On Touching, Where Tender Meets Tough

Abstract

In one of the most pivotal moments in Moonlight, the now-grown Chiron visits his childhood friend, Kevin, who is now a chef. In this crucial reunion scene, two formerly incarcerated men, Kevin and Chiron, meet at a diner and reconcile through intimacy and touch. Knowing that Kevin was the cause of Chiron's carceral past, we see a moment that stands contrary to hegemonic masculine expectations—as tenderness replaces anticipated revenge or animus. In this scene, the normative constructions of Black masculinity as decidedly violent and illustratively criminal are sharply contrasted to a relatively gentle, kind, and sensual Chiron. In as much as one can sense the pain, anguish, and perfidy in the weirdly, sometimes almost uncomfortable penetrating gaze between Chiron and Kevin, this scene illustrates something more commanding: the centrality of touch and touching between Black men. In this short article commemorating Moonlight, I want to reflect on the rhetorical force of “touch” between the Black men in Moonlight as a socially disorienting force against the backdrop of Black carceral animus.Moonlight is a striking attempt at highlighting the emotive energy that unbinds Black masculinity to social annihilation and violence. What McKittrick terms the “mathematics of the unliving”—where “black is naturally malignant and therefore worthy of violation; where black is violated because black is naturally violent; where black is naturally unbelievable and is therefore naturally empty and violated; where black is naturally less-than-human and starving to death and violated.”1 In contrast, McKittrick notes that other possibilities of reading the archives of anti-Black violence exist. In this regard, Moonlight offers such possibilities of reading blackness often overshadowed by the public performance of Black pain or the parading of Black pleasure resulting from a “culture of deficit.” Rather than focusing on Black pain as a singular constitutive of blackness and Black queer life in particular, Moonlight reveals the performative covalence of Black pain and pleasure that are not antithetical or diametrical to each other. As such, by revealing the social seams that orbit Chiron's life, a more complicated picture of community and relationality emerge—one that is unmistakably queer. The rhetorical force of touching between Black men as a preemptive gesture to mundane and sensual ways of relating reveals a particularly complex communal bridgework at play. Touching, holding, reaching, and embracing.Moonlight begins with a drug deal. Juan, played by Mahershala Ali, drives into the frame to check on his “worker.” This scene also portrays the movie's setting in Liberty City, Miami, where drugs and state disinvestment have devastated vast parts of the community. With this imagery surrounding, Juan and his worker stand side by side, posed in b-boy fashion and hard masculine stance. At first, the interaction between Juan and his worker evokes the archetypical drug dealer trope that pervades Hollywood movies about Black communities. After several handshakes with his worker, who is also bickering with a potential drug user, the camera pans around them to emphasize the setting in which they stand at-large. This initial scene forestalls the social landscape that incubates Black queer relationality throughout the movie. First, while Juan's worker asks if he came for his money, Juan responds he should wait until the weekend. Juan then asks, “How is your mom doin’ now?” A shift from strictly business interactions to one where Juan knows his worker's life details. Amid frequent handshakes and anxious looks, his worker responds that his mother is doing better. They shake hands again, and then his worker states, “thanks for the opportunity.” But how has Juan symbolically and metaphorically “touched” the life of his worker? How have they moved from strangers to intimates? What queer social configurations exist in a social setting marked as a “death world” (itself queer) that pushes the boundaries of the normalization of anti-Black violence socially, physically, and representationally?Moonlight offers an alternative picture through the use of close camera shots that intrude into the characters’ intimate moments, facial expressions, and fondness of each other through their touch. In the now-famous scene where Juan teaches young Chiron how to swim, viewers not only confront their prejudices about Juan's background as a drug dealer, they encounter a familial relationship outside heteronormative relational frameworks. In such candid explorations of Black masculinity and the appropriation of touch as communal bridgework, viewers are forced to look beyond the “thingification” of Black men by focusing on the intimate moments of touch that illuminate complex social relationships. “Touching” can mean altering someone's life (e.g., I was touched by his unwavering kindness) or explaining an erotic experience (e.g., they touched me). It can also mark sexual violence such as rape. However, in Moonlight, the role of touch opens spaces for communal bridgework where bodies marked as death bound remake social worlds within constricting conditions where Black men are consistently represented as violent. For instance, in Darren Wilson's statement to the grand jury, he described Michael Brown as “Hulk Hogan” and “demon.” In this vein, the only enactment of touch that Darren Wilson could imagine is one that initiates violence. McCune notes that the words used by Darren Wilson showed the resurgence of “canonical prejudice” that “constituted a historic deformation of black bodies in order to deny victimage for the sake of the white narrative of ‘defense against all things black.’” In this regard, McCune states that Michael Brown was queerly rendered a thing.2Moonlight perpetually takes the “things” and gives us something intimate, touching, moving, and beyond the normative relations of Black men in film and life.Moonlight demands a queer reading of black relationality—where “the queerness of blackness is not just about how life is tethered to death but also its relationship to living and creativity.”3 By examining closely how touch and touching are performed in Moonlight, Chiron, Kevin, and Juan queerly perform an undoing to characters who have historically been represented as antithetical to each other. The representation of touching as an expression of vulnerability, pain, pleasure, and desire in a way that the “queerness of blackness” is illuminated in multifaceted, complex social and familial configurations. To be “touched” symbolically and physically coexists as rhetorical bridgework in a delicate social schema where even the drug dealer can mentor a Black queer child, where the once-scorned queer boy can love the once-scorned man of deep ambiguity and rage, and where toughness can be accompanied (sometimes overshadowed) by tenderness.