Moonstruck · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

She goes down a flight of stairs to deliver a wedding invitation and walks into an oven room. Flour in the air, fire behind the doors, and a man who lost a hand to a bread machine and has organized his entire life around the grievance. He throws furniture. He brings the wooden hand to the table as evidence. Loretta Castorini came on an errand for her family. She leaves detonated.

Gilles Deleuze wrote two books about the movies, and under all the vocabulary they are about one gap: the distance between seeing a situation and doing something about it. Most of what we call classical cinema closes that gap. Somebody perceives, somebody acts, the act changes the situation. Deleuze calls that whole regime the movement-image, and he thought it broke down in Europe after the war, when characters started to merely look at things they couldn't fix. Moonstruck, in 1987, is the movement-image working at full strength and full charm. That's exactly why it's worth reading this way. The film is a demonstration of how much life was left in a form the art had supposedly outgrown.

But which kind of action film? Deleuze splits them in two. The large form starts with an enormous situation that squeezes a hero until he acts and transforms it: the Western, the epic. The small form runs backward. An act comes first, and only afterward do we learn what situation it belonged to. Moonstruck is small form all the way down. Nobody in it knows what scene they're in. The bakery visit is family duty until it isn't. Rose asking a stranger in a restaurant why men chase women is idle talk and a wife auditing her own marriage, simultaneously, and Deleuze has a precise name for that: the index of equivocity, a gesture that fits two different situations at once and refuses to declare which. Shanley builds his farce out of nothing else. So does the staging. The Castorini stoop and front door work the way Leo McCarey's doors work in The Awful Truth, admitting the wrong person at the wrong moment so that the scene already in progress gets relabeled mid-sentence. Cavell called that tradition the comedy of remarriage: a couple must be broken apart and re-educated before they can be legitimately joined. Moonstruck runs the grammar honestly, except that the couple being re-educated includes Loretta's parents.

Underneath Brooklyn there is another Brooklyn. Deleuze describes a kind of film where the recognizable setting, what he calls the derived milieu, turns out to be a thin surface over an originary world of pure drive: appetite, wound, death, no manners. In that lineage, Stroheim and Buñuel, the drives run everyone downhill to ruin. Moonstruck has the whole apparatus. The bakery is a hell-mouth. Shanley's working title was The Bride and the Wolf. Dogs howl at the moon in the street. Death is the substrate of every joke: the grandfather openly rehearsing his exit, Cosmo's affair as mortality panic, the bus that killed Loretta's first husband and became her curse, Rose's conclusion that men chase women because they're afraid of dying. The wooden hand is what Deleuze calls a fetish, the part-object a drive organizes itself around, carried and displayed. And here is Jewison and Shanley's real invention: they take naturalism's furniture and reverse its physics. Same wolf, same appetite, same corpse in the room, but the slope runs up, toward a kitchen table, instead of down. Commedia all'italiana had granted the permission — Divorce Italian Style put honor, death and farce in a single register — and Moonstruck spends that permission on mercy.

Watch the two leads' faces, because they are not doing the same job. Deleuze distinguishes the reflexive face, held still, expressing one quality, a surface that thinks, from the intensive face, a run of micro-movements climbing toward a threshold, a face that wants. Cher plays Loretta almost entirely reflexive: flat, deadpan, a woman who decided years ago that feeling was a luxury she couldn't afford. Cage plays Ronny entirely intensive, at opera volume. People have called the mismatch a flaw for forty years. It's the plot. When she slaps him and tells him to snap out of it, she's issuing the reflexive face's verdict on the intensive one, and telling him precisely what she has been telling herself since the bus.

David Watkin lights the argument. Bounced, soft, no hard sources: amber inside, cool blue outside under the moon. Deleuze's affective colour is colour that absorbs a scene rather than decorating it, and here the film's entire moral geography is temperature. Inside is family, food, obligation, the small daily death of routine. Outside is appetite and risk. Loretta's dark layers become the red dress, and the transformation sequence is unembarrassed Cinderella, because the film has no interest in being embarrassed.

Then there's the moon. Deleuze noticed that in musicals a character sometimes stops producing the movement and the world takes it over; the dance absorbs the dancer. Jewison came out of Fiddler on the Roof, and he stages the full-moon night exactly like a number with no dancing in it. Lou Lombardo cross-cuts four romances — Loretta and Ronny, Rose and the professor, Cosmo and Mona, the grandfather and his dogs — into one simultaneous action and never labels the parallel. Nobody decides anything that night. The moon does. That's why the superstition never curdles into whimsy. The film isn't asking you to believe in lunar influence; it hands movement over to the sky for one reel and lets the characters be carried.

And then everyone arrives in one kitchen and the secrets surface at once. Deleuze's word for a group that behaves as a single feeling-unit is the dividual, and the Castorini table is one. It descends from the mother-and-aunt chorus of Marty and the overlapping comic arias of Big Deal on Madonna Street, staged with the anti-coverage patience Cukor used in The Philadelphia Story: hold the wide, trust the actors, cut for reactions instead of punching up jokes. Three major craftspeople chose to disappear so that a proscenium could work.

What did it do? In the decade that invented high concept, it proved that a film about a thirty-seven-year-old bookkeeper living with her parents could outrun its cost on word of mouth and take three Oscars. Nearly forty years later it's the thing people point to when they say Hollywood stopped making a certain kind of movie for grown-ups. Watch it again and keep a count: how many times does someone act before knowing what situation they're in? That's the engine, and once you see it you can't unsee it. The open question is Rose's, and she never withdraws it even after she gets an answer she believes. Knowing why people betray each other doesn't tell you whether to set a place for them at the table. She sets it anyway.