There is something deeply intimate and quite unsettling about returning to a film that has outlived entire versions of yourself, which is exactly what I found myself doing this past weekend when I went to the theater with a group of friends to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Moonlight, one of the greatest films of the 21st century. Any opportunity I get to talk about Moonlight, I seize the moment, to the point my friends know how much certain films mean to me. It’s kinda my love language to ask, “hey you wanna come to the local cinema with me, and pregame at the theater bar,” because I hate company. For me, getting the opportunity to see Moonlight in theaters felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity to get to see a film that changed history, and in my opinion introduced a lot of people to A24 (before they went lame). I was convinced we HAD to get to the theater early as it was probably going to be sold out. I had watched Blue Velvet at that same theater a couple months earlier and the theater was PACKED. I scurried up the hallway with my espresso martini and made my way into the theater, hoping there would be a row that all 7 of us could sit in. I turned around the corner to find there was only one person in that whole theater. I gasped loudly and immediately laughed, mostly at myself for having gone on an anxious tangent about whether we would get good seats, as if the theater were going to be packed. But beneath the laughter was a sense of real disappointment. Here was a film about Black boyhood, Black queer boyhood, and the fraught passage into manhood that had left an ineradicable mark on my own understanding of cinema and of myself, and yet the film that had once felt so immense to me at thirteen was now playing to an almost vacant theater ten years later. There was something almost dissonant about it. I had spent years thinking about Moonlight as a film of enormous cultural and personal significance, only to sit inside a room that seemed to suggest otherwise. And maybe that was what made seeing it again feel so strange. I was not simply returning to a film I loved. I was returning to the first film that made me want to understand why I loved movies in the first place.
I’ve seen Moonlight a million times at this point. I first watched it when I was thirteen, a freshman in high school, and for whatever reason my world felt more Afrocentric then than it is now. Moonlight was all I was hearing about upon its theatrical release, and although I didn’t know it at the time, that film would become one of the earliest things to make me want to understand cinematic language that at the time, I felt limited to. I knew I loved creative writing, but I didn’t yet know what that would manifest into for me. What I did know was that Moonlight was making me feel something I couldn’t quite articulate, and that inability to articulate it became its own kind of fascination. I wanted the vocabulary to explain why the mise-en-scène mattered, why the cinematography moved me, why the score seemed to deepen certain scenes, and why certain images remained lodged in my mind long after the scene had ended. I wanted to understand the mechanics behind my own emotional response. At thirteen, I could recognize that something in the film was reaching into me, but I didn’t yet have the language to identify what it was touching. In that sense, Moonlight did more than make me want to become a filmmaker. It made me want to learn the language of cinema because I wanted to understand myself through the things that moved me, as if learning the grammar of the image might also teach me how to read myself.
There is something particularly significant about encountering Moonlight at thirteen, when childhood is beginning to recede but self-consciousness hasn’t yet given you the language to make sense of what you are becoming. I was old enough to recognize the emotional weight of what I was watching, but still young enough to lack the vocabulary for why certain things felt so familiar. I could recognize Chiron’s loneliness before I could articulate my own and his desire to be accepted before I could explain how much of my own identity was being negotiated through that same. What I recognized in him was not simply the awkwardness of being thirteen, but the particular vulnerability of being a Black child learning that the world already had an idea of what a Black boy was supposed to be. Chiron is constantly being read before he has the language to read himself: as weak, strange, feminine, vulnerable, different. His silence becomes something other people interpret for him, and his softness becomes something the world treats as an invitation to discipline, ridicule, or violence. I understood the feeling of being watched, of being made conscious of yourself through other people’s perceptions, of wanting to belong while slowly realizing that belonging might require performing a version of Blackness you had not yet figured out how to become. It was an identification with his interiority, with the quiet and sometimes disorienting experience of growing up Black and learning that identity is not only something you discover within yourself, but something other people are constantly trying to define for you. That may be what made the film so formative for me. At thirteen, I was watching Chiron search for a language for himself while, unknowingly, I was doing the same thing.
In retrospect, I recognize that I was living through my own “Act II: Chiron,” occupying an uneasy terrain of Black adolescence where softness, difference, desire, and vulnerability can feel like things you have to explain, defend, or sometimes even conceal. I did not share Chiron’s exact story, but I understood the longing underneath it. At thirteen, I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to fit in. I had angst, rage, shyness, anxiety, dreams, desire, and a growing awareness that being seen did not necessarily mean being understood. I was still learning how to exist in a world that seemed to constantly communicate that there was a correct way to be a girl, a Black girl, a Black teenager, a Black friend. I think that distinction matters, particularly when we consider how often Black children are denied the luxury of being unfinished. There is a particular violence in the way Black boys are expected to understand the world around them while simultaneously being denied the innocence we so readily associate with childhood. Black boys are often infantilized when society wants to deny them agency, yet prematurely aged when it wants to assign them responsibility, danger, or culpability. Black boyhood becomes a contradiction that rarely allows Black boys to simply be boys. Moonlight refuses to make Chiron legible through either of these extremes. Little is a child, but he is not oblivious. He is vulnerable, but he is remarkably observant. He is quiet, but his silence is not emptiness. He is absorbing everything: the hostility of the other boys, the instability of his home, his mother’s addiction, Juan’s tenderness, the strange intimacy of a world he is beginning to understand but cannot yet name. By the time we arrive at Chiron, we see how much that observation has hardened into repression. Little’s silence becomes Chiron’s guardedness. His vulnerability becomes something he learns to conceal. His sensitivity, rather than disappearing, becomes buried beneath the demands of a world that has taught him what it will punish him for revealing. That is what makes the film’s three-act structure so devastating. Little, Chiron, and Black are not three unrelated versions of the same character. They are three stages of a Black boy learning, adapting, performing, and surviving. Black is not some entirely different person from Little. He is Little after years of learning which parts of himself the world will make dangerous to reveal.
By the time we meet Black, the question is no longer simply who Chiron is, but who he has had to become. The muscles, the car, the gold teeth, the drugs, the hardened voice, even the nickname itself communicate a version of Black masculinity that is immediately legible to the world around him. Moonlight does not treat masculinity as something Chiron simply possesses. It treats it as something he has had to construct, a kind of armor assembled from every lesson he has learned about what the world will punish, exploit, or perceive as weakness in a Black man. Black is a performance of survival as much as it is an identity. He has made himself physically imposing, emotionally guarded, and almost deliberately difficult to read. He has become the kind of man nobody can easily hurt because he has spent years making sure nobody can easily reach him. And then Kevin calls. It is such a seemingly ordinary interruption, but Kevin’s voice reaches backward through everything Black has constructed and reminds him of the person who existed before he learned how to make Chiron disappear. Kevin remembers something Black has spent years trying not to remember: that underneath all of this performance is still a boy who wanted to be touched, wanted to be held, wanted to be understood. That recognition follows Black when he visits his mother in rehab, another person from the past who forces him to confront the parts of himself that adulthood has not magically erased. His mother is no longer simply the source of chaos or pain that Chiron experienced as a child; she is a woman whose own wounds have shaped the wounds she passed down to her son, and Black is finally old enough to see the complexity of that without pretending the damage did not happen. By the time he arrives at the diner, the armor begins to loosen. There is something almost radical about watching this hypermasculine version of Chiron sit across from Kevin in such an ordinary space and allow himself to be known again. The man who has spent years performing, who drove all the way back home, has now again become quiet. He listens. He remembers. He lets himself exist without having to prove anything. And when Kevin embraces him, the moment feels like Chiron is finally occupying two versions of him in the same body. The embrace does not erase the man he became or redeem him from the life he chose; it simply reminds us that Chiron was never completely buried beneath Black. He was there the entire time, waiting for someone who knew him before the performance to make it safe enough for him to come back.
That is what made watching Moonlight with my friends feel unexpectedly complicated. Most of the people sitting beside me had only entered my life within the past year, which meant that while they knew me intimately in the present, they had no relationship to the girl who first encountered this film at thirteen. I had known, and I had loved other people then. People who, at the time, I assumed would be around much longer than they actually were and there’s a particular kind of grief attached to realizing that you have lost friendships you once thought were permanent. It is not always a dramatic falling out, either. Sometimes people simply become strangers slowly. Conversations become less frequent or the inside jokes stop being funny because you no longer share the context that made them funny in the first place. Eventually, you realize you haven’t spoken in months, then years, and the person who once knew so much about you becomes someone you would have to explain yourself to. I think part of me was grieving those friendships, including a version of myself while sitting in that theater, even though I had not gone there intending to grieve anything. Maybe that is what unsettled me most about the night: I was surrounded by people who know me now, while the film kept pulling me toward a version of myself that none of them could have known. I wondered if they ever saw a glimpse of her but didn’t know? I wondered if there was someone in my life who with one call could bring me back to who I once was? There is something beautiful about that kind of friendship, the privilege of being known in the present without being burdened by every version of who you used to be. But there is something frightening about it too. I know now that people can leave. I know that friendships can end without either person necessarily deciding that they should. I know that the person sitting beside me today may not be sitting beside me ten years from now. I know this because I have already lived through it. So underneath the joy of that night was a quiet anxiety about impermanence. I was grateful to be surrounded by people I had come to love, but I could not stop thinking about how easily the present becomes the past. Would these people become memories too? Would I someday think about that theater the way I now think about the friendships I had at thirteen, remembering how much those people once meant to me while struggling to understand how we became strangers?
Looking backward has always felt a little dangerous to me. I’m not religious but the writer in me does read The Bible for writing inspiration. Whenever I'm hit with a pain of nostalgia or of the past I'm reminded of Lot’s wife, who looked back at what she had been told to leave behind and was transformed into a pillar of salt by the act of looking. I do not mean that memory is punishment, or that we should move through life without looking back. If anything, I'd argue that Moonlight made me realize how impossible that is. The film itself is an act of looking backward. It asks us to watch a boy become a teenager become a man, to sit with the distance between those selves while understanding that none of them can be completely separated from the others. Watching it at twenty-three, I was doing something similar with my own life. I was looking directly at the girl I had been and realizing how much of her I had carried forward without noticing. The frightening part of memory is not simply that the past is gone. It is that the person who lived it is gone too, and yet somehow she is still inside you.
That was part of what made watching Moonlight at this point in my life so emotional. I am now a lesbian. I have lost my virginity, I have graduated high school, dropped out of college, loved people, experienced heartbreak, experienced the humiliation and exhilaration of being known by another person, and slowly became the filmmaker I did not know I wanted to be at thirteen. So much of my life exists now that my thirteen-year-old self had no frame of reference for. There are experiences I have now that she could not have imagined, identities she had not yet inhabited, heartbreaks she had not yet survived. Even the friends I was watching Moonlight with ten years ago were no longer my friends (I actually watched it alone, but metaphorically!). My life had changed almost beyond recognition within those ten years, but my love for the film had not. That was probably the strangest part of the experience for me because sometimes I wondered if my life looks stagnant to others. I mean I still don’t drive, I live at home with my mom, I sometimes wonder, have I actually grown up? Had anything really changed? It was very interesting to sit with that thought after the film had ended. Moonlight had remained remarkably stable in my life while almost everything around it had changed. It became a kind of fixed point I could return to, even as I became increasingly unfamiliar with the person who had first watched it.
Maybe that’s what I mean when I say Black boys still look blue in Moonlight. Blue, in Moonlight, is beautiful, but it is never simply just an aesthetic pinpoint. It carries melancholy, intimacy, desire, loneliness, memory. It is the color of the ocean Juan teaches Little to float in, but it is also the color that later follows Chiron into adulthood, lingering across his body as if the child he once was has never completely left him. Blue makes Chiron beautiful without making him easily readable. It illuminates him while keeping something of him concealed, refusing the expectation that looking at a Black boy should mean immediately understanding him. There is something particularly significant about seeing a Black boy rendered this way. Black boys and Black men have so often been represented through images of hardness: strength, violence, anger, hypermasculinity. The visual language surrounding Black masculinity has historically left very little room for softness unless that softness can be disciplined, explained, or interpreted as weakness. Moonlight refuses that visual economy. It allows a Black boy to possess an interior life without demanding that he make it available to us. Little can be frightened without becoming pathetic. Chiron can be queer without the film reducing him to his sexuality. He can desire another man without that desire becoming a spectacle for the audience. He can be violent and still vulnerable. He can become hardened and still be loved. He can carry all of these contradictions without the film forcing them into a single, convenient definition of Black manhood. He can simply be blue.
Ten years later, that image means something different to me because I understand now that growing up does not necessarily make a person easier to understand. If anything, adulthood can make us more complicated. We become better at hiding. We learn which parts of ourselves are socially acceptable to reveal, which parts need explanation, and which parts are safer kept private. We learn how to perform stability even when we are falling apart, how to become legible to other people while still protecting the parts of ourselves they may never fully understand. Maybe that is the sadness of growing up, or maybe it is the beauty of it. When I first walked into that nearly empty theater, I was bothered because I thought Moonlight deserved to be witnessed by a room full of people. Ten years after its release, I wanted evidence that the film still mattered. I wanted the crowd, the packed rows, that collective feeling that everyone in the room understood the significance of what we were sitting down to watch. Instead, there were seven of us. And maybe, in retrospect, that was enough. Because the film had remained the same. I was the one who had changed. I was sitting beside people who had entered my life at entirely different points, people whose histories I had not known at thirteen and whose futures I cannot possibly know now. I kept thinking about how little we can ever truly know about the people sitting beside us, even the people we love, and how strange it is that friendship asks us to trust one another despite that unknowability. I wondered how much of them I truly know, how much of me they truly know, and whether ten years from now any of us will still be sitting beside each other. I hope we are. But I know now that hope is not the same thing as permanence. So for now, I will take the night that I had: seven friends, an almost empty theater, two espresso martinis, and a film I have loved since I was thirteen. I will take the strange, bittersweet realization that sometimes the most meaningful part of growing up is not becoming someone entirely new, but realizing how many versions of yourself you have already had to say goodbye to. Black boys still look blue in Moonlight. Ten years later, so much has changed. And somehow, the blue remains.
