Moonlight (2016)'s Juan (Mahershala Ali) remembers running past an old Cuban lady when he was a little boy, and how she called out to him, "in moonlight, black boys look blue". This remark is applicable to the grittily honest coming-of-age film's representation of African-American youths. The depiction of black boys is refreshingly diversified from being stereotypically 'aggressive', or 'threatening'. As Moonlight engages with such issues as sexuality, identity, and drug addiction within the black community, the film teases out the simultaneous insecurities and senses of dejection, stagnation, and distress underlying the young black experience of Miami's Liberty City projects. This commitment to fully capturing multifarious identity is evident from the division of Moonlight into three separate acts. These acts are named 'Little', 'Chiron', and 'Black', in acknowledgement of the three different names by which the central character is known. Barry Jenkins' film as a unified whole is the sum total of these three refractions of his identity. In terms of the order of the acts, his actual name, Chiron, is bracketed by the two nicknames. This gestures to the inherent act of viewing, whereby we attempt to perceive the essence of the subject matter through the warped and imperfect lens of our perspectives.
As a subject, Chiron is constantly and elusively evolving during the course of the film. It's only the haunting stare of his dark and expressive eyes which is common to all transformations of the character throughout Moonlight. In 'Little', Chiron (Alex Hibbert) is first introduced as a lanky figure who runs into a derelict drugs den for refuge from a group of boys chasing him (the choice of this particular location prefigures his later descent into drug dealing). Once the boys have gone, drug-dealer Juan opens the door of the house and lifts a board from a window, literally and metaphorically forcing light into Chiron's world. Juan teaches Chiron how to swim and how to look out for himself and explains to him that at some point he must decide who he 'gotta be'. Juan and his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe), offer their home to Chiron as a haven composite of 'all love and all pride', away from the turbulence of the home Chiron occupies with his drug-addict mother (Naomie Harris). Just as the character of Chiron is amorphous throughout Moonlight, there is a sour erosion in the viewers' eyes of his mother's parental substantiality during the course of Moonlight. Chiron's mother first appears in the film revoking his TV privileges for his being late back home. Later on in the film she later pesters him for drugs money and eventually features as a figure that haunts his dreams, even as a grown man. In the next act, Chiron (Ashton Sanders) establishes a meaningful connection with schoolmate Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), but this is soon derailed by troublemaker Terrel (Patrick Decile). The next time Kevin (André Holland) and Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) meet in 'Black', Chiron has emerged from the cocoon of incarceration into a reincarnation of Juan, a gangster and drug dealer with gold grills on his teeth. 'That ain't you, Chiron', Kevin ends up saying, placing his seal of disapproval on the inauthenticity of this remodelling. But the intentionality behind Chiron's self-recasting cannot be doubted. Before Chiron commits the act that lands him in prison and at the very start of 'Black', he plunges his face into a sink of icy water and looks intently at himself in a mirror. This lends the sense that this gangster into which he has 'built' himself is who he has decided he has 'gotta be'.
In the middle of the film, Chiron admits that he '[cries] so much sometimes' that he feels as though he will turn into drops. This ideation of Chiron turning into water aligns him with water; it is because of Chiron's latency of emotions that these emotions are subconsciously disseminated through the use of the element of water in the film. The subtly and gently varying shades of blue from sea to sky in the water scenes are in stark contrast to the over saturated colour palette of the rest of the film. Moonlight begins with the sound of waves washing up on a beach, and in 'Black', after Chiron and his mother have been reconciled, the idyllic scene of children splashing about in waves faintly appears on the screen. It is by the waves that Chiron's longings find their completion for the first time. Kevin notices how the sea breeze forces a moment of still as it sometimes 'just [comes] through the hood', 'everything [stops] for a second' and 'everyone just gets quiet'. This is a hushed moment of cessation in their fast-paced heteronormative surroundings in which Chiron is able to experience a pure moment of self-awareness, as he whispers back to Kevin how in that still 'all you can hear is your own heartbeat'.
The similarly precious territory of light evoked by the title of Yuko Tshushima's novel (trans. Geraldine Harcourt) is a flat on the fourth floor of a 'dilapidated office building...on a three-way intersection'. The novel's single mother narrator waxes lyrical about how 'the apartment [is] filled with light any hour of the day'. This light is variantly 'dazzling', 'dancing', '[pulsing]', 'suffocating', '[suffusing]', '[blazing]', and '[bathing]'. The speaker admits how initially the fact that name of the building is her married name, Fujino, was significant for her as a way of maintaining some sort of connection with her estranged husband. Yet, later on this coincidence comes to signify that she and the building are almost one, so deeply attached to the extent that the speaker's 'warmth of body' permeates its vacant rooms at nighttime after its shop workers have gone home.
The concept of connection is significant for the speaker of Territory of Light - the event of her arrival into the world was linked to her father's departure from it. The speaker explains how she came into the world 'at more or less the same time' as her father died. The shadow of Tshushima's father's suicide when she was just a one-year-old tinges this somewhat autobiographical book with invocations of death and suicide. In the speaker's dreams, her father cannot have a 'living body', though, as this kind of tangibility would be to '[yield] that which was most precious to the living' to the dead. Those dreams of her father are laden with the mingling emotions of 'fear and joy', an 'overpowering sensation of spiralling down into darkness' mixed with an apprehension, too, of an 'inaccessible warmth and softness'. One of the novel's chapters is titled 'The Sound of a Voice' which is suggestive of distance and disembodiment. The narrator reveals that she '[wants]' the company of others. She describes herself and a stranger on a train who falls asleep on her shoulder with the intimate simile, 'in a twosome like a mother and child'. The palpability of human beings is foregrounded in the novel by the speaker referring to them as 'flesh-and-blood' people. Whilst the narrator disproves of the character Sugiyama's wealth and privilege, she appreciates his solidity, commenting on how his fat body 'feels very nice'. Rather than being an arbitrary, stand-alone event, the speaker postulates that the onset of her daughter's nightly crying spells are 'surely related' to the day in which she slapped Fujino on the cheek. She feels culpability for a suicide on a railway and connects her pattern of tardiness to the tragedy. Her sense of involvement with the 'mangled and bloodied' body is typified in the sibilance joining the 'silver-suited' attendant medical crew and her 'shivering' self. The origami pieces her daughter drops from a window in their apartment to a roof below ends up foreshadowing how a boy in her daughter's daycare will soon fall to his death from the tenth floor of an apartment building. The sound of a water leak on the rooftop permeates the speaker's dreams, as she imagines herself 'nestled in a sense of moisture', with the 'gentle, distant' sound of water '[lapping] about [her] ears'.
When the speaker first refers to her husband in chapter one, the delayed subject entry emphasises how disconnected they are, as she alludes to 'the man who at the time was still my husband'. The speaker explains how 'when we were together, I'd depended on Fujino to hold me up'. By contrast, the speaker is now only in possession of not even her husband's new address, but rather the phone number of a restaurant at which he only works part time. She tries to 'summon' Fujino like a ghost for mediation meetings and 'non-committantly' listens to the memories her daughter has of her father which are recalled to her 'as if describing someone her mother wouldn't know'. In time, the speaker comes to disassociate 'the husband [she] used to have and Fujino as he was now'. He appears at her light-filled flat as an undefined and anonymous 'dark shadow'. The speaker represents her new life to the reader, 'an invisible, rickety, misshapen mass' that '[keeps] its precarious balance' whilst 'sending out roots that only [her] eyes could see'. Many of the characters in the novel coercively attempt to direct the speaker as to how she should sculpt this 'unstable object'. They tell her to 'think...over' the divorce 'carefully' and not to 'split up over some silly thing' and they tell her how she is 'taking an awful lot for granted'.
The speaker brazenly discloses how sometimes she feels like 'shouting vile abuse' at her daughter or 'smothering' her out of frustration. Territory of Light's twelve chapters do not omit typical mundane domestic situational matters, like sorting out a child's birthday party, wanting to have a lie in, bedwetting, and catching the flu. The novel was originally published in twelve monthly instalments in the Japanese literary magazine Gunzo from 1978-9, true to life all chronicling a year in the speaker's life. Yet, there is beauty and warmth in this intricately-woven, unembellished novel. The speaker describes how she and her daughter seek to 'find joy in the other'. She lovingly intimates that her daughter's 'daily joy intake ought to leave her so knocked out that she would sleep soundly at night', and that 'no chance to offer her moments of joy [seem] too small' on her part.
heartbeats
With thanks to https://www.goodreads.com/ and https://www.theatlantic.com/ for the images which I spliced together.
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