Moonlight

Juan tells “Little” Chiron that a little old lady nicknamed him Blue when she saw him among other boys fishing in the moonlight: 

"Running around, fishing in a boat of light. In moonlight, black boys look blue. You're blue. That's what I'm gonna call you: ‘Blue'."

But Juan rejects that name. He won’t be Blue. “At some point, you gotta decide for yourself who you're going to be. Can't let nobody make that decision for you.” Ironically, Juan refuses to be identified with a colour. But his life leads him into a Black stereotype nonetheless: the flashy drug dealer. 

As the title suggests, the film is about the blues of the black in America. Chiron grows from Little into Black, the nickname bestowed by the boy Kevin before they make love, by the water, in the moonlight. This scene apart, there is nothing romantic or radiant — the usual implications of moonlight — about the characters’ experience here. Moonlight is what turns the black boys blue, so it’s a paradoxical emblem for the black experience in America.

The film’s focus on black alienation and disenfranchisement makes the film seem like a parallel universe that occasionally intersects with ours. White characters are few and emblematic: a cop, the obese customers in Kevin’s greasy spoon, where the American flags are the only sign of America’s ideals, and ineffectual at that. In that key restaurant scene where Chiron and Kevin reconnect, the white customers act as if the blacks were invisible. Kevin treats his customers graciously — with no response whatsoever. One white man sits alone as if in his own bubble, not responding to anything, as bleak an existence as the blacks’. 

The very setting of the restaurant evokes the civil rights struggle, where a black man at a counter was a challenge to the social “order.” When Chiron enters he checks out the scene, then sits at the counter. Kevin moves him to a booth for his personal service. As a barometer of the African American’s place today the film reveals the races in desolate isolation from each other.  

Chiron and Kevin both pass through prison. But vertical bars are a constant motif in all the interiors, the houses, the school. Even the outside world is the black man’s prison. 

Food is another motif that unites the three stages in Chiron’s growth — the community and love expressed in cooking: the meals Juan and Teresa give the boy starved for affection; the meal the adult Kevin makes for the grown Chiron, rekindling their lost and furtive intimacy and love. In the intervening food scene, set in the school cafeteria, Chiron is fragile and alone and the brute Terrell prepares young Kevin to assault Chiron.

In the cafe later the Chef’s Special Kevin prepares for Chiron moves from the cafe to the bed. Whether they have sex or not is irrelevant. The two men achieve a rare openness and intimacy. Kevin phoned Chiron out of the blue because he had come to terms with himself and his life and felt the need to reach out to the friend he had betrayed. Chiron drives out to him but is reluctant to admit his motives:

Kevin: What man? Come on, you just drove down here?

Black: Yeah.

Kevin: Like you was just, you was just on one, and you hit the highway?

Black: Yeah.

Kevin: So where you gonna stay tonight man?

Having healed himself Kevin can now heal Chiron. The first step is self-awareness and self-acceptance. 

Kevin: Where's you Chiron?

Chiron: I'm me man. I ain't trying to be nothing else.

But the reticent Chiron is not himself until he drops his pretence to casualness. He tells Kevin he hasn’t touched or been touched by any one other than Kevin. The touching is emotional as well as physical. Now the massively muscled Chiron and the warm, generous Kevin finally find grace in each other’s arms. This blues song ends happily.

Significantly, the two men’s tenderness happens in Kevin’s rental near the water. Water scenes mark key turning points in Chiron’s life, mobilizing its association with the subconscious and the origin of life. Juan slips into a fatherly role when he teaches young Chiron to swim, to keep his head above water and advance. His sexual initiation by Kevin happens over a joint at oceanside.

Perhaps the film’s dominant theme is the mystery of manliness. In his boyhood Chiron doesn’t have a father, just a druggie mom bringing in strangers. Juan becomes his surrogate father. Though Juan would determine his identity for himself, rejecting the Blue nickname, he breaks down when Little Chiron rejects him: “Do you sell drugs?” We don’t see Juan again after he weeps at Chiron’s rejection. The teenage Chiron finds refuge in Teresa’s house, not Juan’s. She only refers to him when she recalls him giving the boy gin. When he’s neither mentioned nor seen again we infer Juan is another of those disappearing dads, perhaps a casualty of his drug trade. Juan has broken his promise: “Never let you go.”

Juan’s influence is clear when we meet the adult Chiron as Black, his nickname an echo of Juan’s rejected Blue. Chiron has grown into a Juan lookalike with his powerful build, the result of his jail time, his drug dealing empire, the black bandana, the diamond ear-rings and golden chains and silver teeth. At that vulgar flash many whites tend to sneer — but it's not unlike Donald Trump’s golden furniture and guilt-edged estate. Chiron has to remove the silver teeth to eat Kevin’s meal. The flash fails to nourish. Chiron’s essential choice is between the Juan’s flash and Kevin’s tenderness.

Juan seems sensitive to Little Chiron’s nature when the boy asks what a faggot is and if he might be one. “A faggot is a word used to make gay people feel bad.” Chiron will only later learn he is one. In the school scenes Terrell and others bully Chiron mercilessly because they read his “softness” as a lack of manliness. Young Kevin has learned to play the game, so he flaunts his hetero success to explain a detention and however reluctantly obeys Terrell’s orders to beat up Chiron. This after they’ve had sex. The film’s  climactic manliness is the tenderness when Kevin and Chiron meet again.

The last shot is of the boy Chiron facing the sea. After the man has found his better self, the image reminds us of the hapless boy still inside. Having looked out at the sea he turns back to look at us. The shot evokes the famous lost shot in Truffaut’s 400 Blows. There young Antoine Doinel looked out in fear and uncertainty at the ocean of dangers ahead for him. Here the boy Chiron has the new courage to face us.

But after so much suffering. The film’s representation of black life in America has a texture, emotion, empathy and dignity that make it a swan song of pre-Trump America.The astonishing quality of this film — the script, the direction, every single performance — expresses a commitment to our disadvantaged and excluded that the new Trump government seems determined to eradicate. The powerful performances — performances so strong we forget they’re actors playing roles; they seem like real lives on which we are eavesdropping — suggests the wealth of African American talent that we have left unheard, unseen, unconsidered. Like their community’s lives.

It’s not that the film is arriving too late. In fact it may be coming just in time to remind us that the best of America is far from what the new president and his racist appointees represent, indeed their polar opposite. These blues are a rallying cry for the opposition. It’s a loyal opposition but one properly loyal not to the vicious government but to the people, especially the marginalized, the downtrodden, the persecuted.