Moonlight: Entrapment and Affective subjectivation

Film reviews of Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) praise its treatment of identity, but the title suggests the film is more precisely about subjectivation, that is, the social, material, and affective forces that shape the sense, limits, and horizons of “selfhood”.

  Consider first the film’s most iconic and most exceptional scene in which Juan (Mahershala Ali) teaches Little (Alex R. Hibbert) how to swim in the ocean. Though it is shot in medium and close frame, the scene is incredibly capacious. Daylight floods the screen and the ocean seems to go on endlessly around them and behind them. The openness comments on the achieved tenderness between them. Their two bodies do not seem lost or precarious but buoyed and steady. The intimacy is palpable, drawn out in the ability of two male bodies to be close and trusting and held.

Later that evening Juan and Little are sitting on a bench near the beach in a scene more ordinary for this film, shot with tight spatial dynamics that keep a chokehold on the landscape and its inhabitants. The openness of the ocean is here off-screen and barely heard—as it is for most of the film. Juan tells Little that he’s Cuban. Before viewers can absorb that affective dissonance (Juan seems black and American, not hispanic and Cuban), Juan relates the memory of an old Cuban lady telling him that, “in moonlight, black boys look blue. You’re blue. That’s what I’m going to call you: Blue.”

When Little asks with the straight deductive logic of children, “Is your name Blue?” Juan answers in a way that boomerangs out to the film’s title and reframes its events and trajectories: “Nah,” he replies, “At some point, you have to decide for yourself who you’re going to be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you.”[Quotation from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4975722/trivia?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_qu].

It is a sentence that might seem to reaffirm a liberal sense of core identity and the individual’s ability—even obligation—to choose, to decide, who and what to be in the world. But the scene, the memory, and the conversation introduce a fundamental ambivalence to this ideology of American individualism, since even if Juan decides not to be Blue, he still is seen as Blue by the people around him.

Whatever he decides to be, it is a decision emerging out of conditions, perspectives, and responses he did not choose. That oscillation—or seepage—between layered material-affective situations and the layered affective materiality of the self is as endless as the grains of sand, as diffuse as moonlight.

  The accumulated effect is entrapment. Indeed the adult Chiron, who goes by “Black”(Travonte Rhodes) answers Kevin’s (André Holland) question about who he is with this very word. “Straight up?” he warns Kevin, who dismisses the warning and urges him to speak. “Trapped,” he offers in acute summation.

The film’s minimalist dialogue perfectly reflects and enacts the entrapments of Black and Kevin. If this were a film about finding one’s true self, then this inner truth would need to find expression in words and actions. But that is not this film. The silences between the characters, their stuttered, torn, and inept linguistic exchanges, leave viewers grasping to fill in the gaps affectively, not representationally. Our eyes can’t help but rove from the men to the neighborhoods, streets, buildings, rooms, walls, and furniture that constitute the material situations and contexts and signify the affective economies by which these men are seen and which trap them as surely as does any ‘chosen’ course of action.

Even though Black remakes himself from the ground up after his incarceration, the blocks of that refashioning could only rearrange the bars of a social prison buoyed by poverty, racism, neglect, and homophobia. The film’s persistently referenced dyad of “soft” and “hard” that puts color and flesh on what it is to be a “man” turns and twists around this social prison, and never quite settles out into the lived intimacy and capaciousness of that one scene with Juan.

And yet. If this is not a film of hope, at least it is not a film that glorifies despair.

Graduate Mentoring

Yesterday I attended two panels of a multi-session workshop on graduate mentoring that was beautifully organized by Glenn Wright at the SU Graduate School. The first discussed best practices for mentors and the second, run by Paula Chambers, laid out her “Virtual PhD” advocacy for counseling PhD students toward non-academic positions.

The takeaway from the best practices is that good mentoring emerges out of frequent meetings and consistent, concrete feedback. I was particularly struck by the weekly meeting Joanna Masingila, Dean, School of Education runs for her doctoral students. From my Humanities neck of the woods, I’d call this meeting a “proseminar”. Students register for it and receive zero to three credits, depending on where they are in the program. Students who are analyzing data or writing prospectuses or grants can register for 2-3 credits, while those gathering data or reading through bibliographies register for 1 credit. Students still in coursework are required to attend but receive zero credits. Each Monday, Joanna reported, one student sends out a chapter or a set of analyzed data, and each Friday (3:45-4:45 p.m.) the group meets with faculty to discuss what was sent out. The meeting works not only to model genre (this is what a dissertation prospectus looks like, this is what a grant proposal looks like) but also to incarnate departmental support and the necessary collective dimension of any academic success.

The Virtual PhD discussion left me less satisfied. I broached the session fully on board with the need to counsel students toward alt-ac teloi for their doctorates. But Paula seemed to respond to academic disdain for the corporate world with non-academic disdain for the focus, time, energy and passion required to become successful in the academy. The edge in her voice was a bit distracting considering her audience (faculty and staff dedicated to mentoring grad students). Clearly, Humanities mentors are deluded and even cruel if they refuse to vocalize their support for non-TT jobs. I’d even say that every departmental professionalization program needs to establish regular alt-ac discussions in their programming. But this support for considering and pursuing a wide range of post-doctoral employment must be balanced with an insistence that departmental training simply is what it is–regardless of what one ends up doing with the degree. The desire to work for an NGO or the State Department is fantastic but cannot be used as the excuse for not fully engaging with the intellectual, pedagogical, and programmatic offerings of the department. My support for a student’s interest in digital humanities or curriculum development is different from my feeling obligated to suggest that all students develop IT or administrative skills because they are imminently desired by “the market.”