Leaving the Party Early & Alone #3: Moonlight in La La Land
This Oscars season had me thinking a lot about art and its limitations. In addition to the debate of when we should (and shouldn’t) separate the art from the artist (re: Casey Affleck and his win for Best Actor amid sexual harassment allegations), I found myself thinking about what constitutes the "best" picture or "best" screenplay. Isn't it all relative, and is that okay?
One of my roommates is part of the union for the Screen Actors Guild, so she gets screeners of some of the nominees. I watched Moonlight, Arrival, Jackie, and Fences on my couch in my pajamas. We also had Manchester by the Sea, but I can’t stand looking at Casey Affleck’s face, so I declined to view that one.
I went to see La La Land at the theater on its opening weekend, before the DVD arrived in our mailbox, because I happen to be a little in love with both Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. I’m not in love with musicals, so I felt a little ambivalent about a musical devoted to Los Angeles, a city I’ve only visited twice, but it was early December, winter was descending, and the reality of Donald Trump as president was beginning to take hold of my psyche. La La Land seemed like it would be the perfect antidote to my pre-holiday depression.
If you haven’t seen it or read anything about it and you don’t want anything “spoiled,” maybe don’t read any further…but long story short, La La Land was not quite the cure I was looking for. It’s not that anyone dies or is oppressed or is denied basic human rights—really, the worst that happens is two people who love each other find that love is sometimes not enough to overcome the obstacles that the world can throw in your way. But this movie had me crying in heaving sobs by the end, completely undone by a sorrow I wasn’t prepared for.
After the movie, one of my friends who I’d gone with said she didn’t think it was sad, which is completely fair. Honestly, I was crying before the end anyway, because all I could think of when the two main characters go on a date to the Griffith Observatory and float among the stars was my own memory of the first week of my relationship with my ex-husband, when we visited the Griffith Observatory during a trip to California (yeah, it was a weird beginning to a relationship) and watched the sunset, then looked at the solar system through a giant telescope and I felt like I was really contemplating the universe for the first time. All of this is to say that La La Land made me feel emotion on a very personal level.
Later, watching Moonlight, I was affected on a totally different level. The sadness and beauty of Moonlight captivated me, but I didn’t sob—not like I had when I watched La La Land. Chiron’s experiences were, for the most part, foreign to me, as a middle-class straight white woman. While the pain of feeling like an outsider, of trying to figure out who you are, of being scared to give or receive affection, is in many ways a universal human story (and thus part of Moonlight's appeal), the particular circumstances didn't hit me in the gut the way La La Land did. In fact, though I enjoyed all of the movies I was able to see on some level (I also went to see Hidden Figures at the movies), none of them quite lived up to the emotional resonance of La La Land.
This doesn't mean that I was sad when La La Land didn't win Best Picture. In fact, I was thrilled for Moonlight because it was such a gorgeous and evocative film, telling a completely different story than the narratives we are commonly told about black men. Just because a particular movie or book or painting or song happens to hit you in the gut doesn't mean it's a better piece of art than something else--enjoyment and emotional resonance is a personal and relative thing, something we often can't even explain to ourselves.
But I still wonder--is my appreciation of art somehow flawed or diminished because I tend to enjoy things more when they are refracted through my own limited lens of experience?
Bonus Puggle Photo
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