A Film Canon

It's difficult to build comedy around ethnic hyperbole - if it's aimed at another culture, it feels exploitative, if it's aimed at the audience's own culture, it feels insular - but Moonstruck dissolves and displaces this bind by way of the immigrant experience, addressing a demographic that lies somewhere between Italian-American and American, alienated from its national heritage but never quite arrived at its national future. As a result, what could have been a mere catalogue of Italian-American stereotypes becomes a kind of mythological hearth, around which future generations can gather to remind themselves of their Italian heritage, and remain Italian-American - and it's this mythological quality that creates the exaggerated register, which is, for the most part, formulated as operatic. Not only does the central love triangle - between Loretta (Cher), Johnny (Danny Aiello) and Johnny's brother, Ronny (Nicolas Cage) - play out against a backdrop of near-continuous music, but it's suffused with a superstitious, prophetic frenzy, culminating with the tipsy "moon in a martini glass" that sets the love triangle in motion. Musically, this magical moonlight also sets the central question-and-answer motif in motion - "What makes a man chase women?" "Fear of death" - as well as abstracting the mise-en-scene until it's positioned somewhere between Brooklyn and Sicily, its seer and spokesman the only Italian in the film.  At the same time, the subsidiary narrative of Loretta's parents (Vincent Gardenia and Olympia Dukakis) makes it clear that miracles don't happen in Brooklyn in quite the same way as in Sicily, offsetting Jewison's striving for operatic pathos just before it becomes absurd, and deflecting it into something more quotidian and melancholy. It's a nexus between opera and soap opera, in which depth is largely externalized - a romance between Ronny's prosthetic hand and Loretta's transfigured hair, "a bride without a head and a wolf without a foot" - and every character feels destined to repeat the same actions over and over again, with an intensification that is ultimately optimistic, gesturing toward generational continuity, the bounty of mothers and motherland.