In the most literal sense, it is impossible to run away from something without running towards something else. When abstracted into the metaphorical, running away from one’s past catalyzes the movement into the future. Escaping the object of fear becomes chasing the object of desire. In film, this double-edged sword of movement is manifested often in the image of the car and its movement. Whether the protagonist is fleeing their past or running after some dream on the horizon, the movement is usually facilitated by some kind of cross-country trek. This journey and the vehicle itself are packed with symbolism as well as suitcases – and the occasional passenger. Queer cinema especially utilizes this thematic tool to work through desire in a heteronormative landscape. Pursuit, loss, and a need for movement factor heavily into a queer experience shaped by homophobia both external and internal. The films Carol (2015) and Moonlight (2016), though representing vastly different queer experiences, share the car/journeying motif in order to shape their respective protagonists’ struggles within themselves and against society – and, perhaps, the struggle towards something better. 

The driving scene differentiates itself from other scenes in film through its unique use of montage and close-ups both to create intimacy and facilitate distance. While the viewer at times gets to see into the private space of the car’s interior, shots of the car from the outside – as the landscape rushes past and the road behind it lengthens – remind us of the space being opened up between the character and the things they leave behind. The way these different proximities affect the scene depends heavily on how they are cut together, as this dictates how much intimacy the viewer is permitted – or how much distance they are forced to bear. Russian filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuleshov, in his extensive work with montage and editing, explains the power dynamics at play within the way a scene is cut together. For Kuleshov, the editing together of a scene is “inextricably linked” to the way the scene is interpreted by the viewer and inherently reflects the artist’s “ideological purpose” (Kuleshov 137). By Kuleshov’s logic, two versions of a similar scene can express vastly different feelings or outcomes based on how they are strung together: “The very same action, the very same event, set in different places with different comparisons, ‘works’ differently ideologically” (Kuleshov 143). This idea of montage is key to understanding how a scene as common as driving (though more specifically the long journey or road trip) can function so differently between two films. In Moonlight, Chiron’s long highway journey back to his hometown represents an almost entirely different set of emotions from Carol’s Christmastime escape through a string of hotels and diners. Both scenes, though, hinge on the use of the car while chasing and being chased. 

The montage also has ramifications outside of the scene itself. Though used in reference to close-ups, which will also be pertinent to understanding these two films, Béla Balázs’ metaphor concerning melody and sequence is useful in order to explain how the journeying scenes bleed into other parts of the film and add poignancy to the act of driving. Balázs, summarizing Henri Bergson, asserts that the importance of each note in a melody is inherently dependent upon all of the other notes in the sequence: “Hence the last note, which may not be played for some time, is yet already present in the first note as a melody-creating element. And the last note completes the melody only because we hear the first note along with it” (Balázs 131). Like the notes in a melody, the pieces of a sequence – and, arguably, the sequences themselves in relation to one another – lean upon each other for context and poignancy. Chiron driving down the highway is not important only for driving’s sake, but because of all of the moments leading up to that highway and all of the consequences of his journey back home. Carol and Therese’s westward-bound road trip is not just a lovers’ getaway but is also bound up in the lives they try to leave behind. 

Moonlight opens with a shot of the front of a car, speaking to the significance of both the object and its driver later on in the film. For Juan, the car is a symbol of his status in the neighborhood. The front of the car takes up most of the screen, and the crown on the dashboard speaks to his power – including the power to pull up onto the curb whenever he likes and spot check one of his dealers. The next time a car is involved, it is with Juan and Chiron both. There are no outside shots of the car as Juan drives Chiron to his house, and the camera remains inside with Chiron as Juan gets out and later as Teresa gets in. From the backseat, the camera pans between Chiron and the driver’s side window; we feel a cage-like isolation created in the vehicle as a muted dialogue happens outside concerning the young boy. Alternatively, when Juan takes Chiron home, the shot is completely outside the car; we watch Chiron with his arm hanging out of the window, catching the wind. Unlike the earlier tense silence and timid glances between Chiron and Juan, there is a small but significant growth in the boy’s comfort level during this car ride. Interestingly, the next time the two are in the car together is a moment we are cut off from seeing. Juan pulls up in a shot similar to his introduction, but this time it is not the business he is focused on – it is Chiron. We do not see the pair as they ride to the beach, so instead another moment of silence between the two precedes the emotionally laden ocean scene that solidifies the mentoring relationship Juan has to Chiron. 

An important aspect of these car rides, aside from their facilitation of the growing relationship between Juan and Chiron, is Chiron’s positioning within them. Even when Chiron is older, we only see him as a passenger – it is Kevin who drives him home after their intimate encounter on the beach. Since Juan dies before Chiron is old enough to drive, the dynamic between the two will always be remembered with this childhood memory of Chiron in the passenger seat. In a negative iteration of this dynamic, Chiron becomes a passenger once again as he is arrested and placed in the back of a cop car – this is the last image we see of him before the flash forward to adulthood. The moment recalls his arrival at Juan and Teresa’s house, as he stares out of the window, but this time, the camera is outside of the vehicle, cut off from him as he is being cut off from Kevin and sent away. 

Following his arrest and new life as a drug dealer in Atlanta, we see the shift in power that has taken place: Chiron is the driver now, complete with his own dashboard crown to recall Juan’s status. In her writings on the power of souvenirs, Susan Stewart explains: “We do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable… The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia” (Stewart 135). Juan’s death is irreversible, so the objects that recall him must do the emotional work for Chiron. The crown, and the car itself, reflect a longing for that adolescent connection to be restored. Chiron driving himself around is a way to reclaim the memory and keep Juan “alive.” The other pieces of the film’s “melody” as we understand it come through car rides; connections to both his mentor and his first (and only) intimate queer experience are framed by these movements. 

Chiron’s move to Atlanta, though an escape from the bullies and loss that pervaded his childhood home, leaves him isolated. He lives alone in Atlanta, doing the same job that Juan did, but without a romantic partner and plagued by nightmares of his abusive mother. He does not have a souvenir of his relationship with Kevin the way he does for Juan, and instead has refused any and all intimacy since that first encounter, which he admits to Kevin at the end of the film. This shutting down of his queer identity makes the escape from his troubled childhood incomplete. A phone call from Kevin, a living reminder of the past he hides from, forces Chiron to make a decision – to either stay away from the past, reminded only by controllable souvenirs in a place where all of the power is his, or to go back and face it (and by extension, the queerness he has forced down over the years). 

It is here that we arrive at the most powerful example of the weight of the car and the journey in Moonlight. When Chiron decides to travel back to Miami, it sets of a chain of events that frame the movement of the car down the highway as more than just a necessary stretch of time to get from one place to another. First, we see a short moment of Chiron’s drive to see his mother in rehab. The camera is close, and Chiron is seen in profile – staring out at the road, obviously deep in thought. This precedes the film’s first moment of reconciliation: between Chiron and his mother. The tear-filled scene cuts sharply to the open road, and Chiron is back in the car, on the way to Miami. As the camera pans to Chiron, we see him again in profile, mirroring the ride to the rehab facility. This is not the first time we have been alone with Chiron in the car; even though his circumstances are vastly different than that first encounter with Juan, the isolation contained within the vehicle is heavy. As Balázs notes in her work on close-ups, “we would still feel that we have suddenly been left alone with this one face to the exclusion of the rest of the world” (Balázs 131). Compounding this inward isolation is the relative emptiness of the highway around Chiron. The camera then cuts to a shot from behind the car, and it is the camera chasing Chiron now instead of riding with him. The distance created between the car and the camera occurs just as Chiron creates distance between himself and his life in Atlanta. The car threatens to leave the shot for a moment, but then the camera begins to catch up just as the scene fades into a shot of children playing at the beach under the moonlight. 

The non-diegetic sound that began at the rehab facility and continued throughout the drive carries over into this shot of the children, connecting the three moments. The ability of the music to connect the vastly different locations and shots follows the assertion of Balázs that “including in every shot a movement, a gesture, a form, a something which refers the eye to the preceding and following shots” allows the spectator to create connections between the different moments (Balázs 128). We do not have to make unfounded assumptions about what Chiron is thinking of as he drives down the highway – the montage tells us that it is his mother and his childhood that are weighing on his mind. 

Similarly reliant upon Balázs’ ideas of montage and connection is when Chiron meets with Kevin at the restaurant. After Kevin makes him dinner, Chiron drives him home, reversing and revising the scene from their adolescence when Kevin drops him off after their intimate moment at the beach. Instead of dropping him off and driving away, Chiron is welcomed into Kevin’s home as the two men reconnect. Returning to the metaphor of melody between sequences, the moment where Kevin holds Chiron’s head on his shoulder at the end of the film is already “contained” within that same gesture on the beach so many years ago. Chiron’s life after that adolescent encounter has been so caught up in staying away from the ghosts of his past that he lost the intimacy of that moment in the process; now he is allowed to feel it once again. 

That is why the decision to drive home is so important to the ending of the film. Rather than choosing to stay away, Chiron decides to run back into the past in order to rectify it. He starts, importantly, from one of the larger roots of his problems – his mother and her drug abuse. In at least beginning to reconcile his relationship with her, his journey back to Kevin is not an act of getting away from her, as he often did in the earlier parts in the film. Instead, Chiron returning to Kevin is more focused on the running towards, not the running from. The movement back towards the center of his relationship with Kevin is a symbolic movement back into the queer parts of his identity that he was shamed for in his youth, and this journey is facilitated and enhanced by the thematic tool of the car and driving montage throughout the film. 

Carol, while utilizing theories of montage and close-up as well, relies more heavily on the fragmentation of the driving scenes to create meaning, in addition to treating isolation as a positive rather than negative outcome. Therese, much like Chiron, is always seen in the passenger seat being driven around rather than doing the driving herself. For Carol, on the other hand, driving seems to be bound up in her appeal. She is a dominant personality compared to Therese’s soft-spoken character; she initiates the first conversation the two women have and (arguably on purpose) leaves her glove behind to guarantee future contact from Therese. Her dominance manifests itself in her driving; the only time she is shown as a passenger is when Abby drives her through the city, which speaks more to her comfort with the other woman than to a power dynamic between the two. Most of the time, when a car is involved, it is Carol driving Therese, like when she picks the younger woman up and swiftly gets her away from her then-boyfriend Jack. 

This scene in particular is important, not only because it is the first time we see the two women in an extended car ride together, but because of the atmosphere it creates around their budding relationship. At first, we watch the car drive away from Jack’s perspective, pointing to their (voluntary) isolation within the car, but we are soon drawn into the inside of the vehicle. The first thing we see is Carol’s glove – notably, the thing that brought them together in the first place is our point of entry into this shot. The camera then pans over to Therese as though we are in the backseat watching the pair intently. Rather than panning slowly back over to Carol, however, there are a series of cuts between extreme close-ups of Carol and Therese. While the cuts to Carol highlight features – her coat, her eyes, her lips – we see the same shot of Therese each time, suggesting that we are seeing Therese’s perspective as she eyes the other woman. The camera cuts to a shot outside of the car for a moment afterwards, but rather than orienting us in the world around the car, the shot shows the entrance to a tunnel, compounding the isolation of the women within the car and introducing the lights that will further obscure and separate the two from reality. Unlike the painful isolation of Chiron in Moonlight, however, this separation is a positive form of escape; it allows the two women to be alone together rather than just alone.  

Patricia White comments on this characteristic of the film in her review: “Carol depicts a lover’s world, outside of which, Barthes says, everything is ‘stricken with unreality’” (White 4). Cuts to different aspects of the interior of the car, such as the radio, put the camera’s attention on the minute details of the scene, mirroring Therese’s keen attention to Carol and pulling us deeper into the world the two create for themselves within the space. Shots of the green glow of the tunnel lights blur into the passenger side window where Therese sits and stares, seemingly lost in contemplation. The shot blurs once again into Carol’s face staring intently into the camera (and, most likely, at Therese) before changing to the two women in profile, shot through with streaks of light before reaching the bright whiteness at the end of the tunnel which pulls them back into “reality.” 

This first moment catalyzes the relationship that develops through further car rides as the two women journey from hotel to hotel, getting farther and farther away from a (now ex-) boyfriend and ex-husband. Whereas the weight of Chiron’s journey was in the return in order to reconnect and (possibly) heal, the beginning of the road trip in Carol starts on vastly more positive terms, as the escape is what allows them to be together in the first place. Carol and Therese drive off to cheerful Christmas music, and the camera pans out as the car drives pulls away, giving them a privacy that not even the spectator is allowed to breach at first. Even when the camera cuts to close shots of Carol and Therese, we see them through the car windows; we are not able to penetrate the intimacy of the space they have created. We are allowed glimpses of Therese’s perspective on the outside, however, such as the trees passing by. 

Much like the music that connects the scenes of Chiron’s mother, his driving, and the children on the beach, Carol utilizes sound to connect different shots. The song “Silver Bells,” first heard as non-diegetic music outside of the car, switches seamlessly into a diner radio as the women stop to eat. After a conversation that makes Carol uncomfortably think of her home and her daughter, the non-diegetic soundtrack picks back up as the camera cuts to a far-off shot of the car on the road once again, this time with more ominous underpinnings. The connection here suggests that it is Carol’s discomfort pushing the women farther and farther into their road trip, while Therese is just happy to be away from her (admittedly a little bland) life as a cashier. 

The scene grows even more melancholy as darkness falls and the passing landscape is shown instead of the car – the focus here is on the movement itself, not the dynamic of the women in the car. The camera eventually pans to Carol’s face as she listens to the radio before cutting it off abruptly for further reminding her of the daughter she is leaving behind. The camera follows Carol’s gaze over to a sleeping Therese, still mostly oblivious to the distraught feelings of the other woman. The tender moment where Carol covers Therese as she sleeps against the window is cut off abruptly by a black screen followed by sharp knocks at the door, signaling Harge’s incessant search for Carol. It is here that the audience sees what Carol is so worried about as she drives away – Harge is after her, intent on dragging her back into the heteronormative “real world.”

Before coming back to the women on the move, we see the pair in a hotel room. It is here that Therese becomes slightly more aware of the gravity of the situation, as she finds a gun in Carol’s suitcase. The camera does not linger in this moment for long, however, as the women are quickly back on the road – they don’t even stop to eat, choosing instead to eat in the car. This time, we see the women from inside the car, as though from the backseat. The air is tense where earlier is was lighthearted; now there is the sense that Carol is hiding something: we see Carol’s face obscured by her coat while the worried Therese’s face, though mostly visible, is darkened by shadows. The camera follows Therese’s gaze as she breaks eye contact with Carol, panning to the passing trees and then cutting abruptly to the outside of the car once again. 

The movement of the car is punctuated by stops at hotel rooms that become more and more dangerous: first with the gun, and then when Therese is approached by a strange man near the ice machine. The man runs into them again at breakfast and refuses to leave them alone. Following another moment of relative calm on the road, the man’s deceit is revealed. It turns out that he is collecting “evidence” of the women’s relationship, and having collected the evidence, he bursts the bubble of their fantasy of isolation. The letter from Harge that follows forces Carol back into a world where her queerness is weaponized in order to keep her daughter away from her. The result is a true separation between the two women, with Carol leaving before Therese wakes up. Therese is dragged back to her life before Carol, and subsequent car rides become a source of pain rather than escape – Therese gets sick on the car ride home without Carol, and Carol is visibly pained later on as the car she is in passes Therese on the street. The car now represents separation not from the pressures of society, but from the object of desire. 

Though fragmented between hotel rooms, diners, and a private detective, Carol and Therese’s journey creates a “melody” that finds its climax in the film’s final moments. Each scene on the road is in conversation with the others, not only strengthening the relationship but allowing Therese to grow in a way that makes the “real world” she returns to better than it was before. At the film’s end, Therese is worlds away from the shy counter clerk we first met. She is more confident than we have ever seen her. Most importantly, the relationship between the two women, though broken for a moment, is not completely erased. Just as Chiron returns to Kevin and regains the intimacy he’d been missing, Therese leaves the party she is at – filled with straight couples – and instead finds Carol in a restaurant. The subtle smiles of both women point to a renewal of their relationship. Patricia White describes the fact that there is no “homo-normative world of ‘happily ever after,’” and this is true for both films. Both are cut off in an ambiguous moment, leaving us uncertain of the future. What is important, though, is the movement towards that world of a queer happy ending. Regardless of the baggage left at home or just in the trunk, the people towards whom these characters run shape the final moments of each film. Despite different moods, both endings are outlined with opportunity. Instead of fleeing, we can hope for a future where queer characters find some way to drive off, as Carol dreams, into “a perpetual sunrise.” 

Works Cited

Jenkins, Barry, director. Moonlight. A24, 2016.

Haynes, Todd, director. Carol. StudioCanal, 2015.

Balázs, Béla. “The Close-Up; The Face of Man.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, by Timothy Corrigan et al., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 127–135.

Kuleshov, Lev. “The Principles of Montage.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, by Timothy Corrigan et al., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 137–144.

“Objects of Desire.” On Longing, by Susan Stewart, Duke University Press, 2012, pp. 132–169.

White, Patricia. “Sketchy Lesbians: ‘Carol’ as History and Fantasy.” Swarthmore College Works, 2015, works.swarthmore.edu/fac-film-media/52/.