![]() The beauty of the Barry Jenkins-directed feature, which went on to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, is how it forsook any kind of neat remedy on identity, sexual orientation, or gender performance. The anguished triptych is an extraordinary study in distance: Juan (Mahershala Ali) teaching a terrified Little (Alex Hibbert) how to swim Chiron (Trevonte Rhodes) reuniting with Kevin (Andre Holland) in a Miami diner, transforming the eatery into an Eden of unspoken desire. Originally adapted from playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the film is flush with scenes of tenderness that keenly measure the depths of belonging, vulnerability, and black male intimacy. In 2016, that shifted with the release of Moonlight, a queer black love story that went mainstream. The structures of Hollywood simply don’t allow for the same kind of cultural disruption, no matter how hard Netflix has tried to shatter that model. Comparatively, films could feel a little less exciting. It was unavoidable, mostly, given that the chief cultural engines of the 2010s were image-centric innovations: updates to the iPhone camera, Instagram, the permanence of surveillance culture, TikTok. ![]() A jittery drone and disquieting bass blasts (scandals, notifications, atrocities) slowly drown us out, until all that’s left are discordance, disunity, devolution. We the people are the lone piano, plinking nervously in the foreground, straining for a melody. "Hand Covers Bruise," the opening track, which underscores Mark Zuckerberg’s scampering between Harvard’s redbrick dorms with baleful foreshadowing, might as well be the soundtrack to the decade. All of that was topped off with an Academy Award-winning techno-industrial-horror score that launched Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross as the decade’s composers of America’s anxieties ( Gone Girl, Bird Box, Watchmen). Aaron Sorkin’s best script, a dolphin-skin-smooth nightmare, and Jesse Eisenberg’s best performance, megalomaniacal paranoia at its most delicious, nailed (spiritually, if not entirely factually) Facebook’s slippery origins and presaged its assaults on privacy, democracy, and consciousness. “The movie,” as Facebook executives still indignantly call it, set the tone for the decade in both film and the tech metanarrative.
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