Explor­ing black mas­culin­i­ty in Boyz n the Hood and Moonlight

“You got­ta show them you ain’t soft.” These words, spo­ken to Moon­light​’s pro­tag­o­nist, Chi­ron, as a young child, rever­ber­ate through­out Bar­ry Jenk­ins’ film – a qui­et mas­ter­piece told as a trip­tych of vignettes about Chi­ron grow­ing up poor, gay and black in Amer­i­ca. Jenk­ins’ and screen­writer Tarell Alvin’s expe­ri­ences of grow­ing up in Mia­mi are cru­cial in cre­at­ing a nuanced, pal­pa­bly real por­tray­al of the social ten­sions that thrive in poor black neigh­bour­hoods. Their real-life expe­ri­ences with peo­ple make it onto the screen, turn­ing the pic­ture into a reflec­tion of their child­hood in a man­ner that evokes John Singleton’s sem­i­nal 1991 film Boyz n the Hood.

In the open­ing scene of Moon­light, we’re intro­duced to a drug deal­er named Juan (Maher­sha­la Ali) and his cor­ner boy, with Jenk­ins draw­ing on per­son­al expe­ri­ence to set up clichés only to imme­di­ate­ly sub­vert them. Juan, despite his harm­ful pro­fes­sion, is a kind and sur­pris­ing­ly tol­er­ant man who all but takes Chi­ron under his wing, nick­nam­ing him ​‘Lit­tle’, teach­ing him how to swim, and attempt­ing to instil in him the film’s most impor­tant life les­son: ​“Nev­er let some­one else tell you who you sup­posed to be.”

Both Moon­light and Boyz n the Hood promi­nent­ly incor­po­rate black music, not just as ref­er­ence points for the eras they respec­tive­ly por­tray, but as the­mat­ic hooks too. Most notable is the rela­tion­ship between both films and hip-hop. Gen­er­al­ly, hip-hop is a plat­form for real sto­ries that might oth­er­wise be ignored, to be told – which is essen­tial­ly the same thing that John Sin­gle­ton and Jenk­ins accom­plish with their films. The close rela­tion­ship to this genre of music makes per­fect sense. To this day hip-hop music main­tains a com­plex rela­tion­ship with homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and images of mas­culin­i­ty, which are only now begin­ning to be chal­lenged by main­stream acts like Young Thug.

But 20 years ago, when Boyz n the Hood was released, gangs­ta rap was still very promi­nent and hard­ly known for its tol­er­ance. Gangs­ta rap remains an out­let for anger and frus­tra­tion, its vio­lent brag­gado­cio evolv­ing from a refusal to be trod­den under­foot (see: ​‘Straight Out­ta Comp­ton’, ​‘Fuk Tha Police’, pret­ty much any NWA song). Yet this also extends into a refusal to appear vul­ner­a­ble, ​‘fem­i­nine’ or just plain weird. Boyz n the Hood (espe­cial­ly in the cast­ing of Ice Cube as Dough­boy) has a clos­er asso­ci­a­tion with the grit­ty, dis­turb­ing real­ism of gangs­ta rap, but also includes the pop­u­lar black gen­res that pre­ced­ed hip-hop, with funk, soul and dis­co punc­tu­at­ing sev­er­al sig­nif­i­cant moments of the film.

Moon­light con­fronts the issue of mas­culin­i­ty head on through its choice of music. Jenk­ins uses chopped and screwed music – a remix in which the tem­po of a song is slowed down that orig­i­nat­ed in south­ern hip-hop. This idea is also applied to Nicholas Brittell’s fan­tas­tic score. The recur­ring theme heard ear­ly on in the film has its high notes sup­pressed, slowed down, going from a reg­u­lar speed and pitch dur­ing Chiron’s child­hood, to a much low­er pitch and slow­er speed as the sto­ry unfolds.

While the con­nec­tion between ​‘Lit­tle’ and Chi­ron is absolute­ly clear, the char­ac­ter we meet in the film’s third act is decid­ed­ly not some­one we recog­nise straight away. ​‘Black’ (Tre­vante Rhodes) is whol­ly a prod­uct of his envi­ron­ment, opt­ing to mim­ic acts of mas­culin­i­ty that he’s wit­nessed through­out his life rather than act on his own impuls­es. In this seg­ment of the film, ​’Black’ plays chop and screw ver­sions of R&B songs, one of which is Jidenna’s ​‘Clas­sic Man’, a nod at how Chi­ron acts as a ​‘clas­sic’ (het­ero­sex­u­al) man.

Of course, ​‘Black’ is fronting, just how Kevin taught him. In Boyz n the Hood, no one illus­trates this kind of pos­tur­ing – and where it gets you – bet­ter than Dough­boy. Dur­ing a scene where a night out turns sour, he says: ​“This is why fools get shot all the time – try­ing to show how hard they is.” Both films are make sure to show where this mas­cu­line one-upman­ship leads. In a par­tic­u­lar­ly painful moment in Moon­light, Kevin attempts to prove his mas­culin­i­ty by beat­ing Chi­ron, who is tar­get­ed for his per­ceived lack of tra­di­tion­al mas­culin­i­ty by his peers. Here, Jenk­ins shows the lengths that some young black men have to go to in order to hide any per­ceived vulnerability.

A lot of char­ac­ters in Moon­light assume that mas­culin­i­ty means assert­ing dom­i­nance. Kevin is the first exam­ple of this, play­ing up to an image of a het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty that prac­ti­cal­ly comes across as par­o­dy. A sim­i­lar­ly humor­ous sequence occurs in Boyz n the Hood, when Tre (Cuba Good­ing Jr) tries to impress his dad with a pho­ny sto­ry about a sex­u­al con­quest. Kevin attempts to keep up appear­ances are des­per­ate, espe­cial­ly dur­ing a scene on a beach with Chi­ron. Fol­low­ing the near-admis­sion that he cries, he back­tracks and responds: ​“Nah. I wish I did.” It’s almost com­i­cal that even in a scene as inti­mate as this, Kevin feels the need to main­tain his hyper-mas­cu­line façade.

Moon­light and Boyz n the Hood may be vast­ly dif­fer­ent in style and tone, but there’s enough the­mat­ic sem­blance for these films to be con­sid­ered com­pan­ion pieces of sorts. They are per­son­al, unique and hon­est explo­rations of the con­nec­tion between the hos­tile envi­ron­ments that young African-Amer­i­can men are met with, and how they respond. In response to the ques­tion of what ​‘makes a man’, both Jenk­ins and Sin­gle­ton pro­vide a sim­i­lar answer: it’s not about adher­ing to or per­form­ing spe­cif­ic gen­der stereo­types, but rather a feel­ing of inde­pen­dence, and the right to choose a life for one’s self.