Something struck me as I watched Barry Jenkins’ mournful, hopeful Moonlight in the movie theater. We were deep into the film, almost at the end of the second of the three vignettes that make up the movie, and as the teenage incarnation of our lead Chiron (Ashton Sanders) is led away from his school in handcuffs, I noticed that one of the arresting officers was a white man.
And I realized that this was the first white face I’d seen in the film. This critically-beloved, awards-accumulating, word-of-mouth hit, this Oscar-favorite, hadn’t felt the need to show a white person until two-thirds of the way through the runtime.
In a piece for The New Yorker, “Moonlight Undoes Our Expectations,” Hilton Als touched on how the absence of white faces underlines Moonlight’s thematic and sociological themes, writing, “There are no white characters in the film, and this is a radical move on Jenkins’s part. Whites would have introduced a different dynamic to Moonlight. Jenkins’s story is about a self-governing black society, no matter how fractured.”
In dramatizing the same “self-governing black society” in which he grew up, Jenkins brings the audience into a world and experience they might never in a hundred years even have considered. To be honest, and to my shame, I’m one of those people.
I am a straight white man. If genetics were a lottery, brother, I hit the jackpot. I don’t say this as some kind of attempt at liberal guilt or self-effacement, but simply as an acknowledgment of fact. Straight white men have to put up with less shit than probably every other race and gender and orientation combined. Basic fact.
And that lack of shit-taking extends on a cultural level. I’d say, on rough estimate, that anywhere between 90–95% of modern pop culture is created at least in part with me in mind. Movies are greenlit based on the likelihood of appealing to me, commercials are cut specifically to entice me and people like, people with my skin color and crotch set-up are overwhelmingly the people in charge of writing, directing, and producing films and television.
The Trump fans and Gamergaters are no doubt already tearing their hair out over the idea that there is any kind of cultural bias in favor of us, straight white men, but they can get bent. Culture is dominated by us, and mass-produced to our heteronormative tastes and buying whims. If you somehow want to argue this very basic, not-really-ambiguous-at-all-if-you-think-about-it concept, you can fuck off back to your egg account.
And because art and culture made by and aimed at straight white men is so dominant and all-consuming, it can be easy to wrap yourself in this bubble of same-ness and never leave, or to look at the meager scraps extended to other genders and ethnicities and consider the problem solved.
“Well, hey,” you might say, “Wonder Woman was the best part of BVS, and Harley was the best part of Suicide Squad, and even if they never make a Black Widow movie or female-led solo film, ScarJo does cool stuff in every Avengers movie every couple years, so what are these feminazis complaining about?”
Or…
“The thing you have to understand about Game of Thrones is that it would be historically inaccurate for a show with dragons and ice zombies to feature a black man living in a castle. And, besides, remember that pirate guy? And those slaves? There are SO MANY roles for black people on that show.”
Or…
“I don’t have a problem with films and TV shows made by and starring women, people of color, or LBGTQ individuals, I am on board, but you know, I just don’t know if now is the right time. Let’s build up to it over a couple more years.”
I don’t write this to wag my finger at other people. I write this to point the finger at myself and say that at various points in my 26 years of life, I have thought and probably said some variation on just this kind of shit. That bubble can be all-encompassing, and it can just be so fucking comfortable.
And that bubble impacts me in ways I never would have considered. Getting back to Moonlight, the first of the film’s three vignettes pivots largely on the relationship between “Little” (Alex Hibbert) and drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali), who discovers Little hiding from bullies and takes the boy under his wing. Juan bonds deeply with the scared little boy, provides him with love and kindness and glimpses of a happier life beyond public housing.
The entire time this section of the movie was playing, I was primed for the other shoe to drop. Of course Juan was going to turn out to be a bad guy. Of course it was going to turn out that he had ulterior motives, that his interest in the boy was of a predatory bent. Of course the status quo of hundreds of hours of television and film was going to be reinforced and the drug dealer would be revealed as a cancer, right?
Als used the term “Negro hyperbole” to describe this kind of thinking, writing in his review, “Negro hyperbole – the overblown clichés that are so often used to represent black American life. For instance, Juan doesn’t take that runaway kid under his wing in order to pimp him out and turn him into a drug runner; instead, he brings him home to feed him, nourish him.”
I made the same mistake a few months later when I sat down to watch Denzel Washington’s Fences, which he directed and stars in alongside Viola Davis, adapting from August Wilson’s play. Depicting a few fraught months in the marriage of Troy (Washington), a former hotshot in the Negro Leagues who is now a middle-aged garbage man, and his wife Rose (Davis), Fences is another film where I kept waiting for my narrative to supersede what was happening on screen.
Specifically, I was waiting for the moment when white people would ruin everything. When the dreams and aspirations of this family would be shattered by the heavy hand of racial oppression. But that’s not what Fences is. Segregation and racial divide run through the heart of the film (Troy believes he was denied a career in the MLB because of his skin, and he discourages his son from pursuing an athletic career because he believes the same discrimination will staunch any real prospects the boy gets), but this is a film about one household and the way the people inside clash and rage and love and break. White faces are not needed to define this family and their struggles, their souls.
Neither Moonlight nor Fences were easy sells to get made. In his piece, Als remarks that he is still unsure how Jenkins managed to get Moonlight off the ground, and Fences spent decades in development because Wilson refused to let his work be adapted by anyone besides a black filmmaker, and that was apparently an insurmountable obstacle.
The problem is that movies aimed at non-white audiences continue to be seen as ‘niche’ films, without ‘crossover’ appeal. There continues to be a belief that white audiences will not turn up for films without white faces, that straight people will not go see movies by and about gay people. And for a distressing number of people in Trump’s America, that is probably true.
That’s why straight white men, with our privilege, need to nourish and support work that is not “made for us.” That’s why we have to seek out voices that sound nothing like our own and celebrate the work of those bold enough to stand up against the tide and pronounce themselves to the world.
And the rewards are endless. Moonlight, man, I saw Moonlight months ago and I still can’t shake that movie. There are images I return to again and again, images of emotional and spiritual intimacy that leave me breathless just to think about. And with Fences, Washington provides a platform for Davis, and underappreciated actors like Stephen Henderson, Russell Hornsby, and Mykelti Williamson, and new talent like Jovan Adepo, to hit home run after home run with beautiful assemblages of language.
There’s another trick too: Just because something is specific, doesn’t mean it can’t be universal. I’ve never been a poor gay black teenager in Florida, but I’ve felt outcast and isolated, starved for any kind of connection. I remember the electricity of those first halting moments when it seemed like I’d found someone safe to share myself with, and I remember the agony of those moments when that turned out to be wrong. I’ve never lived in a house like the one in Fences, but I remember how trapped you can feel, when your parents’ arguments rage through the walls, the people you love and cherish most in the world now at war with one another. I remember those moments when all I wanted was to get in a car or on a train or a plane and just go go go and leave everything that had made me behind to rot.
These are stories about specific people in specific worlds going through specific problems, but in them we can find all the heartbreak and hope that defines each and every one of us.
It’s just a damn waste to live your life only looking out of one set of eyes.
