Moonlight is about
the career of a black man who from childhood to adulthood, has to navigate his
life concealing his gay sexual orientation from the masculine black culture of
South Florida.
Barry Jenkins debuted with a quiet frustrated slice of life
with Medicine for Melancholy (2008).
About a black bike courier who contemplates with a black woman who’s in a
relationship with a white man. Barry Jenkins returns to the social struggle of
the black experience with Moonlight.
Like Boyhood,
Moonlight chronicles the touch stone moments of a boy’s life that add up to
who he is. What Moonlight does better
is focus in on those moments that turns one into their worst self. Through
universal cultural missteps and sub cultural missteps of one’s race. There
being a notion of mandatory apparent strength, aggressiveness and violence associated
with black males within the black community, also linked to the imperative need
for a positive male role model in a boy’s existence. As a partly back person
myself, I can a test to this but I would most definitely say this cultural
gripe is egged on universally by whites through media as a way to belittle the
black experience and once again make being a colored person a caricature.
Moonlight also
touches on refusal by the black community to understand gay rights and the possibilities
of being black to be more 3 dimensional than 2 dimensional. Having the up-bringing
of most black males to be a fight to be who they really are as oppose to an
image being projected on to them for societies own indifferent pleasures. The
movie’s title reflects on this as pertaining to “moonlighting” as someone
during the day and as someone else by night. Also portraying an important scene
and plot point of the movie as our protagonist has his first gay experience
under the blanket of beach bound moonlight.
Moonlight is a
very poignant film for one a like to see, and casts an important light onto the
eye opening truths of black stubbornness and incapability to see past a crippling
stereotype of their communities, while also being the product of a homophobic
and prejudice global society. We need to change things once and for all,
towards the betterment of our fellow human beings, young and old.
-
- - Maurice Jones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NJj12tJzqc
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