“Stay Down”: Moonlight and Negative Affect as an Analytic

Abstract

Violence can be intimate and revealing. People reveal much about themselves when they give or receive a beating. So it was when Kevin hit his lifelong friend Chiron in a Miami schoolyard in the second act of Moonlight.1 They shared another type of intimacy the night before when they confessed feelings of despair and loneliness to each other on a beach. These vulnerable emotions created a space to risk touching, leading to a kiss that melted into Kevin slowly masturbating Chiron to orgasm. Chiron and Kevin had always created space for each other, finding ways to be alone and talk even in a larger group of neighborhood boys. Thus, every punch that Kevin landed on Chiron's jaw resounded with betrayal and remorse, not just physical pain. Kevin urged Chiron to “stay down,” his eyes pleading forgiveness for what bullies had pressured him to do. Instead, Chiron jutted his chin out and held Kevin's gaze, as though he wanted to sear the scene into his mind: his beloved friend's punches and the jeering faces of the bullies urging him on. The beating showed Kevin, who had a confident social ease throughout the movie, to be a creature of social approval, turning on his friend when his peers demanded it. The beating also showed Chiron's mettle; he did not turn away from his friend's betrayal or from the cruelty of the boys who goaded him.Analyses of Moonlight do not dwell on Chiron's bullying, finding it trite or otherwise irrelevant to the broader story of his life.2 However, Chiron's bullying plays a key role in establishing him as queer, that is, a character with same-sex attractions. The first scene of the movie features a group of boys chasing Little (Chiron's nickname when he was a child) into a crack house, throwing objects at him, and calling him a “faggot.” It is through bullying that we know that society sees Little as gay. The film does not give Little stereotypically effeminate mannerisms as a shorthand to signal that he is gay, nor does Little show sexual desire for boys other than Kevin.3 Little falls in the middle of the gender presentation spectrum of boys who grow up to have a same-sex identity: neither effeminate nor hegemonically masculine, merely odd for a boy—a loner who is uninterested in sports.4 The bullying is constitutive of Little's understanding of himself—he asks Juan and Teresa, the surrogate parents who look after him when his drug-addicted mother cannot, whether he was a “faggot.” Juan tells him that he may discover that he is gay, understood here to be a sexual identity, but not to let others call him a “faggot,” understood to be a slur referring to a debased masculinity and a debased sexuality.5 In other words, we never hear Chiron name his sexual identity, we must take the bullies’ word for it.What to do when negative affect, like violence, bullying, and the torment they cause, is so present in a film that has been heralded as a welcome portrayal of the lives of Black gay men?6 I argue that the ubiquity of negative affect in the film is a key for making sense of Moonlight. Examining the scenes and characters with negative charge offers an alternative way of understanding the film's world. Using negative affect as an analytic suggests that Moonlight is a film about the forces that shaped heteronormative Black masculinity in the post-Civil Rights era, not a film about Black gay men. Although the film shows same-sex attraction, attachment, and sexual behaviors, it is not a gay movie in terms of reflecting Black queer male sociality, particularly “Negro faggotry.”7 Instead, Moonlight can be read as an updated hood film that innovates in its portrayal of the eroticism and attachment that can exist between Black male friends without resolving those feelings into a conventional sexual identity.8 In other words, Moonlight shows the queer intimacy of street culture without offering self-avowed gay male characters or representing Black queer men's social worlds and culture.9Moonlight reflects the gender and sexual norms of hip-hop culture in its emotional logics. Like hip-hop culture, the film limits women to the role of mothers, not men's peers, and centers street culture, in particular the illegal economy, as the site of Black male self-making and belonging. As I argue elsewhere, hip-hop's gender politics are defined by the homosocialization of intimacy, or a structure of feeling that treats men as the ideal source for men's emotional support and companionship.10 Thus, Moonlight is more productively read as a meditation on the limits of the homosocialization of intimacy as manifested in the hood film rather than as a Black queer film. Director Barry Jenkins accepts the gender norm that male homosocial bonding requires the rejection of women and femininity and thus reproduces dominant forms of masculinity.11 Yet he challenges the requirement that homosocial bonding precludes sexual desire and romantic attachment.José Muñoz describes Latinix emotional worlds as structured by negative affect, or “feeling down.”12 I follow his method by “staying down” in the negative frequencies of feeling to trace the life worlds of the Black men in the movie. Like Muñoz, I use negative affect as an analytic to help identify attachments, desires, and forms of belonging that resist easy categorization into familiar identities.13 Where other critics examine Moonlight's neutral or uncertain affect, I plumb its negative affect for what it tells us about the possibility of Black men's life.14 In particular, I focus on Terrel, the ringleader of Chiron's bullies, as a key to unlocking the gender and sexual politics of the movie.Terrel's fixation on Chiron's gender and sexuality, dating back to when they were children, is a negative form of same-sex attachment. His bullying amounts to a one-sided feud where a feud refers to a couple locked in a sustained conflict.15 Terrel's fixation with Chiron lacks the mutual hostility that defines a feud; still, the way that feuds straddle the boundary between desire and antagonism is instructive.16 Terrel seemed enthralled with Chiron, carefully watching his behavior, and instigating the other boys’ animosity toward him. The intensity of the emotions of feuding pairs could be mistaken for desire. After all, people with crushes also monitor the slightest changes in the behavior of their beloved. Terrel's fixation with Chiron exemplifies the queerness of a feud as a form of coupling, where positive feelings are not required for a long-term, all-consuming attachment to another.17The antagonism/desire dynamic that animates feuds is evident in Terrel's attentiveness to Chiron's behavior and emotions. Terrel must have been watching Chiron carefully enough to know that something was different the day that he demanded that Kevin hit him. He could not have known of Kevin and Chiron's sexual encounter the previous day. Instead, he monitored Chiron closely enough to know that he seemed more buoyant the next day at school. Moreover, Terrel shows that he understands the depth of Kevin and Chiron's romantic attachment when he demands that Kevin be the one to hit him. After all, he could have easily gotten his friends to beat up Chiron. The fact that he chose Kevin is an implicit acknowledgment that homosocial bonds can exceed the boundaries of friendship and cross into sexual and romantic attachment. When Terrel had Kevin hit Chiron, he wanted to break Chiron's heart, not just his body. That is a grudging acknowledgement of the depths of same-sex love.Terrel frames his call for Kevin to hit Chiron within the context of homosocial bonding. He acts like he is innocently reviving the homosocial game they all played as boys when one friend would suddenly hit another on command. This is another sign that Moonlight is interested in the forces that structure the homosocial world of Black young men. Terrel's response to Kevin and Chiron's closeness reflects the anxiety about homosociality that haunts hip-hop culture, where men try to stave off the homolatency, or specter of homoeroticism, within their homosocial bonds.18 Terrel enlists Kevin as a surrogate to violently reject the taint of same-sex desire within their homosocial world.But as I suggest above, Terrel is unusually attentive to the depth of Kevin and Chiron's affection for each other. His ability to interpret the nature of Chiron's attachment to Kevin suggests that that type of desire was familiar to him. How else was Terrel able to clock Chiron's glow of consummated desire the day he forced Kevin to hit him? This line of questioning is not meant to suggest that Terrel is a closeted homosexual man who bullies Chiron out of self-hatred. Rather, Terrel feels a combination of animosity and desire towards Chiron as reflected by his one-sided feud with him. He resolves his ambivalent feelings by violently rejecting them, using Kevin as a stand-in for the violence that would be too revealing if he did it directly. Although it is true that straight men use homophobia to prove how straight and masculine they are, Terrel might also be struggling to integrate his fixation on another boy into his understanding of his sexuality.19Moonlight challenges convention by not giving easy labels to anyone's sexual identity, including Terrel's. Instead of treating sexual orientation as a binary, the film shows what happens when men cannot accept same-sex desire as part of their self-understanding.Rather than reading Terrel's bullying as the self-hating actions of a closeted gay character, I treat his violence as a way to police the legitimate forms that homosocial affection can take.20 Terrel's bullying is an example of fag discourse that sanctions boys who violate norms of masculinity by branding them with the debased masculinity of being a faggot.21 He labels Chiron's sexuality to stigmatize his gender. This insight reveals that the film is more about the forces that structure the norms of male-bonding rather than gay sexuality per se.Sexual identity, sexual desire, and romantic attachment are separable, but the dominant culture collapses them all into the status of sexual orientation.22 The movie pushes against this normative conceptualization of sexuality by allowing the elements of sexual orientation to vary, thereby opening possibilities for noticing other aspects of sexuality besides gender of the sexual object. It is Terrel and his cronies that insist that Chiron is a “faggot,” understood now as an indictment of his nonnormative masculinity as an introverted loner as much as a sexual slur. They are the ones who focus on the gender of the object of his romantic attachment, Kevin. Yet the film offers other ways to make sense of Chiron's sexual identity if we place less weight on how he is defined by others.The most striking feature of Chiron's sexual desire is its dependence on emotional connection. Some Black queer male viewers were disappointed that Kevin and Chiron did not have sex when they reunited as adults.23 But what I found most telling in their reunion was Chiron's admission that he had not touched anyone since Kevin. This suggests that emotional attachment, not gender of the desired person, is the most important component of Chiron's sexual identity. In other words, the possibility that Chiron is a demisexual whose sexual desire depends on emotional connection is eclipsed by focus on his same-sex desire. Moonlight offers a queer account of intimacy that treats gender as merely one component of sexual identity.24It is this attention to the emotional and sexual nature of Black men's bonds in street culture that distinguishes Moonlight from the hood films that preceded it. Hood dramas and comedies of the past, like Boyz n the Hood and Friday, showed close friends being vulnerable with each other.25 Yet Moonlight shows that male intimacy can include sexual and romantic bonds. In that sense, the film intervenes into the gender politics of hood films. This intervention is clearest when contrasting its portrayal of Juan and Black as drug-dealers. Black, the nickname Chiron adopts after he gets out of prison and becomes a drug dealer, emulates Juan down to having the same toy crown on the dashboard of his car. Like Juan, he drives around checking up on the men who sell drugs on the corners for him. Unlike Juan, he invites one of his drug dealers into his home to count the money he earned that day. Although Juan conformed to heteronormativity by keeping his domestic life with Teresa separate from his work life, Black blurs the boundaries between home and work. The scene also blurs the boundary between homosociality and homoeroticism when Black clumsily flirts with his employee. I read their interaction as flirting due to Black's behavior and affect. He sits closer to his employee than we have seen him with any male peer except Kevin. He playfully touches the man when he implies that his cash was short and pretends to be mad at him. Black's awkwardness, touch, and physical closeness to his employee have the hallmarks of flirting. Yet, lacking the emotional closeness he had with Kevin, he only knows how to show his affection through negative affect. He arouses fear in the man rather than desire. Here again, negative affect reveals a deeper truth by showing that emotional connection is what eases his expression of sexual desire. Without emotional connection, he falls back on negative ways of relating to men he desires.We can read the absence of a sex scene when Kevin and Chiron reunite differently if we recognize emotional connection as the key to Chiron's sexual desire. We see that the real sex scene happened at the diner when Kevin lovingly prepared a meal for Chiron. The scene had the hallmarks of a sexual encounter, complete with the foreplay of watching Kevin cook the dishes, Black's anticipation of the food, and Kevin's focus on whether the meal satisfied Black. Rather than sexual touch, the scene featured the care, tenderness, and attentiveness that seemed to be Black's erotic language throughout the movie. The diner scene constituted sex within the logic of Black's sexual world, which hinged on his ability to be seen and cherished by another person. When Kevin later asks: “Who is you Chiron?” reverting to Black's given name rather than his nickname, he offers an intimacy akin to sex, the intimacy of meeting a beloved person's deepest need to be recognized underneath the masks they are wearing.The scene where Chiron beats Terrel with a desk takes on new meaning when understood as a critique of the constraining norms of homosocial bonds. In the wake of his beating, Chiron barges into a classroom and bashes a school desk against Terrel's back. Chiron's sudden violence recalls the title character in “Jeremy,” a song by quintessential 1990s grunge band Pearl Jam. In “Jeremy,” an emotionally neglected and bullied white boy explodes into violence by killing himself in front of his classmates. Although “Jeremy” examines anxieties about white suburban life of the 1990s, where workaholic parents are too self-centered to notice the victimization of middle-class boys, Moonlight tackles anxieties about Black urban boys of the same era whose crack addicted mothers are too self-centered to care that they are being bullied. In Moonlight, street culture, in the form of a surrogate family involved in the drug economy and a homosocial community of peers, takes the place of normative socializing forces such as the nuclear family and school. The differences in the response to bullying, including the circumstances that led to it and consequences of fighting back (that is, Jeremy's death contrasted with Chiron's imprisonment) distinguishes the particularity of “feeling down” from the universality of (white) depression.26It is important to note that Chiron beats Terrel without help, whereas Terrel enlisted a crowd of boys to beat up Chiron. Chiron forces Terrel to “stay down” in a way that Terrel could not achieve without the help of his buddies. The switch in who is kept down and how is a commentary about the constraints of homosocial masculinity. Chiron stays to true to himself throughout the movie no matter the cost, whereas Terrel is trapped within the limiting visions of homosocial masculinity. Chiron beats Terrel as a way to violently reject the constraints of normative homosocial masculinity as embodied by Terrel and his cronies. He embraces the possibility that Black men's bonds could legitimately include sexual touch and romantic attachment. Likewise, feeling down allows marginalized people to embrace the potentiality of love and belonging while acknowledging the weight of oppression.27 Rather than a scene of triumph, Chiron stays down in his negative emotion to have a clear-eyed view of the world as it is.