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On a podcast I recorded, the actor Mark Duplass said that one reason he was glad to be a new member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was so he could support “a movie like Moonlight,” which was scheduled for release in a few weeks. I hadn’t seen Moonlight, though Duplass, who is white and straight and liberal, seemed to echo a sentiment I’d picked up on social media, which already was supporting the movie unequivocally without many of its champions having seen it. A friend of mine, a black entertainment lawyer in Hollywood, hadn’t seen Moonlight either, but as he sat down to dinner with me the night before it opened his excitement at seeing a big indie drama whose leading character was a queer black male was palpable. His blind enthusiasm reminded me of a heated debate we’d had over Ryan Coogler’s 2013 movie Fruitvale Station. Aesthetically, I thought that film was sentimental—the point of it seemed to be everywhere, and there was an earnestness built into the retelling of this tragedy that made it the Sundance equivalent of a snuff movie about fate. Actually our positions weren’t that far apart when looking at Fruitvale Station on an aesthetic level. His taste, like mine, runs to the grand flourishes that the cinema can offer and, like me, he prefers genre movies. But he admitted that Fruitvale Station had shaken him to the core because he so rarely saw a movie where a young handsome black man was just trying to get by and having to deal with all the hassles and burdens of just being black. So he found the final sequences of Fruitvale Station, when the protagonist, Oscar Grant, is casually shot and killed, completely overwhelming. Not necessarily because this was an artistically accomplished film, but because he could—even from his different class and background—relate to Grant and feel that a part of his own story was being told, and he couldn’t stop choking up the day after he’d seen the movie. When he described this reaction, I began to see Fruitvale Station through his eyes. While the movie wasn’t for me, I could understand how, apart from its aesthetics, my friend could be affected by it. I finally realized he’d had a similar experience to the one I’d had with Weekend, a movie that also ends on a train platform.
The difference, for me, was that I’d found the aesthetics of Weekend stronger: it was more understated, more neutral, its compositions more cinematic, the protagonists’ innocence and victimization wasn’t overly stressed, and the only thing they were victimized by was loneliness—and yes, they were also white. On social media people who rejected my reservations about Fruitvale Station seemed to suggest I should like it no matter what, hinting, in fact, that I was camouflaging my racism by quarreling about the aesthetics of the movie—which, considering its budget and ambitions, aren’t by any means bad. And though I recognize that my aesthetic preferences, like everyone’s, were created within the context of my own upbringing, they also rely on a set of criteria that don’t answer exclusively to victimhood. But these social media critics wanted to imply that my whiteness was an ideological error, that my comfortable unawareness was an indisputable problem, yet I’d argue that living without a direct experience of poverty or state-sponsored violence, growing up without ever being presumed a guaranteed threat in public places and never facing an existence where protection is hard to come by don’t equate to a lack of empathy, judgment, or understanding on my part and don’t rightly and automatically demand my silence. But this is an age that judges everybody so harshly through the lens of identity politics that if you resist the threatening groupthink of “progressive ideology,” which proposes universal inclusivity except for those who dare to ask any questions, you’re somehow fucked. Everyone has to be the same, and have the same reactions to any given work of art, or movement or idea, and if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or a misogynist. This is what happens to a culture when it no longer cares about art.
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When did people start identifying so relentlessly with victims, and when did the victim’s worldview become the lens through which we began to look at everything? Why was Moonlight so inordinately drawn to the character Chiron, whom we see at three different stages of his life over the course of the movie: child, adolescent and man, each in a separate section? Because, born poor to a drug-addicted mother and an absent father, he’s a victim all the way through—and so here we are in American indie movies’ favorite scenario. The movie asks us to endure Chiron’s pain without offering us much of anything else. There’s nothing particularly interesting or admirable about Chiron, so the only thing at stake is his sadness and pain. He’s not into anything—not music or poetry or comic books—and is simply a cipher. And because of this Moonlight seems to like its bullying scenes, climaxing when Chiron gets beat up by a schoolmate, most of all, and this is when the movie becomes active instead of passive and Barry Jenkins is strongest and most direct as a filmmaker. The movie is an elegy to pain, bursting with one feel-bad moment after another, a litany of rejections. Movies have always depicted suffering, of course, but there’s a new kind of suffering that contemporary audiences are enthralled by, and seem to overidentify with, and that’s suffering caused by victimization. Sometimes Jenkins doesn’t make a big deal out of this and that’s when Moonlight works best—as visual mosaic, casual and loose. At other times the violins and cellos and oboes start swooning over the soundtrack to signal a more aspirational and high-minded movie, and sometimes the movie feels too pristinely well-intentioned, wanting you to admire its style and good taste, and yet it badly needs more humor, more lightness, more sexual flash. The whole experience is dour and downbeat, and it fails to understand that those two distinct styles could coexist, or that we’d be more interested in Chiron if there was a fighter in him. But the movie has little interest in making him a stronger character. Chiron’s mostly an enigma and Moonlight is curiously fascinated with him as a chaste, beautiful, sad-eyed angel.
This chasteness reveals a hetero sensibility at work in Moonlight, specifically in relation to how gay male desire is portrayed. Not that Moonlight needed to go all Gregg Araki but the movie has no sexual heat, and apart from the bullying it sidesteps scenes by overstylizing them for fear they might be too upsetting for an audience. When Chiron’s mother screams at him as a little boy and calls him a “faggot” we don’t hear the word, but only lip-read it, and the scene is further stylized by playing in slow motion with music ladled over it, and this distance lessens our experience of his pain, and the scene seems evasive, as if this primal gay-boy-versus-mother scene is something the straight filmmaker simply didn’t comprehend. A group of schoolboys gather together and compare dick size—yet the scene goes nowhere. Of course you could argue that’s just the movie’s style: elliptical and noncommittal. But many opportunities to depict gay desire are missed, as others are elsewhere in what turns out to be a very mild movie. Moonlight makes it easy for certain straight and black audiences to respond to it by removing actual gay sex from the equation, and this bargain comes at a high price aesthetically.
I think this is why some audiences outside of the liberal Hollywood bubble apparently laughed at the movie. A few weeks after it opened, E. Alex Jung posted a piece on Vulture called “The Sad, Surreal Experience of Seeing an Audience Laugh at Moonlight.” The writer cited the differences between watching the movie at a press screening, and then seeing it again with the public at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on a packed Friday night, and taking that audience to task for rejecting certain scenes and laughing at how some of them portrayed sexuality (or didn’t). The writer was stunned, but I don’t think the paying audience was wrong—this was their genuine reaction and if this seemed “sad” and “surreal” to the Vulture writer, obviously hoping the audience would conform to an ideology rather than respond to the film’s aesthetics, then Jung had an out-of-touch bias against that audience. Why shouldn’t a section of the paying audience feel however they want, or laugh whenever they like, at a movie that approaches everything evasively, or with such solemnity that they can’t help but giggle at its self-seriousness and unwill
ingness to be up-front about shit? In the beach scene involving the teenaged Chiron and his classmate Kevin, the movie slows down and there’s half a kiss—no tongue, skin, flesh, reciprocation—while Kevin gives Chiron a hand job. No matter how damaged and passive Chiron might be, this could have provided him, and the movie itself, with a chance to explode with awkward passion. And this might have scared Kevin, who we have assumed was straight until now, and laid the groundwork for the severe beating that comes later, which after two viewings, still makes no dramatic sense—only that the movie wants to show Chiron getting the shit beat out of him, and therefore continuing his victim narrative.
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When we finally meet Chiron as an adult in the third section, it’s ten years later, he’s a somewhat successful drug dealer, yet he’s almost as mute and sullen and inexpressive as he was when we last saw him. Wouldn’t it have been a more “progressive” view if Chiron had defeated his old victimized self, if this big and beautiful black guy by then could have easily found physical intimacy and perhaps affection and maybe even love on the down-low? Maybe dissatisfied or unhappy, but that would have constituted a dramatic progression and an ideological triumph. Instead he’s just a man-child who hasn’t had sex since getting jerked off on that beach years before, and Moonlight wants us to believe the most chaste hand job in the history of movies had stunted this stud into celibacy. (If the boys had given each other blow jobs, I doubt the movie would have been as wildly acclaimed by the entertainment press, or won the Academy Award for Best Picture.) This is a literary conceit: the hand job that could never be forgotten. That the grown-up Chiron wouldn’t, on the down-low, be satisfying his desires is also a literary fantasy—but this is part of the sullenness of the movie and underlies its basic conservatism as well, how proud it is of its values and what it represents, an Oprah experience. The movie’s pulling punches, and I found it all slightly maddening: the scene in which the adult Chiron has a wet dream is caused by a brief montage of Kevin smoking a cigarette; maybe if it were the younger Kevin it might make sense, but since Chiron hasn’t even seen the older Kevin at this point you wonder whom he’s dreaming about. According to Vulture, audiences laughed at this sequence, too. As a gay man, something feels off to me about the chaste ending when Chiron goes back to Kevin’s house after the reunion at the restaurant and then nothing happens. Forget sex, what about a kiss? No, instead of sex we get…a hug. When asked about this, Barry Jenkins said that what Chiron needs is “affection,” not sex. Well, so the question becomes: Can’t he have both? Aren’t the two intertwined? Jenkin’s answer is a straight man’s answer, not a gay man’s answer, and that’s why the movie feels lopsided.
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Certainly the entertainment press and a portion of the audience responded to Moonlight as a Black Lives Matter movie, and the strong, vibrant black bodies of the adult Chiron and the kindly, saintly drug dealer Juan, who took care of Chiron as a child, seemed to them a defiant rebuke to the endless parade of lifeless bodies of black men that we had seen in the media coverage of shooting after shooting. With so many black men having been killed that year, one understands the enormity of the weight that was placed on Moonlight’s fragile shoulders in that moment. Moonlight portrayed a different kind of man, one we hadn’t seen in movies (like Russell and Glen in Weekend, for some of us), and many saw this as new and something to be celebrated. To some extent it was, just as Weekend was, but—on both aesthetic and ideological grounds—is replacing the thug with the oversensitive and victimized man-boy a sign of progress? The movie seemed almost like it was created to be idealized by our current media culture and by liberal Hollywood’s fake-woke corporate culture. Chiron isn’t difficult, he’s not messy, and he’s presented as being as squeamish about gay sex as the straight men in the audience perhaps are. The main character’s rarity may have given the film something of a free pass, which allowed the media to overrate it, but it’s strange to see Moonlight proclaimed—briefly, for maybe a year or two until revisionists take aim—a masterpiece. On one level, Moonlight is the kind of story that needs to be told yet the overprotective reaction to it (as the Vulture piece highlighted) could, of course, be seen as condescending as well.
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A few years ago when a viewer complained to Shonda Rhimes, a top TV producer and showrunner, that there was too much gay sex on certain series she had created, Rhimes shot back, wagging her finger, that what people were seeing was not “gay sex” but simply “sex.” Some of us scratched our heads—it was? As a man not neutered by his sexuality, when I look for pornography online I’m not typing in “sex,” I’m typing in “gaytube,” “gay porn,” “gayxxx,” gay whatever. I understood what Rhimes was going for, but this notion that all sex is the same and we shouldn’t label any of it as being “different” for fear that we aren’t being “inclusive” enough is a nice “progressive” idea that in reality serves no purpose whatsoever. What’s the point in denying the color of something? For a mainstream indie, King Cobra has a lot of simulated gay sex in it and the heterosexual actors really go for it, including James Franco and Christian Slater. All the characters are gay in a narrative that’s blessedly free of both ideology and gay suffering, because the suffering in King Cobra is caused by capitalism, and in this movie being gay isn’t the point. The men in King Cobra have already worked through whatever issues they might have had about their sexuality, and they have other problems to deal with, and there’s an actual plot that isn’t about being gay—it’s just a crime drama.
I suppose both Moonlight and King Cobra are “progressive” movies, insofar as they’re both about things we rarely see depicted in mainstream indie films. In Moonlight Barry Jenkins proves, in what’s only his second movie, that he has an eye for composition, texture, and rhythm, and he mostly knows what to do with the camera. I’m not totally convinced Justin Kelly’s an artist yet but he can shape scenes and works well with actors and, even though the movie goes to hell in the last few minutes, he attempted something daring and new. I can’t claim that King Cobra is a better movie than Moonlight but on an emotional-aesthetic level I prefer it as a gay-themed picture, because with its casual tossed-off manner it has no problem visualizing complicated reserves of gay male desire. White privilege makes it easier for these guys to connect effortlessly, and to publicly exploit their bodies and sexuality, yet very few of the sex scenes in King Cobra take place on porn sets, but instead are private scenes in bedrooms and living rooms that reveal the main characters’ desires and motivations—meaning that the explicit gay sex in King Cobra isn’t dictated by its porn milieu background, and this is why the movie seems a step ahead of Moonlight.
Kelly gets the narrative going quickly—the story’s deftly laid out—and the movie is unfussy and neutral with a dark-toned and surprisingly elegant look at times, especially given its one-million-dollar budget. If Kelly flirts with a bitchy camp aesthetic, that’s mostly folded into the true-crime narrative—the movie is soapy, not campy. The best scenes involve gay men talking about money, and the negotiations and power games they enact, rather than trying to illustrate how they’re so shut down by society, by ideology, by homophobic parents, whatever. The most compelling scene is a long take in a sushi bar where three of the lead characters are discussing business, done in a very slow zoom and with behavioral details and funny asides and digressions that hint at the film King Cobra could have been, but finally it’s just a soft-core exploitation movie, sleazy, energetic, and not afraid of being tacky. This occasionally reminds you that sometimes artlessness can be an aesthetic, too.
Moonlight has a 98 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes while King Cobra has a 44 percent rating, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle—neither movie is as good or as bad as the critics say. Moonlight is a labor of love while King Cobra might be one but doesn’t come off like it, yet I prefer King Cobra because this is the rare post-gay film in which no one is t
ortured about being gay, no one gets bullied, no one is ashamed, no one has tearfully passionate coming-out scenes, and there’s no gay suffering at all—there’s a murder, but it’s over money. And isn’t this, in our new acceptance of gay lives and equality, whether black or white, the more progressive view?
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In the spring of 2013, men of a certain demo experienced a flicker of annoyance at how the media treated basketball player Jason Collins as some kind of baby panda who needed to be honored and praised and consoled and infantilized for his coming out on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Within the tyrannical homophobia of the sports world, that any man—much less a black one—would come out was a triumph not only for the gay community but also for pranksters everywhere, who were thrilled by the idea that what should rightly be considered a boring fact that’s nobody’s business was instead a shock heard briefly around the planet. This was an undeniable moment (perhaps just a footnote now) and Jason Collins was the future, though the subsequent fawning over his simple statement that he was gay still seemed in that moment like a new kind of victimization, with George Stephanopoulos interviewing him on Good Morning America so tenderly it was as if he was talking to a six-year-old boy. And the reign of the gay man as magical elf—who appears before us whenever he comes out as some kind of saintly, adorable ET whose sole purpose is to remind us only about tolerance and our prejudices, to encourage us to feel good about ourselves and to serve as a symbol instead of being just another guy—still seems in media play five years later. While watching the coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang I was constantly reminded that freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy and figure skater Adam Rippon were openly gay—a media “progressivism” that one would have assumed was by now both tone-deaf and antiquated, and yet Kenworthy and Rippon openly participated in it, encouraging an identity-politics fervor that tilted toward that same casual and mindless degradation: the Gay Man as Magical Elf.
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