‘Moonlight’, ‘La La Land,’ And The Human Condition
For the past few years, there has been mutterings (and if you’re Steven Soderbergh, loud shouts) that film and its industry is dying. Or it is already dead. There were plenty of large blockbuster flops to serve as evidence of these mutterings. As the 2017 Oscars draw closer however, it is starting to appear that film is being revived with answers to a very basic question.
What makes us human?
While last year’s highest critically ranked films featured scathing criticisms of human flaws like greed (The Big Short, Mad Max: Fury Road) lust (Spotlight) and vengeance (The Revenant), this year looks like the opposite. This year’s best films are shaping to be deep explorations into not just our triumphs or failures, but instead the questions we ask to get us there.
At the moment, two films have captured the most awards and attention from 2016, and they too are interested in our human questions. Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight and Damien Chazelle’s La La Land explore our aspirations, our questions of identity, and most importantly, how we deal with the paradox of loneliness in a world full of people.
While La La Land was always destined to be about dreams and aspirations — any story set in Los Angeles seems to carry that burden — it is when Ryan Gosling begins his solo version of “City of Stars” that the film deeply reaches into the agony that comes with following your dreams and your passions.
“Who knows, is this the start of something new? Or one more dream that I cannot make true?” is the part of the lyrics of the song that reverberates the most in Gosling’s voice, and across the entire film itself.
Besides the rather melancholic notes of the song itself, Gosling manages to capture the futility that seems to only plague humans because we are aware of our mortality. In a very basic way, Gosling is portraying Sebastian’s feeling of futility about his dream of opening up a jazz club. The fact that Sebastian can even imagine a life beyond the basics of survival is one of the defining characteristics of humans. More importantly though, it is through La La Land that audiences are reminded of the things we sacrifice when we decide that there’s something more to life than survival. You see the sacrifice in various places across the film, but most poignantly in what both Gosling and Stone choose in the end when faced with, seemingly, the ultimate sacrifice.
Barry Jenkins is concerned with a more visceral, and perhaps more complex, understanding of humanity’s ability to dream of the future. In Moonlight, it seems that the film’s protagonist Chiron (played by Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes) dreams of nothing beyond survival because his basic survival is often under threat. That is inherently the real tragedy buried in Moonlight. While the characters in the world of La La Land are dreaming of bright lights, and cities full of stars, Chiron simply wants to get through the day without starving or being assaulted. Beyond this tragedy though, Jenkins dives even deeper into the psyche of the human ability to dream by examining different phases of Chiron’s life. Instead of seeing an adult transformation of thought, the audience gets to the totality of the experience of how children dream, how teens can dream, and how adults learn and look back on those dreams. We see not just sacrifices for dreams, but also admissions, adjustments, and worse, how dreams can die in single instances.
The question of deciding what to do with our lives is often tied to questions about who we think we are. Again, both La La Land and Moonlight pose the question in their protagonists. Emma Stone is perhaps the highlight in La La Land as at some point she questions her entire existence as a person because of her seemingly failed acting career. This is paralleled with her earlier conversation in the film where she answers the question of “What do you do” by mentioning her job at the coffee shop instead of saying she’s an actress. While there may be some argument about screen time, it is clear that it is Stone’s character Mia who is driving the plot of the story. As such, Mia’s through-line is the essential investigation of questions about our personality. Mia spends the duration of the film questioning her authenticity — is she really an actress? Is she really meant to do this? In some ways, Gosling’s Sebastian remains personality-wise the same — he still loudly honks his horn to summon Mia out of her home for an audition even after it appears things might not go the way he wants them to. Mia, however, becomes the person she has seemingly always wanted to be, even if it costs her the very same thing that she loved.
On the more tragic side of humanity, Moonlight follows Chiron’s ultimate suppression of who he is into what he believes he can be. From the very beginning, Chiron is punished for self-expression by nearly everyone except for his father-figure Juan (played by Mahershala Ali) and mother-figure Teresa (played by Janelle Monae). The continued damnation ultimately results in the last chapter of the film where Chiron has taken on the identity of “Black,” who resembles Juan in nearly every fundamental way. Chiron’s suppressed sexual identity clashes visually with his desire to be just like Juan in one of the last scenes of the film. It is the moment when Chiron (played excellently in this chapter by Trevante Rhodes) is forced to take out his grills and slowly be vulnerable with his childhood friend (and perhaps first and only romantic encounter in his lifetime). It is in this moment that despite having the armor that Juan often touted, he’s still a shy and awkward man who is afraid of making any declarations about himself in fear of the demonization he often suffered. Most importantly though, it is here that Moonlight presents the complex ways in which humans are forced to reconcile with who they truly are and who they try to be. It is slightly obscured in La La Land by the music and the drive toward a truly achievable dream. In Moonlight, Chiron must reconcile his identity with dire consequences on both sides.
In exploring the human condition, romance and loneliness are concepts that are perhaps more necessary than anything else. After all, loneliness seems to be both programmed into and simultaneously avoided by most of humanity. Both La La Land and Moonlight have deceptively happy endings. A better description for La La Land is bittersweet. The film portrays the possibilities of Mia and Sebastian’s life together like it is just as important as the realities of their dreams that pulled them apart. The movie’s investigation of loneliness and how we relate to other humans is perhaps best captured in the duet version of “City of Stars” in which Stone and Gosling both celebrate how them finding each other shows they can also achieve their dreams. There has always been the biological necessity for certain aspects of romance, but over the course of evolution, it seems that there was also born a psychological drive away from loneliness. This is best depicted in Emma Stone’s breathy singing of the line “It’s love. All we’re looking for is love.” In that moment, (and somewhat in the results of the film), you get a true sense of how at the very least — both characters are always actively seeking to end their loneliness. Mia has her roommates and then Sebastian, and then her future husband. Sebastian has his sister, and also his jazz community.
On the other side however, Chiron seems to be lonely even in the face of the unconditional love from Juan and Teresa. Part of that loneliness comes from understanding. In La La Land, Mia and Sebastian can bond over their similar desires for impossible dreams. Moonlight, however, features Chiron in a world where almost no one can quite dive deep enough into his internal and external life to truly connect to him. Even his relationship (or the possibility of one) with Kevin is tainted by perhaps the most traumatically authentic scene of the film. That scene features a disorienting assault of Chiron, forced onto Kevin by a school bully.
The desire for connection however never seems lost by Chiron across all three chapters of the film, suggesting that despite everything, Chiron indeed wants love. When he’s “Little,” he retreats to the care of Juan. When he’s a teen, he attempts to reach out to Kevin and Teresa. Finally, even after life seemed to assault Chiron on all fronts, he still made the choice to drive to see Kevin. The final scene in Moonlight ultimately depicts Chiron’s unwavering desire for love and acceptance — even in the face of all the events that could have made him forever closed off. Ultimately, the beauty of Moonlight is Chiron’s complex experience of love and loneliness. Everything that happens would seemingly make others never desire to be close to another human being again. Chiron however shows us the beauty of humanity — our willingness to love in the face of tragedy.
The future of Hollywood cinema will likely still contain blockbusters and spectacles. The boundaries of what is technically possible will continue to be pushed, but it is stories like La La Land and Moonlight that will almost always capture the hearts of audiences on the most human of levels.
