Moonlight grabbed me from the first I heard of it. An online description summarized it as follows: “A young man deals with his dysfunctional home life and comes of age in Miami during the ‘War on Drugs’ era.”
Given all my recent learning about mass incarceration, race and the impact of the War on Drugs,* I was all in to see this story take shape. Before it came to Hartford, I took a drive to Boston just for Moonlight.
It was so much more than any one sentence can summarize.
Moonlight is the story of Chiron over three stages of his life, as a kid, teenager and young man. As a kid, he doesn’t fit in, and he’s on his own a lot. His mom works hard and struggles with a drug addiction. It’s a story of disconnection and connection. Chiron meets good people who care about him and betray him, who he loves and wishes he didn’t. Drugs and the drug trade are a constant thread, a ticket to survival and destruction all at once.
I could watch Chiron’s story again and again, to take in the nuance and appreciate its many layers. It’s a story that resists easy summary, multifaceted and true to life. I was amazed by how well done it was.
There was just one thing that didn’t make sense to me. The poster. It seemed so basic. Just a picture of a face in the moonlight. I felt that it didn’t do justice to the story.
Then I looked at it again.
I had missed the nuance completely. I had looked too quickly, and hadn’t noticed that the poster was three faces spliced together, each with a different purplish hue to represent a phase in Chiron’s life. It was a story of three people in one, a picture of transformation embodied.
I was wrong. The poster was perfect. I just had to look more closely.
It got me thinking. What else had I missed? When else have I glanced too quickly, and missed the layers of meaning? What else had I not noticed?
After that, I renewed my commitment to noticing. To paying attention. To looking twice.
Because art, as in life, is all about the layers. How could I have missed that?
*If you haven’t seen Ava DuVernay’s 13th on Netflix or read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, make sure you add them to your list. There’s so much more but these two are really powerful and chock full of important information.
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