Moonstruck: It’s Never Too Late To Be Insane
Katharine La Ronde is a writer of sketch comedy and teleplays. She graduated from Emerson College with a degree in Film and Theatre and has written for UCB’s house sketch team in Los Angeles as well as the CBS Diversity Showcase. For this month’s FMC Cinema Club, Katharine shared her thoughts on the cult-classic Moonstruck (1987).
Moonstruck, at first glance, defies categorization. “At no point in this headline did I know what the next word was going to be” is a meme format that is recognizable to the very online, and it can be applied perfectly to Moonstruck’s IMDB page. A romantic comedy penned by playwright John Patrick Shanley and starring Nic Cage and Cher, in which various members of an eccentric Italian American family are enchanted by a full moon. A moon that awakens “the wolf” within them? Sure, that could be either a movie or Mad Libs. It’s a hard sell when you’re flipping through the channels and trying to land on something to watch. This might be why it’s falling out of favor, but the film, which turns 37 this year, is more resonant than ever. Not only is it romantic and funny, but it features the first known unboxing video. Try not to swoon as you watch Cher, sipping wine and listening to soft jazz, unwrap all the packages she’s purchased to get ready for her big date, savoring the feel of twisting up a new lipstick for the first time. More importantly, for the millennials who were born around its release date, it’s the perfect antidote to a certain strain of TikTok psychology that has us drawing so many healthy boundaries that we risk becoming islands unto ourselves.
Loretta Castorini (Cher, in the role that won her an Oscar) is ready to settle. A pragmatic middle-aged widow who lives with her parents, she figures the smart thing to do is say “yes” to marrying Jonny Cammareri, a moon-faced nitwit so dim he can’t remember to take his suitcase out of the cab. Twice. Does she love him? No, but “he’s a nice man.” He’ll do. That is until she meets his brother Ronny, an opera-obsessed baker with a wooden hand (Cage, in a performance that makes his turn as Castor Troy understated by comparison). “What’s wrong can never be made right!”, he bellows at Loretta when she asks if he can mend his feud with his brother and attend the wedding. A few minutes later, they are in bed. In Moonstruck’s universe, what’s wrong actually can be made right if you’re willing to throw out the playbook and do everything wrong.
Ronny is a man who has never once in his life done the work, met someone where they are, or believed someone the first time. And yet his love fundamentally changes Loretta, flinging open doors inside her heart that she believed were better off locked for good. With age and experience should come wisdom, the putting away of childish things, like a belief in love at first sight. A woman who has had sufficient therapy should run from the kind of painful yearning Ronny inspires in her when he stands outside the doorway to his apartment, beseeching her to come upstairs. “Love don’t make things nice. It ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. We are here to ruin ourselves, and to break our hearts, and to love the wrong people, and die! Now I want you to come upstairs with me and GET IN MY BED!” She makes the smart decision. She goes upstairs. As Sartre said, “If I’ve got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands.”
Moonstruck poses the question, “What if, instead of doing the right thing, you did the thing that felt right?” What if, the next time your heart ached, instead of practicing acceptance, you railed against it? Gnashed your teeth. Tried to fight God. What if you put down your bullet journal, skipped your sensible bedtime routine, and went outside to howl at the moon?
I’ve been thinking about this lately. About the extent to which trying to make the right decisions for the future robs us of the now. Separates us from our instincts. That’s what all that therapy and self-care memes were for, right? To help us learn to make better choices than we would if we just went with the ones that felt comfortable and familiar? To help us stop and process before we act? This is smart. This is evolved. But where is the balance? If we focus so much on the pain that might come later, that might be visited upon us if we make a bad choice, aren’t we just inviting that pain to take hold in the present? They say that to be a great abstract painter, one must first learn classical techniques. Only then can the painter cast form aside and truly pour his soul onto the canvas. Is it not the same with drawing boundaries and making good choices? Must we continue moving with intention and surrounding ourselves with positive people? What kind of life are we building for ourselves if we never seize the chance to go upstairs and get in his bed?
In the end, what’s wrong is made right–not just for Loretta and Ronny, but for every member of the big and noisy Castorinifamily. The brothers reunite. Marriages are reinvigorated. All because of a little moon madness. The moral of the story is life-affirming and magical: You are never too mature or too smart to rediscover your inner insane person, to make a mess of the canvas of your life, and by doing so, to make it beautiful.