Moonlight

30/11/2025

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    It wasn’t only the mix-up that led to surprise at Moonlight’s best picture Oscar win; it was also that here was a quiet film about a gay, black man made inarticulate by a drug-addicted mum and school bullying. It somehow seemed too small a film for the usually hyperbolic Academy Awards. Titanic, Braveheart, Schindler’s List and The King’s Speech are typical Oscar-winners. While cinema about black experience (12 Years a Slave), bullying (Slumdog Millionaire) and films exploring gay lives (Philadelphia), have all won oscars, usually the stories contain a broader sense of history and exploitation — as if a gay man’s experience isn’t valid unless there is the threat of death, a black person fear of slavery, or that someone bullied lives in a society where maiming a child is good for the begging business. This is an exaggeration, of course, but it helps explain the look of shock on director Barry Jenkins’s face when he became aware there had been a mix-up, that after falsely proposing La La Land had won best picture, the Academy acknowledged the film in the envelope was indeed Moonlight. 

         Equally, if many were surprised at its 2016 win, we would be a lot less surprised now, looking back on the films that have won since, including Nomadland, Parasite and The Shape of Water, films won by directors born in Beijing, Daegu and Guadalajara. Much has been made in recent years about diversity at the Academy Awards and, whatever the limitations of positive discrimination when it comes to aesthetics, it would seem that the films which have won haven’t been any worse than the films before them. Instead of white and worthy, we have diverse and difficult, films that play up poverty, perversion and peculiarity, without feeling obliged to resolve them on the sort of terms that smack of the homiletic. The Shape of Water might not be any better than Gandhi, Schindler’s List, or Dances with Wolves, but it does seem a different type of Oscar-winner, one that doesn’t assume it can speak for others about topics that are of significance with a capital S.

        12 Years a Slave felt a little like one of those important films, no matter if its director was black and its writer likewise. Co-produced by Brad Pitt, who also took a white saviour role within the film, it carried the sort of significance that suggested black lives mattered when contained by historical import and white heroism. That might seem too harsh a judgement but if it offers a caricature of the film’s purpose, it doesn't apply to Moonlight, no matter if some viewers may see appropriation in British actress Naomie Harris playing the central character’s mother, just as Samuel L Jackson wondered more generally whether there was a problem with so many British actors playing Americans: Daniel Kaluuya, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Idris Elba and David Oyelowo. 

      Let us leave that question aside and try to understand an aspect of Moonlight’s success. The film came out at the end of Barack Obama’s eight years as president and, during this period, there were several films made that were exploring black experience: not just 12 Years a Slave, but also Fruitvale Station, Loving, Selma, Get Out, Fences, and a fine documentary on James Baldwin: I Am Not Your Negro.  There were waves of black films before: the seventies blaxploitation movies like Shaft, Superfly, Foxy Brown and Blacula, and the nineties gangsta films: Boyz ’n’ the Hood, New Jack City, Menace II Society, and of course Spike Lee’s work, which was often aggressive in its presentation more than in its content. However, the films released during the Obama years weren’t predicated on forceful self-reliance. More on a passive acceptance that many of the characters were victims who, at best, could hope that a criminal justice system, or changes to the law, might improve their situation. Interestingly, many of the key films from the Obama period covered the years of the Civil Rights Movement: from 1954 to 1968, including Fences, Loving, Selma, and I Am Not Your Negro. It was as though the films wanted to escape the vengeful violence of blaxploitaton and gangsta cinema (that Quentin Tarantino’s Obama-era western Django Unchained insistently and entertainingly fell into), and to ask what sort of moral stance to take.

       We use morality in this context as Bradly Campbell and Jason Manning explore it in a now well-known paper: how, in many areas of contemporary society, victimhood has become a valid position to adopt. They differentiate between honour, dignity and victim culture, seeing in the first, examples like a gunfight or a duel. The second lies in the adjudication process evident in the court of law, and in the third, a position that emphasises one’s inadequacies and weaknesses. Campbell and Manning note that: “public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own victimisation and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor – tantamount to showing that one had no honor at all. Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses.” (‘Microaggression and Moral Cultures’). Much has been made of their paper, but all we wish to extract from it is a passivity that we might find healthier than the authors, and which could explain, just a little, why Moonlight’s Oscar for best picture shouldn’t have been seen as much of a surprise.  

    Let us propose that victimhood can become a valid aesthetic choice rather than simply a moral decision; rather than seeing oneself as a victim, all the better to blame others for one’s misfortune, a filmmaker chooses to escape the narratives of agency that most commercial cinema is predicated upon. We have seen many films about vengeful heroes and crusading lawyers, but the passivity of a victim can appear problematic for developing the story. Campbell and Manning note that “people increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance. Thus we might call this moral culture a culture of victimhood ... the moral status of the victim, at its nadir in honor cultures, has risen to new heights.” However, this is one side of the debate; another rests on comprehending the victim within their passive, quotidian reality. It may be understandable that someone whose place in the social pecking order is deemed inferior finds any method available to improve their power. But that doesn’t much interest us, just as all those films winning academy awards that only allow victims a place if they can be exceptionally victimised, don't interest us much either: from 12 Years a Slave to Milk, The Green Book to The Imitation Game.

      Moonlight is, in this sense, a fine film of quotidian victimhood to be put alongside Playground, After Lucia, Ratcatcher, and Kes. It is a film that offers a sorrowful account of a boy who becomes a man, yet who remains, for all his physical prowess, an inarticulate child. Chiron may find himself befriended by a concerned and respected member of the Miami community in which he lives, after Juan (Mahershala Ali) discovers him hiding from the bullies in a disused building, even though Juan isn’t an ideal role model. Juan is a dealer who sells Chiron’s mother (Naomie Harris) the very drugs that lead to Chiron's domestic hell. Later, Chiron gets close to a boy from school and, after a meaningful encounter on the beach, Chiron and Kevin kiss and touch. Kevin later gets persuaded to prove he is one of the in-crowd at school by beating Chiron to the ground. ‘Stay down”, Kevin says, showing no enthusiasm for the deed but aware, perhaps, that if he doesn’t offer the beating, he might be the next recipient of the bullying. It is a terrible scene of betrayal, made all the more so as we realise that Kevin was at last a peer Chiron could talk to and potentially love. The next day, Chiron goes into the school and beats the chief bully across the head with a chair and is taken away. It isn’t much of a victory: the sort of action so extreme that it doesn’t alleviate the problem but creates another one — he is sent off to a Juvenile centre in Atlanta. When he gets out, he becomes a dealer too. 

          If Manning and Campbell reckon Victimhood culture “arose because of the rise of social conditions conducive to it, and if it prevails it will be because those conditions have prevailed”, they are acknowledging this culture is underpinned by societal markers. Perhaps we needn’t view victimhood as a negative but as the condition of a claim. Like honour and dignity, it has its place, but much depends on how it is used and by whom. When victimhood is a passive state given active force, this is potentially where a problem arises. To say that you will fight a duel, to insist you will defend yourself in court, is different from saying you are a greater victim than someone else. If Chiron were to insist he is a sexually-deprived, child-bullied product of a broken home and wishes to gain sympathy for these facts, this would be the sort of victimhood Manning and Campbell talk about as troublesome. But instead, the film presents Chiron’s victimhood elliptically and aesthetically, trying to understand from the outside the inner life of this terribly sad existence. 

        Moonlight, After Lucia, Playground, Ratcatcher, and Kes are all great films on victimhood, and their quality rests on finding a visual and acoustic correlative to the compassion the person deserves rather than exclaiming the injustice as a first-person grievance. In Moonlight's first section, Kevin and Chiron hang out in the park, get into a mock fight and lie on the grass afterwards as though in post-coital bliss. Yet while the space is vast, Jenkins’ focus is narrow, using a very short focal length to convey the bubble the pair occupy. On other occasions, Jenkins uses shots with a very slow zoom, capturing Chiron's concentrated gaze, even if he rarely expresses what he thinks. Nevertheless, we might be left wondering if they are point-of-view shots at all. One might be the shot of the children dancing in the gym; another when Kevin and the bully are chatting in the canteen. The shots capture an aspect of Chiron’s sensibility, even sensitivity, without quite replicating his visual perspective on them. It aligns with Chiron's viewpoint but doesn't replicate it.

     Near the end of the film, there is a lovely shot where we see Kevin attending to customers and looking across at Chiron (Travente Rhodes), who looks back with a brief but longing gaze as the camera hovers a yard in front of his visage. The film often uses travelling shots from the rear, frequently showing Chiron’s back as he moves through space. We see the shot early in the film when he goes to school, later when he walks to the beach where Kevin will join him, and when he goes into school and hurts the bully. The director is hardly oblivious to the camera’s need to capture an aspect of Chiron’s introversion. “If the cameraman changes the f-stop [focal ratio], based on what he or she changes it to, I know exactly how the image is being altered” Jenkins says. “In this film, that was doubly important because sometimes where the focus is says so much about the mental state of the character.” (Sight and Sound)  

     The film also captures an acoustic sensitivity, often through music that might not seem to chime with the environment but that reflects Chiron’s fragility. When, in an earlier scene, Chiron’s mother yells at him, we don’t hear what she says; only the non-diegetic music. Later, we hear the music again, but this time we hear the mother yelling before Chiron wakes out of a nightmare. If many first-generation blaxploitation films, and second- generation gangster rap films, emphasised honour culture, the third wave plays up the legal significance of the Civil Rights movement. Moonlight asks us to accept victimhood, but Jenkins sees it as a valid discourse if offered in a nuanced and considered way. In winning the best picture Oscar, it also suggests that rather than a film about black people made by whites and falling into a white-guilt trope (like the later Oscar-winner The Green Book), it suggests instead the influence of a marvellous black cinema that never quite became a wave as it instead permeated film as feeling and form rather than so categorically as genre. This would include films like The Killer of Sheep, Ashes and Embers and Bless Their Hearts, works that showed characters victims of circumstance rather than victors of disputation. It is not so much that victimhood is a bad thing; just that it might be when presented through the lens of a liberal ideology that has served Hollywood too well over many years, or a victim culture that trades tragedies in what can sometimes seem a game of one-upmanship. Moonlight is as good an aesthetic answer to this problem as we are likely to find. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Moonlight

    It wasn’t only the mix-up that led to surprise at Moonlight’s best picture Oscar win; it was also that here was a quiet film about a gay, black man made inarticulate by a drug-addicted mum and school bullying. It somehow seemed too small a film for the usually hyperbolic Academy Awards. Titanic, Braveheart, Schindler’s List and The King’s Speech are typical Oscar-winners. While cinema about black experience (12 Years a Slave), bullying (Slumdog Millionaire) and films exploring gay lives (Philadelphia), have all won oscars, usually the stories contain a broader sense of history and exploitation — as if a gay man’s experience isn’t valid unless there is the threat of death, a black person fear of slavery, or that someone bullied lives in a society where maiming a child is good for the begging business. This is an exaggeration, of course, but it helps explain the look of shock on director Barry Jenkins’s face when he became aware there had been a mix-up, that after falsely proposing La La Land had won best picture, the Academy acknowledged the film in the envelope was indeed Moonlight. 

         Equally, if many were surprised at its 2016 win, we would be a lot less surprised now, looking back on the films that have won since, including Nomadland, Parasite and The Shape of Water, films won by directors born in Beijing, Daegu and Guadalajara. Much has been made in recent years about diversity at the Academy Awards and, whatever the limitations of positive discrimination when it comes to aesthetics, it would seem that the films which have won haven’t been any worse than the films before them. Instead of white and worthy, we have diverse and difficult, films that play up poverty, perversion and peculiarity, without feeling obliged to resolve them on the sort of terms that smack of the homiletic. The Shape of Water might not be any better than Gandhi, Schindler’s List, or Dances with Wolves, but it does seem a different type of Oscar-winner, one that doesn’t assume it can speak for others about topics that are of significance with a capital S.

        12 Years a Slave felt a little like one of those important films, no matter if its director was black and its writer likewise. Co-produced by Brad Pitt, who also took a white saviour role within the film, it carried the sort of significance that suggested black lives mattered when contained by historical import and white heroism. That might seem too harsh a judgement but if it offers a caricature of the film’s purpose, it doesn't apply to Moonlight, no matter if some viewers may see appropriation in British actress Naomie Harris playing the central character’s mother, just as Samuel L Jackson wondered more generally whether there was a problem with so many British actors playing Americans: Daniel Kaluuya, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Idris Elba and David Oyelowo. 

      Let us leave that question aside and try to understand an aspect of Moonlight’s success. The film came out at the end of Barack Obama’s eight years as president and, during this period, there were several films made that were exploring black experience: not just 12 Years a Slave, but also Fruitvale Station, Loving, Selma, Get Out, Fences, and a fine documentary on James Baldwin: I Am Not Your Negro.  There were waves of black films before: the seventies blaxploitation movies like Shaft, Superfly, Foxy Brown and Blacula, and the nineties gangsta films: Boyz ’n’ the Hood, New Jack City, Menace II Society, and of course Spike Lee’s work, which was often aggressive in its presentation more than in its content. However, the films released during the Obama years weren’t predicated on forceful self-reliance. More on a passive acceptance that many of the characters were victims who, at best, could hope that a criminal justice system, or changes to the law, might improve their situation. Interestingly, many of the key films from the Obama period covered the years of the Civil Rights Movement: from 1954 to 1968, including Fences, Loving, Selma, and I Am Not Your Negro. It was as though the films wanted to escape the vengeful violence of blaxploitaton and gangsta cinema (that Quentin Tarantino’s Obama-era western Django Unchained insistently and entertainingly fell into), and to ask what sort of moral stance to take.

       We use morality in this context as Bradly Campbell and Jason Manning explore it in a now well-known paper: how, in many areas of contemporary society, victimhood has become a valid position to adopt. They differentiate between honour, dignity and victim culture, seeing in the first, examples like a gunfight or a duel. The second lies in the adjudication process evident in the court of law, and in the third, a position that emphasises one’s inadequacies and weaknesses. Campbell and Manning note that: “public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own victimisation and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor – tantamount to showing that one had no honor at all. Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses.” (‘Microaggression and Moral Cultures’). Much has been made of their paper, but all we wish to extract from it is a passivity that we might find healthier than the authors, and which could explain, just a little, why Moonlight’s Oscar for best picture shouldn’t have been seen as much of a surprise.  

    Let us propose that victimhood can become a valid aesthetic choice rather than simply a moral decision; rather than seeing oneself as a victim, all the better to blame others for one’s misfortune, a filmmaker chooses to escape the narratives of agency that most commercial cinema is predicated upon. We have seen many films about vengeful heroes and crusading lawyers, but the passivity of a victim can appear problematic for developing the story. Campbell and Manning note that “people increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance. Thus we might call this moral culture a culture of victimhood ... the moral status of the victim, at its nadir in honor cultures, has risen to new heights.” However, this is one side of the debate; another rests on comprehending the victim within their passive, quotidian reality. It may be understandable that someone whose place in the social pecking order is deemed inferior finds any method available to improve their power. But that doesn’t much interest us, just as all those films winning academy awards that only allow victims a place if they can be exceptionally victimised, don't interest us much either: from 12 Years a Slave to Milk, The Green Book to The Imitation Game.

      Moonlight is, in this sense, a fine film of quotidian victimhood to be put alongside Playground, After Lucia, Ratcatcher, and Kes. It is a film that offers a sorrowful account of a boy who becomes a man, yet who remains, for all his physical prowess, an inarticulate child. Chiron may find himself befriended by a concerned and respected member of the Miami community in which he lives, after Juan (Mahershala Ali) discovers him hiding from the bullies in a disused building, even though Juan isn’t an ideal role model. Juan is a dealer who sells Chiron’s mother (Naomie Harris) the very drugs that lead to Chiron's domestic hell. Later, Chiron gets close to a boy from school and, after a meaningful encounter on the beach, Chiron and Kevin kiss and touch. Kevin later gets persuaded to prove he is one of the in-crowd at school by beating Chiron to the ground. ‘Stay down”, Kevin says, showing no enthusiasm for the deed but aware, perhaps, that if he doesn’t offer the beating, he might be the next recipient of the bullying. It is a terrible scene of betrayal, made all the more so as we realise that Kevin was at last a peer Chiron could talk to and potentially love. The next day, Chiron goes into the school and beats the chief bully across the head with a chair and is taken away. It isn’t much of a victory: the sort of action so extreme that it doesn’t alleviate the problem but creates another one — he is sent off to a Juvenile centre in Atlanta. When he gets out, he becomes a dealer too. 

          If Manning and Campbell reckon Victimhood culture “arose because of the rise of social conditions conducive to it, and if it prevails it will be because those conditions have prevailed”, they are acknowledging this culture is underpinned by societal markers. Perhaps we needn’t view victimhood as a negative but as the condition of a claim. Like honour and dignity, it has its place, but much depends on how it is used and by whom. When victimhood is a passive state given active force, this is potentially where a problem arises. To say that you will fight a duel, to insist you will defend yourself in court, is different from saying you are a greater victim than someone else. If Chiron were to insist he is a sexually-deprived, child-bullied product of a broken home and wishes to gain sympathy for these facts, this would be the sort of victimhood Manning and Campbell talk about as troublesome. But instead, the film presents Chiron’s victimhood elliptically and aesthetically, trying to understand from the outside the inner life of this terribly sad existence. 

        Moonlight, After Lucia, Playground, Ratcatcher, and Kes are all great films on victimhood, and their quality rests on finding a visual and acoustic correlative to the compassion the person deserves rather than exclaiming the injustice as a first-person grievance. In Moonlight's first section, Kevin and Chiron hang out in the park, get into a mock fight and lie on the grass afterwards as though in post-coital bliss. Yet while the space is vast, Jenkins’ focus is narrow, using a very short focal length to convey the bubble the pair occupy. On other occasions, Jenkins uses shots with a very slow zoom, capturing Chiron's concentrated gaze, even if he rarely expresses what he thinks. Nevertheless, we might be left wondering if they are point-of-view shots at all. One might be the shot of the children dancing in the gym; another when Kevin and the bully are chatting in the canteen. The shots capture an aspect of Chiron’s sensibility, even sensitivity, without quite replicating his visual perspective on them. It aligns with Chiron's viewpoint but doesn't replicate it.

     Near the end of the film, there is a lovely shot where we see Kevin attending to customers and looking across at Chiron (Travente Rhodes), who looks back with a brief but longing gaze as the camera hovers a yard in front of his visage. The film often uses travelling shots from the rear, frequently showing Chiron’s back as he moves through space. We see the shot early in the film when he goes to school, later when he walks to the beach where Kevin will join him, and when he goes into school and hurts the bully. The director is hardly oblivious to the camera’s need to capture an aspect of Chiron’s introversion. “If the cameraman changes the f-stop [focal ratio], based on what he or she changes it to, I know exactly how the image is being altered” Jenkins says. “In this film, that was doubly important because sometimes where the focus is says so much about the mental state of the character.” (Sight and Sound)  

     The film also captures an acoustic sensitivity, often through music that might not seem to chime with the environment but that reflects Chiron’s fragility. When, in an earlier scene, Chiron’s mother yells at him, we don’t hear what she says; only the non-diegetic music. Later, we hear the music again, but this time we hear the mother yelling before Chiron wakes out of a nightmare. If many first-generation blaxploitation films, and second- generation gangster rap films, emphasised honour culture, the third wave plays up the legal significance of the Civil Rights movement. Moonlight asks us to accept victimhood, but Jenkins sees it as a valid discourse if offered in a nuanced and considered way. In winning the best picture Oscar, it also suggests that rather than a film about black people made by whites and falling into a white-guilt trope (like the later Oscar-winner The Green Book), it suggests instead the influence of a marvellous black cinema that never quite became a wave as it instead permeated film as feeling and form rather than so categorically as genre. This would include films like The Killer of Sheep, Ashes and Embers and Bless Their Hearts, works that showed characters victims of circumstance rather than victors of disputation. It is not so much that victimhood is a bad thing; just that it might be when presented through the lens of a liberal ideology that has served Hollywood too well over many years, or a victim culture that trades tragedies in what can sometimes seem a game of one-upmanship. Moonlight is as good an aesthetic answer to this problem as we are likely to find. 


© Tony McKibbin