while. With nothing blocking the flow of air, a combination of evaporation and convection transfer considerable heat away from the water, which heat loss causes a slower transition from liquid to gas than would occur in, say, a kettle. In other words, use of an open pot leads to a gradual, pressure-free conversion of water into vapor. No pressure, no shriek, no heightened tension in the containing scene.
Which is exactly why this pot-boiling business is such a clever trick on Jenkins’ part, and not just a sign that the director finds a whistling kettle to be an annoying distraction. Boiling itself is a state change, so it makes sense that it would often signify a narrative change in state. Just as kettles use the transformation from liquid to gas to create pressure and noise, they coincide with changes from annoyance to anger or from indecision to certainty — more generally, from passivity to activity. So when Chiron is invited into Kevin’s apartment after years without communication and isn’t so much transforming under pressure as he is shifting timidly between identities in a warm and open environment, a pot’s boil seems more apt than a kettle’s. When he finally confesses, “You’re the only man that ever touched me,” there is no pressure behind it, no building tension forcing him forward. Just his choice after an entire evening spent testing his comfort and the bounds of a complicated relationship.
This scene is significant not because it’s a unique moment in Moonlight, but because it typifies the film’s treatment of Chiron’s growth. With an obvious, chair-swinging exception in the middle, Chiron’s journey is a thoughtful one pointed generally in the direction of self-understanding. In the end we come back to a platitude (“At some point you gotta decide for yourself who you gonna be.”) and a question without an easy answer (“Who is you, Chiron?”). But instead of anxiety, Jenkins gives us peace, playfulness, and hope. He gives us patience through suffering, steadfastness amidst discrimination, joy in confusion. Difficulty abounds for Chiron, and his self-discovery is slow work. But in the slowness is a quietness, and in the quietness a maturity both formal and narrative.
Where conflict would have been easy, Moonlight strives for steadiness. Tension, disagreement, a screaming match — any film could have thrown these at us and provided a satisfying resolution. But that isn’t how adulthood happens. That isn’t how a personality forms, and that isn’t how relationships grow. Moonlight is special because it lets Chiron breathe. Jenkins does his character, not to mention the actors who played him, a great service by giving him the opportunity to decide who he will become and to do so on his own time. Moonlight is the best film of 2016 because it lets its water boil in a pot.
