Hannah Skjellum, “Close-Up: Moonlight: ‘Can’t Be No Worse Out Here’: Radical Queer Black Ecologies in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight,” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 14, no. 1 (Fall 2022): 284–306, doi: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.16. Close-Up: Moonlight “Can’t Be No Worse Out Here”: Radical Queer Black Ecologies in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight Hannah Skjellum Abstract Barry Jenkins’s 2016 flm Moonlight initially presents the argument of the danger of cultural space to queer Black men and boys that can only be escaped in natural space. But this article seeks to complicate the binary of nature and culture through an ecocrit- ical perspective of this flm. Tis perspective—which derives from theories of Kimberly Rufn, Katherine McKittrick, Catriona Sandilands, and others—pushes a reevaluation of space in Moonlight by arguing how this flm constructs a radical queer Black ecology that seeks to redefne and question the foundations of how space is understood. Te theo- rization of this flm’s radical queer Black ecology argues for queer Black access to nature that has historically been denied to Black people. At the same time, this radical queer Black ecology questions the idea that anti-Black, heterosexist cultural spaces cannot also be accessed by queer Black men and boys. Rather than accepting space to be cultural or natural, Moonlight rethinks how space is produced by depicting queer Black existence in cultural spaces that have been decentered and infuenced by the aesthetics of nature and the natural. In total, Moonlight promotes the ability of queer Black men and boys to redefne and recreate space that, in McKittrick’s words, has historically been space that “just is,” unquestioned and not critiqued. F rom its very frst moments, Moonlight (2016) seeks to question the cer- tainty of space. As the frst scene of Act 1 begins, the sounds of Boris Gardiner’s “Every N***** is A Star” comingle with the crashing of ocean waves—in this moment, neither sound holds precedent or power over the other, and they exist in balanced harmony. In this way, the perceived space of culture, of a Miami neighborhood, becomes displaced, redefned by the powerful presence of crashing waves, of the natural. Immediately, Moonlight connects the sounds of culture with those of nature, a connec- tion that persists throughout the flm’s exploration of the life of Chiron, a queer Black boy struggling to grow up in hostile, homophobic spaces in