Fanon claims, “the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110). To juxtapose the euphemistic mode of Moonlightwithin Fanon's critical race phenomenology is to unmoor the fixated representation of a black male figure. The nonlinear, non-developmental narrative Jenkin portrayed, especially in the scene on the beach at night in the moonlight, poetically examines the amorphousness of Chiron's being and becoming that lies beyond self-repudiation, or a seeking of “a lost object” that renders melancholia and mourning and “the self-maximizing affirmation towards an ultimate happy path of normalcy” (Ricco, 31). In the scene when the boys kissed, the shot on the constant holding and letting go of sand on one's hand mirrors the movement of a sand clock, which I find the impending unease of running out of sand (time) on one side and flipping to the opposite side, starting the cycle once again all under one's full autonomy liberating.It is a powerful statement where the intimacy felt both strange, exotic and invigorating to Chiron — the kind of feeling that was/can never felt before.
The moment/movement is conjoined with “the stasis of the momentary” (23), a luminous open memory Chiron will always sealed and preserved as an affective moment. What Ricco claims is that “the stasis or inertia of a moment can be its own form of movement… toward neutral affect” (24). By theorizing neutral affect as a temporal genre, Ricco argues that “we are dealing with a historicity of sense or feeling that in its a-temporality defies the laws and categories of genre, requiring us to move from the singular to the anonymous, rather than from genre to the general” (22). The ambivalent, unsayable sign in Chiron is a gentle rejection to the ontological predication of a Black man, but what it does more is to halo the sense and feeling Chiron pulsates in that particular neutral a-temporality as a reminder to embrace such reserved gesture of resistance.
Reference:
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967. (Chapter 5)
Ricco, John Paul. 2019. “Mourning, Melancholia, Moonlight.” CR: The New Centennial Review 19(2): 21-46
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