On Friday, on her Twitter, Angelica Jade summed up a conversation about Moonlight:

I don’t think MOONLIGHT is universal and it shouldn’t have to be. Part of its strength is its specificity.

One of the many qualities of Moonlight is how specific the movie is about growing up black, gay, poor, and southern (especially close to Miami). When I saw Moonlight, we were treated to a post-film conversation between a lesbian and a gay southern black man who had just watched the film for his first time. For a good period of the conversation, he could barely hold it together. Moonlight spoke directly to him, and to many aspects of his life that he felt hadn’t been addressed by more mainstream (read: white) homosexual films.

That isn’t to say that Moonlight‘s specificity means that it is an exclusive film. Many people who don’t fit its very specific demographic haven’t been left out in the cold. General audiences from a wide variety of backgrounds – straight and bi, male, female or trans, white, black or latino – have found much to admire in Moonlight and have come away with a deeper understanding of the character if not themselves. Their enjoyment has led to the conversation about whether the movie is universal because audiences of many backgrounds have enjoyed it on personal levels.

The two reactions bring up the question of what is specificity and universality? What is relatability in the face of a character that is nothing like you, and what value does having a character exactly like you bring to the movie itself?

Specificity and Relatability
Ta-Nahisi Coates opened this conversation back in 2014 as a critique about Boyhood in an essay titled “Not Everyone’s Boyhood.” Richard Linklater made a movie about growing up in the Texas as a white son of a single mother with modest means. Though many people identified with Boyhood and took it as a movie that was generically universal, Coates noted that it almost completely avoided the topic of race, an issue central to the lives of many People of Color. He also noted that, by being so generic, Linklater was normalizing, and subsequently approving of, a life in which the conversation of race never has to occur. While he noted, correctly, that many women and people of color had indeed enjoyed and even related to the movie, there was something insidious about its “universal” nature.

This summer, the Ghostbusters reboot was released with a gender flipped cast. The previously male Ghostbusters were replaced with women, and their female secretary became a male one. The conversation that emerged from many female-focused geek circles was “I’m seeing a summer action blockbuster led by women without the movie making a big deal out of the characters being women. I’m seeing what it would be like for me to be the natural protagonist of a film (especially without being a sexpot).” For lady geeks, having a lady geek character in the film added a personal dimension to the content of the film. This dimension of specificity added to their appreciation of a movie that was otherwise a generic film designed to be enjoyed by a broad, universal, audience.

Similarly, this summer I found movies that were very specifically about my situation (even as they are broadly relatable to many gay men). Both Other People and Closet Monster wrecked me because I found specificity in their gay male presentations that related directly to my experiences as an adult and as a teenager, respectively. During most movies, I have to sympathize or empathize with people who, largely, don’t fit into my personal experience. They’re straight, or white, or movie star hot (sadly, I don’t look like Jake Gyllenhaal). They live in a different culture, or are a different age, or marital status, or financial status, or strength level, or… The majority of the movies force me to relate to people with whom I have nothing in common, including sexuality.

Specificity can also patch over mediocre movies. There are many terrible gay movies that have been championed in the gay community simply because they’re about a gay sensibility. In a more universal sense, many many people who like La La Land say that the movie spoke directly to them as a person. These people are largely white, mostly straight, and generally relate to the artistic side of things. Some have said that they see the flaws other people see, but it doesn’t matter because the movie spoke directly to them. This specificity meant the world to them.

But, specificity can also create divisions. Martin Scorsese’s Silence is, essentially, Apocalypse Now for Portuguese Catholics. The Japanese have outlawed Christianity, and a Japanese inquisition has forced the apostasy of a Jesuit missionary. Two more missionaries are set out to go rescue the guy and find themselves embroiled in Christianity while it is being persecuted. Many people of faith, and many who have struggled with faith will probably find the idea of faith under adverse pressure to be fascinating. But, for this lapsed catholic, I couldn’t help but think of the irony that the Portugese had their own inquisition happening at the same time (along with the Spanish and the Romans) and were now facing an inquisition in a foreign land. Silence is a movie that speaks to certain segments of the population, but alienates other segments of the population.

Similarly, an Argentinian documentary called Las Lindas (The Pretty Ones) was shown at Seattle International Film Festival, and spurred walkouts upon walkouts…at the pre-screening! The film was about a woman trying to figure out the relationship of women and expectations of beauty in a culture where her friends were seen beautiful and popular (and found self-worth in that). The documentary was so specific it alienated much of the audience, but some women found it recognizable and enlightening.

Universality
The flip side of the equation is universality. What do we mean when we say a movie is universal? Is universality determined by how many people can see themselves in the movie? Or is it in how much the movie works to appeal to a diverse cross-section of humanity?

The fight against the claiming of Moonlight as a universal film is related to the conversation about cultural appropriation. For cultural appropriation, people of privilege take a specific element of a culture and claim it as their own. When a large enough group of privileged people appreciates a film such as Moonlight about a specific culture, many people fear that by claiming it is a universal film reduces it to a generic movie eliminating the gay-ness, the black-ness, and/or the southern-ness of the movie. By being claimed by other audiences, these critics fear that those other audiences will dismiss the full message of the movie and parcel out what they can appreciate.

This fear isn’t without merit. Though Boyz ‘N The Hood is about the generic themes of coming of age and raising a son, it is specifically about being in the hood, and few people have claimed that Boyz is a universal film. Similarly, Do The Right Thing has few people claiming it is a universal movie, when it is specifically about the black identity in Brooklyn.

And, heck, cultural appropriation isn’t dead. The other awards favorite, La La Land, participates in mindless cultural appropriation by the dumpster full. It’s the story of two white people falling in love in a musical styled with Broadway-pop music. But, one of those white people is trying to save jazz – an art form developed by southern African-Americans – from John Legend, one of the few black people in the movie with more than a handful of lines.

Another possibility meaning for “universal” is that a movie is simple enough to have themes easily transposed across demographic lines. Moonlight, in its most basic terms, is about a kid growing up in a broken home where his single mother is too young to be a proper mother. The boy finds parental figures where he can find them as he comes of age to deal with his outsiderness (read: his homosexuality). Specific events that happen as a child and as a teenager affect who he becomes as an adult. Many people of various backgrounds can relate to these themes at their most basic, so simple themes could be adding to the label “universal.”

So, what do we mean when we say a movie is “universal?” It, itself, is a generic term that tries to lump all people as connected by our humanity. But, even that varies from person to person. The attempts at universality create a pushback (Boyhood) as does the attempts to claim something as universal. Maybe universal is a term so generic it’s rendered meaningless.

Salesmanship
One part of this conversation that’s missing is the idea of salesmanship. You can’t have a conversation about a movie if nobody wants to see that movie. In the culture where 700+ movies are released in a year (on Linoleum Knife, they said that 925 movies were shown in Los Angeles this year alone), many people want to see movies either about themselves or that they can relate to. Perhaps people calling a movie “universal” is a form of salesmanship that undersells the cultural conversation of Moonlight.

An earlier conversation about Manchester By the Sea brought up Todd VanDerWerff’s review from Toronto focused on assuring a jaded audience that Manchester was a more unusual movie than its “mopey white dude deals with grief” log line suggests. Todd’s article was pulling multiple duties by reviewing the movie, selling the movie, and also trying to analyze the movie. But, the salesman aspects of the review, that is by trying to claim that Manchester transcends its Sad White Dude genre (a genre that has been exhausted as of late) to deal with depression, was seen as problematic by hewing too close to armchair social justice. And, of course, it was a white dude writing about a movie about a white dude, so criticizing the Sad White Dude genre and claiming this was an exemplary entry in it felt hypocritical and ironic (bringing us back to specificity and relatability).

Perhaps calling Moonlight universal is a calculated appeal to audiences who would normally abandon such movies because they didn’t believe it would appeal to their sensibilities. Is there a truth to it? Sure. But, these claims might also contain a bit of disingenuous salesmanship.

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The intent of this wankery thinkpiece is to discuss the types of stories that get made, our relation to those stories, and how we communicate about our experiences with those stories. Though it is largely about the culture of film and how it relates to our Now, I’m also striving to talk about the interconnectedness that good cinema can create. I previously linked Boyz N The Hood and Boyhood in a piece on racial difference in America, that called out the relative segregation of American society. But, good cinema can bring us to think about the parts of society we don’t normally experience. Both Boyz N The Hood and Boyhood are linked by their themes of growing up in America, despite their being completely different movies that deal with completely separate issues.

Perhaps that’s what specificity and universality is all about. Maybe people are calling Moonlight “universal” because it is able to communicate a specific experience to a broad audience. Maybe it is that specificity that makes it broadly appealing. But, there’s something intensely personal about seeing yourself on screen that can be taken for granted when people see a movie they appreciate that isn’t actually about themselves.