‘Moonstruck’ Makes Me Reconsider the Myth of Bad Luck

Loretta Castorini and I have bad luck. It’s about the only thing we have in common.

She’s the protagonist of 1987’s Moonstruck, played by Cher, world-renowned singer and actor, in an Oscar-winning turn, and I’m a thirty-three-year-old underemployed woman who has watched Moonstruck three times in the past month. Loretta is pragmatic and sensible, and I am capable of spending upward of thirty dollars every single day on nothing. She’s an accountant for several local businesses around town, and I once said, “Fame is the only lifestyle that can sustain me,” while standing in line at a Chipotle.

Loretta is a thirty-seven-year-old widow who lives with her parents, Rose and Cosmo Castorini, in Brooklyn. She traces her bad luck back to her nontraditional wedding. She married her first husband at city hall. She didn’t wear a wedding dress. Cosmo didn’t walk her down the aisle, and there was no wedding cake or reception. It’s for these reasons, Loretta believes, that her husband was hit by a bus and killed. As a result, she has closed herself off to the world, to romance and passion and notions of love. She zips herself inside her small, simple life, and keeps her true feelings and desires secret.

Early in the film, Loretta’s boyfriend, Johnny Cammareri, played by Danny Aiello, proposes marriage in the Grand Ticino, a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant where they are both regulars. He has planned for this moment, and even called the wait staff ahead of time to ensure that they would have champagne ready, but it soon becomes clear that he forgot to buy an engagement ring. Before she accepts the proposal, Loretta insists that he get down on one knee and offer his pinky ring as a temporary engagement ring. She demands they set a date right away for a church wedding, something traditional, where her father can give her away. If she does things the right way this time, maybe she can change her luck. Johnny, who flies to Sicily right after the proposal to care for his dying mother, asks Loretta to do one thing: visit his estranged brother, Ronny, and invite him to the wedding. Loretta agrees.

When she heads home to share the news with her parents, her mother asks if she loves Johnny. Loretta says no.

“Good,” Rose morosely replies.

A woman with bad luck shouldn’t marry a man she loves. She would lose him.

*

I trace the beginning of my bad luck, or at least my awareness of it, to a Labor Day weekend a few years ago. That Friday, my best friend let me drive her car to the preschool where I worked. On the drive home that afternoon, a car driving at full speed rear-ended me, smashing my friend’s car into the BMW in front of it. I spent that weekend sprawled on the couch, nursing burns on my chest and arms from the airbags, every muscle in my body aching. I was in that same position when I got a text informing me that my employer had secretly closed her business over the weekend and had stolen my last paycheck. The final blow came shortly after the weekend, when I learned that she had never sent the taxes she deducted from my weekly paychecks to the IRS.

I have an endless supply of stories like these, where bad thing after bad thing rains down like blows on a punching bag. This past year, I RSVP’d yes to two weddings and got Covid a few days before both of them. The budget for the freelance gig that made up the bulk of my income was slashed right before Christmas, leaving me jobless for the second time in a year. The next week, a “once in a generation storm” hit on the exact day I planned to drive to Louisiana to visit my parents. While I was gone, the weather in New Jersey dropped into single digits, cold enough for my plants to die and my pipes to freeze and burst in my empty apartment.

Now, it’s early 2023 and the winter wind brings with it the scent of my financial ruin and I’m weighing the option of paying my estimated taxes with a credit card.

While I wouldn’t compare my list of shitty experiences to the loss of a husband, I do relate to Loretta. She staves off hope and goodness, fearing that inviting anything new into her life will cost her the illusion of control that she works hard to maintain. I try to find a sense of control by adopting the air of someone who loves nothing more than to laugh at her own misfortunes. Cracking a joke helps me downplay my own disappointment, both to myself and to others. Every moment of stability in my life feels temporary and nothing feels predictable, but how bad can things really be if we’re all laughing?

But the truth is that I am constantly waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me, sending me flying backward into a trash can filled with human shit. Expecting the worst is exhausting, and it weakens my ability to take stock of the many, many good things I have been given. I don’t want to be like Loretta, closing myself to the world and living as a monument to every bad thing that has ever happened to me. And while I try my best to see my life as something greater than the sum of its pathetic parts, I worry that I’m failing.

Every moment of stability in my life feels temporary and nothing feels predictable, but how bad can things really be if we’re all laughing?

*

When Loretta first visits Ronny, he’s in the basement of the bakery where he works, standing before a coal-fired oven. He looks nothing like his distinguished brother. He is sweaty and muscular, with bushy eyebrows and a wooden hand. He doesn’t talk to Johnny anymore because of the bad blood between them: an incident involving a bread slicer, which caused Ronny to lose his left hand. He is dramatic, loud, and self-pitying.

“Bring me the big knife!” he screams when Loretta delivers the news that she and Johnny are getting married. “I’m gonna cut my throat!”

Though Loretta is initially put off by Ronny’s brutishness, he is everything that she secretly desires. His passion and drama shake her out of the comfort of the small life that she quietly hates. When he takes her to his apartment to talk things over, Ronny kisses her. She kisses him back.

He asks her, “What about Johnny?”

“You’re mad at him,” she says. “Take your revenge on me! Take everything, leave nothing for him to marry! Hollow me out so there’s nothing left but the skin over my bones!”

Years of repressed passion fall away as she accepts, temporarily, what Ronny can offer her: release. An opening, instead of an ending.

*

The narrative of bad luck I’ve constructed has served as an explanation for the unexplainable: why every job I’ve ever liked has disappeared, or why I get sick the moment something good is about to happen, or why I can never seem to get ahead financially.

When Loretta loses her husband, the pain is so deep and visceral, she’ll do anything to avoid feeling that way again. She constructs a narrative of bad luck to explain this incomprehensible loss and uses it as an excuse to deny herself love in favor of a life where she has nothing precious to lose.

One night, after Ronny takes her to see La bohème at the Metropolitan Opera House, Loretta becomes afraid. She wants Ronny and the life he offers, which takes her to places outside of the comfort and sameness of the neighborhood where she has spent her entire life. Ronny sees her, the real her, the her that she doesn’t allow others to see. The Loretta that’s desperate for change but scared of what the world could take from her if she admits that she wants it. She tries to push him away.

“Maybe my nature does draw me to you,” she tells him. “That don’t mean I have to go with it. I can take hold of myself, and I can say yes to some things and no to other things that are gonna ruin everything. I can do that! Otherwise, what good is this stupid life that God gave us?”

This is my favorite part of the movie, and it contains the sharpest truth.

“Loretta, I love you,” Ronny replies. “Not like they told you love is . . . 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. Snowflakes are perfect. Stars are perfect. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die!”

The way Ronny sees it, life doesn’t have to be good. The universe has no regard for our grievances. The world does not exist to make us happy. Death and loss, those tragically common occurrences, are always around the corner, and yet we still have to live.

*

Lately, my boyfriend and I have been having conversations about the future. We are planning for a big move, to a place that suits us better. I’ve even had a couple of promising job interviews. We remind each other of everything we’ve gone through and talk about how we feel like we may be at the end of this latest hard chapter. Things feel complicated, but the potential for stability is there and there’s a measure of hope in that.

After marinating in that tentative optimism for a few days, we received a letter from my landlord’s insurer. After paying out my landlord for the damages caused by the pipe that burst over Christmas, they have determined that we are the responsible party. They will be seeking to recover their losses from us. When the dark cloud above my head starts to look as if it might be getting lighter, I hear a far-off crack of thunder.

But Moonstruck reminds me that the stories we tell about ourselves do not always serve us. I’m going to try telling a new one. In this story, I am not uniquely cursed. The small tragedies that keep befalling me are the same ones that happen to everyone every day. People make mistakes, and drive into other cars with their cars, and they steal each other’s money, and insurance companies exist to scam you. Jobs and financial stability are not promised. Life can be crappy and expensive and heartbreaking, and there is no way out of that. That story feels more like the truth.

Life can be crappy and expensive and heartbreaking, and there is no way out of that. That story feels more like the truth.

The truth of Moonstruck is that there is freedom to be found in accepting the indifference and ugliness of the world upfront. Seeing heartbreak and ruin as our main reasons for being, like Ronny does, may sound like a rejection of life in favor of meaninglessness. But maybe the only way to find real meaning is to free yourself from the notion that your happiness should lie at the center of life. Fall in love, go to the opera, admire the perfection of the stars, offer your heart freely to be broken, build a life, ruin everything. You have everything, and nothing, to lose.

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