Adolescence is marked with the seeking of identity. There is a simultaneous desire for an identity that is collective and individual. Of course if one lives in America, the sense of individualism is drilled in early, yet everyone seeks to fit in. These years are trying times for most, but in the two stories reviewed by New Yorker columnists Hilton Als and Alexandra Schwartz, predetermined forces make it war.

Hilton Als in his piece “‘Moonlight’ Undoes our Expectations” weaves us through the life of Barry Jenkins’ film’s protagonist Chiron in his journey through life in Miami. As a queer black man, (both Als and Chiron) finding an identity is much harder than for most. Schwartz’s piece writes on tricks of the memory in Zadie Smith’s fifth novel, “Swing Time.” While Smith is concerned primary concern presumes to be the use of memory and rememory by the novel’s nameless narrator, Schwartz writes extensively on the subject of identity.

She opens with the story of Smith’s lecture, “Speaking in Tongues,” spurred by the inauguration of Barack Obama. The essay speaks to the liminality of being mixed race, at the threshold of each social world, almost within but uniquely without. She imagined a Dream City that was distinctly post-racial. It featured almost solely the 1st person plural pronoun we, for saying I is to be singular, to exclude some part of one’s identity. You aren’t you, you are, to co-opt Benjamin’s term, a constellation.

Unfortunately in the world in which we live, we cling to “I” like a buoy to keep us from floating adrift. We need it to anchor us because too often, we, particularly the marginalized portions of our population, have no collectivity. Or at the very least it’s insufficient. In “Moonlight” and “Swing Time,” the character’s subjectivity is all they have.

The beauty in Als’ writing is that he uses his own subjectivity to explore the film’s. He uses his knowledge of self to add meaning to the already gorgeous film. Through expressing his youthful anxieties and traumas, one can find both veracity and empathy in the film. It was crafted with care, and the sign of this is Als’ glowing review of the film. If it were done with less love and compassion, the film would not have so deftly expressed the experience of a queer black youth, and Als finds that truth in his own life. He expresses that he never thought he would see an experience similar to his on film, asking “Did I ever imagine, during my anxious, closeted childhood, that I’d live long enough to see a movie like “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’s brilliant, achingly alive new work about black queerness?” It is truly heartening that a film like “Moonlight” could be made at all even in this day and age.

Als speaking from experience is a mark of the best criticism too; criticism needs something to latch onto, with which to empathize. It just so happened in this particular piece that it was a foundational piece of Als’ identity. It makes it affecting writing nonetheless. Schwartz does something different in her piece, yet it is also still good writing. Not immediately latching onto the identity of the character, she attempts to assemble it through the character’s memories. In this way she finds ways to identify with the characters’ desires, which are no less integral to their identities.

Schwartz’s digging is a different kind of critical work and one that evokes a different response in the reader: less visceral but more tactical. By probing into the characters desires and fears, one connects in the way that only a reader can, by attempting to envelop oneself in another’s skin, for what is reading if not an exercise in empathy? Schwartz goes on to explore Smith’s nameless narrator and her aimless lack of self. Unlike Chiron, she is not struggling with what is integral to her, but with the fact that she feels nothing is. She floats through her life using her job to mask the fact that she feels unanchored by even an I. Schwartz then reveals her subjectivity through the act of rememory.

If done well, there isn’t necessarily a better mode between intertwining one’s own experiences in one’s work and examining a work through critical distance. The fact is that there are shortcomings to both. Luckily the New Yorker seems to hire the insightful and talented writers and as such, both reviews are affecting. They show us how art can truly help us answer the most meaningful of questions: “Who am I and with whom do I belong?”