Retrospective: "Moonlight" Remains Much More Than An Oscars Punchline

Barry Jenkins' modern masterpiece offers profound insight on race, sexuality, addiction, and how inescapable life's obstacles can feel.

Retrospective

Ian Scott

August 7, 2023

White America sees the inner city as rundown liquor stores, graffiti-covered markets, trash-filled streets, and men fitted with durags hiding Glocks beneath their sagging jeans, all locked in an urban jungle where drugs are king.

We know those communities are populated predominantly by racial and ethnic minorities. We also know that not every perspective on a city street is the same. We know there are issues, that some of that perception is accurate, but we also understand that we cannot judge a book by its cover.

The cover doesn't betray the book, but the content is a mixed bag that plays into human nature more than it alters it. We see what we want to see in the world. If we find validation, we seize it. If we do not, we feign ignorance. In many ways, the world is black and white to us all, not just in issues of race but also in compromise.

Inside the book of any city, many chapters are sorrows, and the joys are not as customary as in upper-class suburbia. But within every sorrow, in the words of those chapters, the ones that paint the cover and dictate our perspective, is humanity, the very thing that sparks change.

We know many things of demographics and differing perspectives, but we rarely accept a punishing truth: stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.

Bigots accept that, but in that vague interpretation where their existence explains the cause of their existence. It is the philosophy of those whose circumstances have always been favorable: no one is a product of circumstance.

Opportunistic liberals do not accept it. Acknowledging stereotypes' legitimacy shatters their worldview: denial is combat. Since their fight is noble, they are always victorious.

But stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. Behaving otherwise only compounds the problem.

White society has shunned adaptation. The differing lifestyles, perspectives, concepts, and ambitions they have gotten offered have faced summary execution, never granted even a hint of collective acceptance. Pockets of progressives embrace these evolving ideals, but majority is as majority does, and the majority does not favor the minority.

Rejection is the root of flamboyance. If we tell people they cannot have, they will want. They will seek but never find. When they get worn down by the lack of fruit their efforts bear, they will create. They will form their own communities, which will get based on everything they were not allowed to have.

If they seek inclusion in gated communities, they form a commune. If they want assimilation into a heteronormative society, they dance through the streets in rainbow underwear and leather chaps. If they desire to be judged not on the color of their skin but the content of their character, they reject everything it means to be the color that refuses to lend their character credence.

Stereotypes get born from rejection, exclusion, restriction, condemnation, and oppression. Everyone seeks to be higher than the other, to get less rejected, excluded, restricted, condemned, or oppressed. Everyone wants to succeed despite their oppression and serve a slice of their reality to someone else.

We cannot change nature overnight, and perhaps not at all, but to try, we must accept that punishing truth: stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.

Chiron, a Black boy in Miami, grows up with poor influences and developing sexuality he does not understand. He is poor and fatherless, with a drug-using mother and a drug-dealing mentor.

Everyone speaks how they speak and walks how they walk, following a path whose cause they may not appreciate but whose reality they must confront. Drugs will get dealt. Mothers will abandon. Everyone will have their handshakes and discuss their crimes as a casual swapping of stories.

This is the world; these are the people; this is how they interact and bond. It's what they know, but they do not experience the world in ways unfamiliar.

Chiron faces childhood as we do. He suffers the contradictions of comparing genitals by the same breed of people who hunt him for being “gay.” He gets ostracized for seemingly arbitrary reasons he cannot control. He learns to swim under Juan’s tutelage and grows to understand autonomy through their talks. He plays games in fields and struggles to fit in. He needs others to help him understand himself and show him the love and affection he cannot find within.

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But every moment gets influenced by his circumstances. Nothing is the same for him as it is for a white child of his age. His sexuality is more taboo, a struggle to embrace because he’s become accustomed to enduring. He suffers a distant, drug-addicted mother who makes him her child when she needs something and rejects him when she doesn’t. He grows up seeing no opportunity to become more than what his station allows. He must endure in solitude, reduced to an outcast among outcasts.

It matters that he is a Black boy in a Black world, but it matters more that he gets forced to confront his humanity as a Black boy in a Black world. We rarely shoulder our problems with forward action and swift resolution. We rarely will ourselves to that better tomorrow we see advertised on bumper stickers. We need each other. We can do our best and reach a certain point, but ultimately, we cannot entirely fix ourselves.

We need each other. We need shoulders to cry on and people to lean on. We need to believe that others can believe in us. We cannot be whole unless made of many parts. What can someone do when they do not have the means to bring themselves anywhere? How can a Black boy in a Black world fight to advance himself? We cannot always know. We do not always get resolution in life, only knowledge.

Moonlight always cuts before we see the end. When Chiron realizes what Juan does and that he’s done it for his mother, Juan cannot form the words to confirm it. We do not see him cry, declare, rationalize, or apologize. We do not see him flip a chair or go to Teresa for comfort. We only see Chiron rise from the table and leave as Juan breaks. We do not see the slow walk to the car after Kevin and Chiron share a sexual encounter on the beach, only the quick drop-off and the rushed farewell.

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We know these experiences mean something because they are our own. Chiron, though different from us in many ways, is a mirror. His life is a reflection: his journey makes us look inward as much as it forces us to look outward.

He is a familiar victim of a common trap. He is victimized, abandoned, misunderstood, and mistreated. He never gets the opportunities, sympathy from those who can affect his life, or a minute to breathe, save the moments he shares with Kevin in the moonlight.

Chiron only ever knows the depth of concepts. People are supposed to be one thing but become another. No one has shown him complexity, a layered view of humanity. When someone proves false, it is familiar. He will force Kevin to own his betrayal as he gets beaten, but when shown kindness by Teresa, it does not need to be more.

Moonlight’s power is balancing that humanity with the reality of who Chiron is and what he's facing. His beating by bullies is not a Black problem, nor is the principal’s instinct to punish the victim instead of encouraging them to seek help. But what good does it do to get help when his line of sight cannot extend beyond the hotbox house he lives in with a mother who uses him for money, past the secret he knows no one will accept?

Chiron’s bond with Juan, an older man taking a lost child under his wing, is not a Black experience, nor is the disappointing realization that Juan is flawed despite his kindness. But how is Chiron’s path to that same life not inevitable when his world walks him to it?

We can find humanity the way Chiron does as he and Kevin share their moment at the end. We can discover that belief in someone who can bring us the rest of the way. We can let ourselves go no matter how tightly the world has bound us and thus forced us to bind ourselves.

Moonlight's subject matter is heavy, but in respecting the path it strives to depict, it refuses to let a heavy hand overshadow its natural power. Chiron is a character that defies categorization because our empathy for his journey is universal. He is Black, gay, and ravaged by the struggles of living in a disenfranchised community, and the movie never forgets that. It simply remembers that defining someone by their circumstances flies in the face of everything it stands for as it cuts to black. Chiron’s life has promise.

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A movie can often make or break itself by its perception of promise. Many rely on syrupy conclusions or believe dreary endings have depth on principle. Moonlight knows life is a slow discovery, and everything we unveil can force us two steps back as easily as one step forward. Regardless of how long our journey takes, we will always reflect upon it as one of great truth, where we find a way to progress despite the obstacles. Even in regression, we inch closer; so long as the potential lies within, and we both accept and act upon it, a moment can come to mean a lifetime.

We cannot grow from placing everyone in boxes and demanding they subscribe to our preconceived notions. We cannot continue to lose children in the shuffle and blame them when they come of age and go down the wrong path. We cannot change by simply saying “Yes” or “No” to the reality we see based on our political views. We cannot chart a new course if we cannot understand what Moonlight makes clear as day.

We all know hardship and loss, disappointment and routine, kindness and brutality. We all know love and hatred. But we do not allow ourselves to accept that context creates more than will. We cannot experience life’s generalities in a ghetto, surrounded by drugs and violence, compounded by prejudice and bigotry, and thrive. We transition laterally. If we want to rise as one, we must afford opportunity; that only comes from acknowledging what Moonlight does: stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.