What *Moonlight* Has the Power to Do
Thanks Barry Jenkins
Dahling,
There are issues that need to be raised in how our psyches work, in how industries work, in the kinds of assumptions we have about people that don’t lend toward any kind of healthy transformation that would make this a better world.
We need to talk about power. Forms of power. What power really is vs. what it looks like.
Right?
I started out this Substack newsletter weeks ago with a little post about Batman, and Jesus Lordy, the number of views I got about a grown man in a leotard! Who puts on a mask! And how he might eat ice cream if we were to meet at a dinner party!
Now, why haven’t any of those Batman movies had a Black Man as the star and superhero?
What is Black Power?
And why is it scary in the U.S?
(Although Woman Power seems to be pretty scary to us, too.)
A movie about men dealing drugs and engaging with bullies and finding their way toward forgiveness in relationships in the midst of communities overwhelmed with crime, and tribes, and killing, and shaming, and fear…that’s a story about power. That’s the movie Moonlight, made by Barry Jenkins, which won the Oscar in 2016. It is now streaming on HBO.
Here are people wounded and suffering, but still finding the simplicity of loving touch, of comforting one another, of forgiveness. This is who I call the superheroes. This is honesty, bravery, and power.
We have an America built on an ethos of masculinity that encapsulates films like The Godfather and TARANTINO and white men with guns and Scarface and Joker and, strangely, heroic men in leotards. (They really want to wear them, can we just get a shop set up so they can play more?) Yet Moonlight depicts the kind of power that may make a lot of men uncomfortable. Vulnerability. The desire for loving touch, simple companionship, kindness, generosity.
True bravery is not wearing a mask and putting on some costume so people don’t know who you are. Perhaps that is what has been taught to us by our cultural paradigm, and the reason we are inundated by “blockbuster” superhero films. We have a country founded by wealthy white male conquerors. Many of us may believe in the paradigm where a man must go inside himself, into a cavern of his soul, in the dark, and be serious and suffering and hoard his money and engage in acts of domination and violence to be a real man. That he must be alone and lonely, a conqueror, in order to capture masculinity. To never ask for what he needs. To take in all the pain and do secret things in the dark he’s not proud of, because he’s not seeing any other way up. To perhaps never know himself fully and live truly, because living truly is at odds with making money and gaining prestige and status and “looking good” and having—what’s that word?—power.
In this messed up paradigm that seeps through the ether, “power” is fear and the threat of violence, and also, simultaneously, status. That is why those in status can unwittingly be engaging in violence while thinking they are on the right side of history.
In a larger dimension—one with more hope, where angels live—power is love, stamina, resilience, inherent knowing, and finding ways forward more in tune with one’s heart.
Too many men—and women!—get the wrong message about what power truly is. For them, power is married to fear.
So the brave and bold filmmakers who create works that show men in desperate situations still finding ways to live from their hearts, even if the occurrences are only like waves—well, those are the filmmakers demonstrating and teaching a higher kind of power. This is more of what we need to see in the Hollywood film industry.
We all make justifications for who we are and why we have done the things we have done. We have stories and narratives, ways to boost ourselves up, compare ourselves to others, or understand better our circumstances.
Many who say they love, love from corruption. They love things that are about their own dominance rather than their own humanity and common-ness with others. They love division rather than unity. And beyond unity that is tribal, is the love of humanity. Karmically, the energy of what we do to one, we do to all.
So love—and acts of love—amid fear and hate and corruption, is the bravest, boldest force one can ever know or create.
What the actors demonstrate in their craft of this film Moonlight is humanity, history, experience, depth. Truth and beauty. A film rooted in love, with tenderness and care. I wish that weren’t such a rare thing to see on screens, and yet it is why the movie is a masterpiece.
I hope you watch and savor it, and tell your friends.
Bisous,
Ms. Wonderful
P.S. Now can we get some viewership for The Woman King, which ALSO does a whole lot of amazing things but is made by and stars black women, and got no cred at the Oscars this year? So weird. Hmm. Gonna have to write about that one, too. :)