A Moon for My Neighbors

Before beginning in earnest, I must begin by acknowledging my acquaintances, colleagues, exes, partners of various sorts, Delta Comfort Plus seatmates, and you, especially, my dearest Ida. I have not followed any of your advice to “please, please, for the love of god, shut the f**k up about this movie.” I acknowledge you, fellow travelers. But an acknowledgement, I’m afraid, is not an apology.

I take up my evangelist mantle to speak to you of love. Not just any love, but the love of a small business accountant for her fiancé’s brother, a baker and opera fanatic. An ignoble union to be sure, but one that teaches us about the para-familial ties we may weave with our neighbors, the intricacies of their lives, affections, and dramas. I speak, of course, of the 1987 Norman Jewison classic, Moonstruck.

I know this film like a childhood bedroom. It does not completely fulfill my needs as an adult, but to be inside of it fills me with a comforting familiarity. My siblings and I can recite this film like a Greek chorus. It is the movie that I love to watch other people watching for the first time. Although I could with ease, I will not recount this jewel of the rom-com golden era scene for scene. It is only 90 minutes long. You could go watch it now. If you’re reading this, you clearly have the time. But with conviction I can tell you that it far surpasses the cliché exemplars of the genre, in that it addresses not just the highs and lows of the romantic leads but their inextricability from the romances (platonic and otherwise) of their neighborhood. Reader, I encourage you to move beyond the Nora Ephrons and Hugh Grants to the true treasures of 80s/90s romance which I would argue (and often do) are this film and Mississippi Masala (a treatise for another time).

Set in Brooklyn Heights before its Italian immigrant residents migrated to Carroll Gardens, Bensonhurst, or Florida, Moonstruck fills every scene with a tactile whirlwind of neighborhood interludes. At the center of this whirlwind is Loretta Castorini-Clark, a widowed 37-year-old accountant who runs the books for various small businesses in her neighborhood (legitimately — there are very few mafia gags in the piece, although Scorsese’s parents do make a cameo).

The opening scene features Loretta at work in the office of the local funeral home, riffling through the receipts and cleaning butter from the mortician’s tie. After that, she runs numbers for the florist, who bemoans her practicality and hands her a rose. Then to the neighborhood restaurant, the Grand Ticino, where her big baby of a boyfriend Johnny clumsily proposes, much to the head waiter’s dismay (good bachelor customer for 20 years!). The reason for all this rushing around is to show that the neighborhood knows Loretta and has known her for a long time. This array of loose connections all seem to want something good for her.

These intimate moments are shared with characters you will never see again. You don’t need to. The point is that you know they’re around. They are the web that encompasses the slippery, somewhat undefinable feeling of localness, prime social currency in any city. In my own research on the anxieties and ambitions of city residents, I’ve found that localness is in the eye of the beholder. Some in New York will tell you that to be considered local you have to be born in the city. While in Odesa, Ukraine, they’ll tell you real rooted Odesiti have put in five generations. To me, localness is more than just a specific length of time in one neighborhood, a proposition that gets more and more difficult in places like Brooklyn, where the churn of real estate speculation often dumps long-tenured locals outside the city gates. It’s also more than a defensive crouch against newcomers, the fretful backlogs of Nextdoor chatrooms, or the ability to impress out-of-town cousins when your bodega cashier calls you “my guy.” Localness is one’s ability to mutually weave in and out of relationship with the people who share your neighborhood. It is a romance of familiarity between you and the many faces that announce the threshold between what is home and what is not.

Back at the Grand Ticino, Loretta accepts Johnny’s lackluster proposal, and her fiancé gives her the task that sets the film’s central drama in motion. While Johnny is in Palermo at the bedside of his dying mother, Loretta is to convince his younger brother Ronny to come to their wedding. Loretta didn’t even know this brother existed, but she agrees. When she heads over to Ronny’s bakery, in an unsurprising “oh no, he’s hot” turn, she falls madly in bed with him. The thing about Ronny is that people know him, too. They know the bad blood between the brothers. They know that it is ridiculous. But even at his most absurd and miserable, they want something good for Ronny, too. Loretta and Ronny’s rendezvous occurs under the titular full moon, which bathes the whole neighborhood in nostalgia. The older couples who run the liquor store and the deli, Loretta’s grandfather and his many dogs, Loretta’s mother who suspects her husband of cheating, and Loretta’s cheating father all come to romantic revelations under this moon.

The thing about revelations is, it’s nice to have them in private. But when we’ve successfully entwined with our neighborhood dramatis personae, private affairs tend to wind up in the street. Any number of regrettable public indignities, a bout of crying on the way home, some sloppy drunkenness, a sneaky link, can all resurface in daily encounters — a chronic downside to the intimacies of localness. With the moon beaming a spotlight over the hearts of Brooklyn Heights, interiority is in short supply. So much so that Loretta must attempt to squash her impractical attachment in a place where all New Yorkers go for unsavory dealings, Manhattan. She agrees to a date at the opera with Ronny if he will take their night together to his grave.

Moonstruck is a capable conductor of two common fantasies. One is that of a local baker who shouts at you about the improbability of justice in familial affairs before romancing you to the music of La Bohème. The second is the fantasy of localness. For New York residents, rooted and transplanted alike, the idea that you might remain in the same neighborhood as your parents and their parents, that the corner store cashier will remark on your haircut and ask about your mother, that the bartender knows your drink order and whether your date is the same as last week’s, that the grocer will advise you on a dinner you are planning, is increasingly rare. The many factors at the heart of New York’s accelerating displacement crisis are breaking the neighbor relations that residents have cultivated over decades, if not generations.

When I first moved to my neighborhood, Flatbush, there were few things I wanted more than to be local. I spent years at the heels of the elder auntie on my block, who serves as the neighborhood deep state and rules the community garden with a pursed lip. If localness is a true yearning in your heart, it requires a level of humility and service. Carrying mulch, putting up tents, making soup, opening doors, and carrying groceries in the service of elders in my ten-block radius, provided me with advice and information. Although I know who has bedbugs and who doesn’t, who is taking their medication and who isn’t, who would bribe the Brooklyn Green Blocks Competition committee members and who wouldn’t, after nearly ten years I am still not a local. Worse than that, my job often draws me away from my pursuit of localness, putting a damper on the whole enterprise.

But my efforts were doomed from the start, simply because one cannot cultivate localness as a singular pursuit; it stems from a whole network of relations and circumstances that any number of municipal misfortunes can tear apart. The deterioration of a public school, the allowable rent increase in stabilized units, the shuttering of a beloved bar, can all set you back to zero, surrounded by unfamiliar faces who don’t nod hello. Given this, a lifelong romance between me and my neighbors, founded on the social choreographies of the everyday, seems unlikely. But I can’t stop myself from wanting it, both the knowing of others and the unbearable ordeal of being known by them, dirty laundry and all.

This is what Loretta and Ronny come to find out. Even leaving their borough cannot save them from community run-ins. At the opera, Loretta bumps into her adulterous father who in turn spots Ronny, trampling their attempt at a private moment. This encounter leads them to question whether they want to hide their connection from their collective after all. The love speech of the film, which Nicolas Cage delivers in his typical unhinged fashion, directly into Cher’s snow-laced eyelashes, is basically: “Love ain’t perfect but it’s here and it’s now.” The difficulty of having, losing, and regaining love, even in the public eye, does not diminish the value of connection. Just as the weaving and unraveling of localness should not drive us to close our doors against our neighbors. Love isn’t perfect, in fact it breaks your heart (or hawr-t as Cage intones) and disregards your pride. Moonstruck shows this even in its depiction of the neighborhood itself. In one of the film’s most iconic shots, Loretta kicks a crushed can down the street — hickey on her neck and Manhattan skyline at her shoulder — as she waltzes home to face the music in the light of day. Something about the trash strewn street seems to whisper, good for her.

Despite the imperfections and improbabilities of the effort, I will never stop trying to be a neighbor. With that ambition, I lift a moonlit martini to all the local Lorettas and their wild hearts. From the place I hope to assume in the loose network of daily tenderness, I want something good for them, and for me, too.