Had Moonlight not come along, hard on its heels, Manchester By the Sea might have seemed like the most emotionally revealing film about a man to have been released in years. But since Moonlight is probably one of the most emotionally revealing films about a man ever to have been made, it wins.
It isn’t fair to set the two in competition. They’re doing similarly important things in their different ways – exploring negative aspects of masculinity. In Manchester By the Sea a single, unlucky catastrophe turns a warm, fun-loving young man into an angry, aggressive, emotionally shut-down loner. In Moonlight, a whole childhood conspires to drive a man to become a numb synecdoche of all that has blighted his own upbringing.
It’s undoubtedly because I’ve recently been diagnosed with a trauma-induced anxiety disorder myself. But I immediately saw the symptoms of chronic or complex post-traumatic stress disorder in both leading characters.
In Manchester By the Sea, Lee Chandler, played wonderfully by Casey Affleck, displays symptoms of chronic PTSD, in which a single trauma comes to dominate the brain’s neural pathways in an extremely unhealthy way. You can also see these symptoms simply as emotional reactions that any person in Lee’s situation might develop. But the point is this: we are so used to these destructive and damaging responses to life’s vicissitudes that they seem natural rather than horribly dysfunctional.
In Moonlight, Chiron, played by three actors as a child, a teenager and an adult, already has complex PTSD, to my eyes, as a little kid. Complex PTSD is brought on when a person is subjected to a series of traumas, most often by a caregiver they ought to be able to trust unconditionally, but from whom there is little chance of escape. Abused or neglected children are very susceptible to C-PTSD. By the time Chiron is an adult, from my reading of the film, C-PTSD is rampant.
There’s a lot of controversy at the moment about whether armchair diagnosis of mental health problems should be indulged. I think it’s totally valid when the character being examined is fictional. I’d say it’s more than valid. It’s necessary if humans are going to get to a point where we can understand ourselves and the messes that we make.
In Manchester By the Sea, Lee is a man who really, really needs therapy, though this isn’t mentioned as an option in the film. The culture he’s in is far too blue-collar for that. Lee fights his miserable losing battle with his trauma, guilt and shame alone. As with Chiron in Moonlight, his symptoms are classic too. It’s so plain in the film that what a psychiatrist would call symptoms are also self-protecting emotional responses, recognisable to anyone who cared to view them in that way.
Having mentioned the controversy around amateur diagnosis, I’m now going to tread carefully. After the screening of Moonlight I attended, there was a Q&A session with Tarell Alvin McCraney. He wrote the play on which Moonlight is based, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.
McCraney makes no secret of the fact that the early part of the story, of a boy growing up in Miami with a crack-addicted mother, a flawed father-figure who loses his life very young, and the experience of being bullied as a “faggot” by his peers, is based on his own life. McCraney’s life clearly has not followed the trajectory of Chiron’s because, you’ll be glad to know, the film doesn’t end with our hero sitting down to write an amazing play that becomes a film. You’ve seen that movie already, more than once.
Boys are told not to cry, told to fight back, told to toughen up, in a way that girls less frequently are
McCraney – intelligent, gloriously articulate, handsome, elegant, funny, charming, polished, self-deprecating – is also frank. On the platform he acknowledged that he knows how people see him, which is pretty much the way I saw him, as listed above. It wasn’t just me. The room was full of love for him. However, he says, this is not at all how he sees himself. Instead, he is “terrified”, has “intimacy issues”, sometimes can’t bear crowds and has to be alone, and sometimes finds himself drifting away from feeling present in the world. He has survived his upbringing and thrived fantastically well. But the psychological scars are there and he is aware of them.
McCraney says that he doesn’t find writing about his past cathartic. Instead, it depletes him. It costs him a lot. I think that while some men, men like Lee, fight with their fists, McCraney fights with his creativity. It’s a much healthier way to do battle with trauma. But that’s still what it is – a battle with trauma.
I find myself thinking that while both Lee and Chiron are extreme examples, a lot of the cliches about the transformation of boyhood into manhood centre on the suppression of trauma. Boys are told not to cry, told to fight back, told to toughen up, in a way that girls less frequently are. (Although girls do toughen up. I did.) Sure, this can result in creativity like McCraney’s. But our experience of the world and its history suggests that very often it results in bombast and aggression, anger and violence.
We are used to hearing about theories of gender as a performance. I wonder if that’s too glib. Maybe gender is more of a neurological response, with hyper-masculinity a pathological response to trauma, and hyper-femininity a defence against an aggressive masculine pathology. Or maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree. Who knows?
The crucial thing is that these films are urging people to look hard at these profound issues around human behaviour, and really think about what makes people who they are. I’m thankful for both of them, and for the pain and struggle sometimes involved in “being a man” that they so sensitively portray. Especially Moonlight. I don’t think there’s ever been another film quite like it.
It’s painful watching the male crisis onscreen – more painful in real life | Deborah Orr
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