Moonstruck (1987)

directed by Norman Jewison

Tara Giancaspro

The first time I watched Moonstruck, I nearly rent the suede of my mother’s tan couch from its spun cotton underbelly. Not in lust over Nic Cage in his Wolverine cosplay swinging tables and banging the gray right out of Cher’s hair, but over John Mahoney. And not in lust, but in fear. In memory.

I had saved Moonstruck for my thirtieth birthday, a gift to celebrate the year I promised myself I’d make it to. Trudging through the relentless childhood snow flurry of medical tests and injections and the melted chalk taste of Barium milkshakes on X-ray tables; the knee-high crunch of insecure high school boys and their insistent scabpicking need to label you a prude and whore in the same breath; twenty-two-year-old boys who treat “no” as the first offer in a boardroom negotiation (which is the only reason there are more male CEOs—simply, they get the practice).

I gave myself the gift of this movie, one everyone around me performatively gasped when I said I hadn’t seen. Me, the Cher fan. Me, the Nic Cage devotee. I chose it as a gold star for perfect attendance, a prize picked from the dentist’s toy chest, a petite reason to make it. I was thirty, nearly thirty and one day old, when I watched Moonstruck, but over dinner with John Mahoney, recall struck me, and I was twenty-five again—a brutal twenty-five, one I wouldn’t wish on my oldest enemy.

He was my boss, because of course he was. He was married, because of course he was. He was forty-five, sixteen years more calloused than I, because of course he was.

He was a drummer, because of course he was.

I wish I could say I was smarter than that. Got up from the interview chair the second the sun glinted off his silver band and reflected on the calm potency in his eyes, inked over with lusty appraisal. He wanted something he already had from the second he shook my hand in the foyer of an office I would go on to nudge into a naive little nest. I would order five types of tea and milk frothers, frame photos of Bessie Coleman and Margaret Hamilton in the meeting rooms, toss out chairs that had maybe not seen better years, with a pattern that if you squinted hard looked like scenes from Naked Lunch. I wish I didn’t let him only refer to “my wife” without a name, only ever “my wife.” Didn’t let him negate her to both mythic everything, the woman who supported him through loss and toil and and pressed her many palms against a stomach once tight, and ancillary nothing, a woman not framed on his desk. I wish I had not let her chosen namelessness invalidate her, but instead forced her into the conversation. Forced her into our rapidly admixing reality. I wish I could say I was smart enough to not confuse the erosion of boundaries with love. Didn’t answer his texts dispatched from his back porch, didn’t accept the pilfered goods of care and caress and commitments that belong to someone who gave him heirs and neckties and begrudging birthday anal. I wish I could say that I had boundaries to erode. I wish I could say I had then wanted them.

Mostly, I wish I didn’t fuck someone who voluntarily listened to Joe Rogan.

*

“You’re the biggest Frasier fan I know. You are Cher! How on earth have you not seen Moonstruck?”

The night he asked me if I could share him, share the sliver of his life he could give, and I told him I would take anything because the moon doesn’t wane forever, we stepped out onto a rooftop patio. It would have been unbearably romantic if our server didn’t take forty minutes to bring our drinks and it wasn’t stationed next to a Duane Reade and a check-casher. This night is an auburn brand across my memory, divots of pain uneven across the shape of the night and the shape of my trauma-thick skin as cognitive dissonance over his motivations still renders an incomplete understanding. His teeth biting my lower lip like a verdant grape, “woo!” girls blitzed off Aperol spritzes below looking for the nearest dollar slice, my heart beating in tune with “Dream Weaver” even though I’m sure the bar’s speakers were playing Pitbull, the twinkles hazed over my view, cartoon stars dancing in front of him like they were cut out of construction paper and dangled with fishing wire.

“Well, listen. John Mahoney is this professor, and he keeps taking these younger and younger girls to the same restaurant…”

The first time we see Perry, no last name, is from the back: he has a full head of hair but you can tell it’s something the character takes too much pride and too much worry in. Too much pride that he’s a handsome gray, worried that the grayer he goes the less he can get away with. The older for which he’ll have to settle. We see him at dinner with a date. We only know it’s a date because of the crystalline vibrato of a lover’s spat that cuts the air. She’s a brunette. A young brunette.

The fact that it’s a young brunette, big hair and a much bevoweled name, eyelinered to death in an Italian restaurant isn’t lost on me.

Perry’s true first line, when we look at him, is him justifying his belittling critique, a look of perfected concern on his face, a look that says “Oh honey…are you doing okay?” in the most vomitous way, the put-upon patron-sainted face all men don when they want the other men in the room to grunt, “Typical female!” When they want complicit women, complicit wives everywhere to pass over a tissue from their handbag. In the vague diminishings of a pandemic, throwing a sipped drink in the face of another is a ghastly offense, but I take heart that Patricia (because I will say her name, because she deserves to be forced into the conversation) gets to quite literally water down Perry’s gouted ego. The second she expresses her hurt, her valid offense at the insult he tried to disguise in flowery professorial language, he turns. “Kiss my aspirations. The height of cleverness,” he barks. Didn’t he find her such a charming date not thirty minutes prior? Didn’t he single her out as bright and complex and special? Wouldn’t she be worth a real clarification, a shred of vulnerability, a drop of kindness?

In some of the coldest shit I’ve ever seen in my life, Perry asks the waiter to “do away with any evidence of her,” and my, how we’ve seen that happen, even outside of marrow, in sedans, in ravines or authoritarian governments, because so often they get knighted with the opportunity. She never existed, and the lesson of her was never learned. We see Perry choose this same restaurant again and again. Why would he return to the scene?

Perhaps it falls to the patterns of humanity. He hopes that his next date at Grand Ticino will break the curse of the last: that there will only be a lipstick smear on his collar, not on the glass of water being jousted at his clean white shirt. Perhaps it’s the furthest from where he lives, the surest bet he won’t be caught by another professor in a leather-elbowed blazer and an expression of disdain. Perhaps it is a test of dedication and very close to his apartment and very far from hers. Perhaps it’s where his subconscious, his dormant projectionism leads him when he knows it is time. Time to make a flippant remark he doesn’t want to mean, time to diminish the bright light seated across from him once too many, time to make her resent him as he resents himself.

But I have another suspicion that feels right when I unfold the linen of it and set it upon my lap. Perhaps he knows that at this particular restaurant the waiters will be complicit in eradicating the memory and lesson of Patricia and not a single patron will run to check if she’s okay. Not even our lead character in a heavensent “save the cat” moment. Perry gets away with it and back to his gnocchi.

I kinda hope that when he arrives in Hell, it looks exactly like this restaurant, and the women he’s wronged get to throw glasses carved of rock and full of lava on his lap.

You could and likely do wonder as the movie unfolds whether Perry is married. In an acute and terminal case of projection, I do. Maybe he’s not. Maybe we, and his conquests, are never meant to find out, because he’s as adept at lying to himself as he is to us. When we see Rose, a woman who knows who she is, walk into her home, alone for the night but kept warm by her surety, Perry clutches his lapels against a cold night, an infinitesimal shiver as he sets off home. He never mentions a wife, but also never mentions not having one. It would not surprise me if she simply was never forced into the conversation. It tells me that even if he is married, he is left cold. Not by an ice princess he married for the money or a kind but plain woman he settled for, no, by his own actions.

Good.

*

“…I worry that’s what I’ll do to you.”

And me: “Of course not. That’s not you.” You know, like someone who had never seen the movie.

“Look at all you’ve risked to show me how you feel.”
You will wind up forced out of the company within four months because of a lie he told you. You will have to lie at every job interview. You will have to lie forever.

“Look at what we have, look at how our connection is unlike anyone else’s.”
Said Jolene, and every woman who hits the dumb bitch juice a little too hard.

“Look how much we have in common. Look at how our ages never come up.”
You’re twenty-five. Your prefrontal cortex was a debutante at her coming-out ball who had chugged too many bourbon neats swiped from mama’s table, vomiting into various priceless rose bushes outside, requesting the DJ play more and more of the oldies to remind her of a time before Big Daddy’s friends’ hugs didn’t linger a beat too long. You’re twenty-five, you dumbass.

“Look at the care you show me.”
After he is done with you, you won’t be able to have sex for a year, taking arbitrary turns sobbing into poor boys’ shoulders or going on synaptic sabbatical, no thoughts ‘til the whole thing’s over.

“Look at what we have.”
Look at the opportunities he handed me to construct an elaborate ruse for our closeness. Look at the favors he called in, the people he had me meet, to construct my exceptionalism, to force others to bear witness to how he just couldn’t help it.

“Look at me. Look at the person you’ve helped me become. Look at who you saw in me.”
You were her all along, my love. Will you ever learn that you don’t need to be broken into better shape?

And the next night, the very next night, he put his hand on my bare knee with his ugly fucking shirt, and his Christmasmorning eyes, and I thought we were both drunk off the euphoria but he might have tied a sponge under his chin. I could have come to my senses, splashed my water, beaded with august condensation, in his face, poured it over myself to let a cooler head prevail. But no. He put his hand on my bare knee and asked me how I didn’t realize it was I who had all the power here?

We were gunslingers, he told me. Brilliant and bold, sharp with a word, quick with a yes, hot to the touch.

We were gunslingers, he told me, and I would blast him to ribbons.

I did shoot first. I did leave him. I aged out of my parents’ health insurance.

I got a better and then a better job. I started writing a novel, I made music, I made art. I have in many ways made art of my life. He is no longer my first thought upon waking. I found friends who breathed life back into me. I found a calendar festooned with plans every night of the week. I finally get along with my mom…most of the time. I still get invited to the old company Christmas party and I go without a single worry of seeing his face or hearing his name, because he resigned a few months after I left to “spend more time with his family.” And I was delivered a viciously wonderful man who saw the baseball bat next to my bed and came back with a cardboard box for swinging practice. A viciously wonderful man who came back again and again until he just came home.

I fulfilled his every prophecy for me.

Most days, almost every day, I call that prophecy my own.

But the trauma, the snow, the ice: did I really win? I bought sturdier boots, always putting my money on my feet. I bought a hat in every color, a cheetah-print parka, gloves with fingertips designed for texting. I am warmer. But time can only thaw so much. And I still trudge through so much snow. And my fingers still sting with cold, no matter how hot my breath on them comes. And sometimes I touch my face. Some days, I skid without thinking of him at all, but his voice is the wind that knocks mine out of me. Some days, he wins. Did he ever love me? Did he ever love himself? How many girls have bundled their coats against his chill since? Was I alone in the snow?

I think of Perry and these students, who he likely too parades around as his exceptional find of the year, sets up with a job interview or an internship, goes so far beyond to prove that they are bright, but it’s not about their brightness and their promise, not really. It’s that he has to prove they are bright enough to be right. That when she “see(s) me there in her eyes, me the way I always wanted to be and maybe once was,” that Patricia and Sheila and the rest are right. They are distorted reflections he can stare into so he doesn’t have to stare into himself. And the harder he bores into them, their word choices, their confidence, their bright and starry potential, the easier it is for him to pretend to resent them for those reasons and avoid remembering, because he knows, of course he knows, that he only resents them for being with the “burnt out old gasbag” that he did. That he is.

I understand this man. I have loved this man. I have little sympathy for this man now.

These women are special. They are each and every one of them special, even after he’s broken them in and broken them down. Some might say they are even more special now, stronger.

I wish for a world where their steps trod as softly as melting snow instead.

I wish for a world where he found them so special he just left them alone.

I wish for taxpayer-subsidized, universal therapy. Normalized.

I won’t dignify any contrarian thoughts about what Patricia and Sheila and these many or few girls thought they were getting into. “She isn’t smart enough for a man like this, and it’s because he’s young, and it’s just a bad fit. It didn’t work out.” No. She’s smarter. She gets up and leaves. Good for her. So many of us watching should and do envy her. We didn’t, we didn’t in time.

*

Despite the size of my curling-iron barrel and the amount of leather in my closet and the 2019 “Turn Back Time” Halloween costume and the tribute Barbie in my attic, I am not Cher. Not when I watch this movie for the first time. When I watch this movie, alone at my parents’ shore condo with some lobster ravioli and an ancient thrift-store cashmere cardigan on, bun flopped over like a rabbit ear, fingers trembling with the trauma of all the things I couldn’t tell you, not yet, picking at the embroidered “life’s a beach down the shore” on the nearest throw pillow, I am that parade of young girls. Faceless actresses in our real life who booked a national tampon commercial then married Ted from the car dealership where they bought their tampon-money Cape Cod with aluminum siding and birthed three annoying kids. Faceless young students, the ones who are real in this world depicted on a sixty-inch television, young students who too would marry a nice man named Ted and squat out three annoying kids, because when you’ve been a sparkler reduced to eau de carcinogen off a charred stick, any glint from any guy after feels like a Brocade Crown of luck upon your head. Sometimes you choose better. Sometimes you choose worse.

It is what it is.

I did so much better, but the beautiful man who took me in from that cold had a lot of ice to cut me from, and cut himself on the sharp of me more times than I can bear to speak.

I think of Rose Castorini, who is paired with Perry, and paired with her husband, but finds a match in neither. Neither man has lived the experience of being a woman, loving a man. Enduring a man. Rolling her eyes at a man.

Knowing who she is.

Rose has a bittersweet arc, falling on her hatpin, having to ask her husband to stop seeing that woman. She is not the woman we are supposed to want to be, Cher’s Loretta. But for all of us who have loved a Perry, she is the woman we become. Permissive, too, but powerful, more—more than her little boy of a bad husband, more than Perry. Because she knows herself, and can keep herself warm at night, no matter what chill comes to the window. I had no choice but to emulate her, in my minute ways, but with it I hope I can always keep myself warm, something Perry can never do no matter how tightly clutched his lapels.

Perry is granted a scene, a spar, a conversation with Rose, because he comes closest to having the awareness that men unchecked are both far too bold and yet far too broken. When Rose Castorini tells Perry, lastnameless Perry, that he’s a little boy and he likes to be bad, it’s true. She cuts through the man to the unhealed child, and knowing what I know of my own Perry’s childhood, my heart stirs with a betrayer's sympathy for what this man might have seen, been subject to, surmounted.

But then I think of myself, a kid who dealt with a lot and a lot at the hands of others. “I’m too old for me. That’s my predicament,” Perry replies. I grew old of myself a long time ago, the trauma grew old, how I handled it grew old. I have, in deeply imperfect and slow steps, sought to change. Will Perry? Could Perry?

I have had no contact with the Perry of my own since June of an even year, an even number of years ago. I don’t know if his marriage is happy or a performance as good as Danny Aiello’s. I don’t know if his new career path is fulfilling. I don’t know if he’s happy. I don’t know if he bought a scarf. I don’t know if he finds warmth in the taut arms of others my age, others my age then, younger. I don’t know if the current of my comebacks, my increasingly dissonant devotions, my escape changed him. I don’t know if I made him a better man. So I have no idea if Perry changed, from his one night with Rose. I am curious, but I can’t care.

I can’t hold onto that question. I have for far too long already.

What I will hold onto forever, because I can’t do anything but, is John Mahoney’s eyes, eyes in which Twitter user @thelicoricekid claimed “you can absolutely see the entire universe.” Find one frame of this film and look at the man’s eyes. The mischievous twinkle. How tired he is.

I see so much in his eyes that I saw in the eyes of the man who told me I was special with words upon words, then told me he lied with actions upon actions. I was nothing more than an enhanced reflection of his own face, nothing more than moonlight in a martini.

And there are plenty of moons, and plenty of martinis.

I dreamed last night that I saw him. It was a dream, and as such, he had on a ridiculous cornflower blue mohair coat and the very baker boy cap that I see now hanging from my bedroom door. We spotted each other in an open outdoor crowd, me first because I would feel him anywhere, know the him of him in any crowd, and we both smiled, slow and sincere. I don’t know what it means, but in this case he shot first.

I’ll give him this one.

Tara Giancaspro is a self-taught writer. This is her first published work and second submission. She runs the weekly newsletter xoxo Gossip Giancaspro on Substack and releases music under the name Sweaty Lamarr, available on Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple. She is based in New Jersey and can be reached @SweatyLamarr on Instagram and Twitter.