Berry Jenkins’ Moonlight chronicles an African-American’s journey in learning how to authentically answer a question reiterated throughout the film, “Who is [sic] you?” The film is divided into three parts giving us portions of Chiron’s childhood, teenage, and adult lives wherein he struggles to find the space and encouragement to process how his sexuality fits into the categories of masculinity which his African-American community provides him with.
In the first chapter, entitled “Little,” a reticent nine-year-old Chiron (Alex Hibbert) is rescued from a gang of bullies by a local crack dealer, Juan, who takes on the role of surrogate father to Chiron. Juan, adroitly portrayed by Mahershala Ali, doesn’t attempt to raise Chiron “in the business” or introduce him into “Black manhood.” Instead he lavishes hospitality on Chiron by taking him out to eat and bringing him into his home to share in delicious comfort foods and conversation with him and his girlfriend, Teresa (Jeanelle Monae). During these tender dinner talks, Chiron (or Little as his “friends” call him) unpacks his confusion over why the kids at school and his mother (Naomie Harris), who is becoming addicted to crack, mock him. When Little asks if he is gay, Juan replies, “You don’t have to know right now,” and, “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
This conversation about identity develops even further when Juan teaches Little how to swim at a local beach, which looks and feels more like a baptism given the way the scene’s numinous score overpowers the dialogue and the way Juan cradles Chiron in the water. After this ceremonious moment, Juan shares a story about his childhood in Cuba when an elderly woman nicknamed him Blue because his skin looked blue when he ran in the moonlight Little responds by asking, “Is that your name?” To which Juan laughs and says, “No. There’ll come a time when you have to decide who you want to be, and you don’t let no one else decide that for you.”
It is this approach to identity-formation that Little steps into as Moonlight moves into its next chapter “Chiron.” However, between the physical abuse and taunting of his peers and the overbearing love and codependency of his mother, there is little space for Chiron to decide, let alone discern his identity. Despite finding mutual understanding from and romantic connection with his friend Kevin (Jaden Piner), who has learned to conceal his bisexuality behind the typical machismo front, Chiron is forced to mimic his male peers and takes on an identity that leads him into the same vocation as his surrogate father. In the third chapter, “Black,” Chiron (Ashton Sanders) reconnects with Kevin (André Holland), and in Kevin’s presence, Chiron’s hard front dissipates revealing that he is still the timid “Little” searching to answer the question poignantly asked by Kevin, “Who is [sic] you Chiron?”
Moonlight is an artfully told story that both critiques and subverts Hollywood’s racially stereotyped portrayals of African-Americans in low income communities. Where we expect to find violence and apathy in Juan’s character we find gentle resolve and fatherly concern. Instead of providing us with a colorless and banal cinematic exploration into sexual identity, Moonlight offers a refreshingly dynamic and deeply contextual story on what it means to be black and gay. Its authenticity refuses to offer oversimplifications, yet its dynamism leaves filmgoers with hope.
You can either perceive Chiron’s journey as a fraught attempt to assert his gay identity in his community, or, as a story that suggests, as an assertion that his attempt to decide who he wants to be on his own is not enough for him to establish his self. Coming from a relationally dependent or, better, an interdependent model of anthropology, Miroslav Volf answers that genuine self-discovery is a repeated and contextual act of embrace between the self and the other. We need an open, loving community that is willing to embrace the “other” and we also need to have a willingness to be open to that community in order to understand ourselves and find fulfilling relationships. Without community, we will neither find affirmation for who we already believe ourselves to be nor discover who we can be; also, without embracing the other(s) in our life, we will never come to relationally understand the other, which usually engenders fear or hate of the other.
We begin to see something like this in the early stages of the film when Jaun and Teresa make space for Chiron and wait on him to reciprocate that openness. However, there is not enough open community in Chiron’s childhood to make that much of difference. When his mother begins to give Chiron more attention in the second chapter of the film, the love is overbearing and only colonizes Chiron’s identity, making it what she needs from him. His high school peers won’t accept Chiron’s otherness, and, as almost if they are threatened by it, coerce Chiron to repress that part of himself.
As Volf writes, to open ourselves up is “a herald of non-self-sufficiency and non-self-enclosure, open arms suggest the pain of the other’s absence and the joy of the other’s anticipated presence” and in the embrace “the identity of the self is both preserved and transformed, and the alterity of the other is both affirmed as alterity and partly received into the ever changing identity of the self.” (143) Perhaps the final image of Chiron in Kevin’s arms alludes to this reality providing our racist and homophobic society example of what we could be.