Journal Article

Guest Editor Introduction- Moonlight: The Weight of \Intimacy\

Yancy, George

2020

Overview

After my first viewing of Moonlight in 2018, though it premiered in 2016,1 knew that I had to write about it. The hard part was figuring out why. Obviously, it is not as if I possess a skill set steeped in film exegesis. I had not figured out the film's singular core meaning, assuming that it has only one. I had not discerned some deep and hidden secret that informed the assumptions behind the film's driving narrative force. I could not, unequivocally, articulate the film's raison d'etre. So, what was it? Why Moonlight?Movies touch us; some make us cry, scream, angry, happy, depressed, cynical, disappointed, you name it. For me, Moonlights touch was disorienting. I use the word \"disorienting\" to mean to confuse in terms of direction, though not in terms of spatial direction. Think of only one part of my identity, especially as it is multiple and can be mapped along various identificatory coordinates. Let us keep it л/rø/g/ztforward: I define myself and I am defined as a cisgender, heterosexual Black male. Think about that self-ascripti on and the ways in which I am interpellated. There is nothing nominal about that mode of being rendered intelligible to myself. Being a cisgender, heterosexual Black male bespeaks a mode of being-in-the-world. That identity shapes how 1 move through the world, shapes what appears to me as \"normative\" and \"acceptable,\" shapes the ways in which my gaze is culturally mediated, the ways that my gaze dilates or not, how I self-comport, how 1 am bodily. It is through that orientation that the world is disclosed and simultaneously concealed. To say that 1 \"watched\" Moonlight is probably inaccurate, especially as \"watched\" implies a species of surveyance, which suggests a form of measured judgement - like an unfamiliar landscape. Furthermore, the activity of \"watching\" also implies surveil lance, a mode of keeping track, a form of technology designed to follow and control that which functions as the constituted \"outside,\" the \"problem,\" that which is \"askew,\" that which İs \"oblique,\" \"odd,\" \"out of place,\" \"queer.\"My point here is that being a cisgender, heterosexual Black male is to be part and parcel of a world, an active process of worlding whereby I inherit, instantiate, and perpetuate a certain logics of encompassing and framing that which appears before me. The beauty, of course, is that such a mode of being is not static or invulnerable. Perhaps that is why drawing limits is a process of constant re-worlding, even if done unconsciously and habitually. In short, one must make sure that one is straight, oriented in the \"right\" direction. To be \"touched\" on such occasions, one is prone to anger, perhaps even violence. That brings us back to Moonlight whose touch, for me, as stated above, was disorienting.

• Publisher: Washington State University Press
• Subject: Anger / Cisgender / Exegesis & hermeneutics / Freedom / Heterosexuality / Identity / Intimacy / Males / Motion pictures / Ontology / Personality / Sexual Orientation / Technology / Word meaning