#036 - Moonstruck (1987)
Hello and welcome to my web log. Tonight I watched Moonstruck (1987).
It is still Werewolf Month, now almost three months later. I’m still in ragged jorts every possible moment outside the forty-hour work week though I’ve traded the flannel shirts for more seasonable pearl snap cowboy numbers or lightweight floral print button-downs. Now maybe three weeks into a different beard. Still, occasionally, howling. It is still Werewolf Month and I’ve been thinking a lot about the moon this year.
It started a couple of months back when I got a reprinted copy of Everest Pipkin’s “picking figs in the [*] garden while my world eats Itself” in the mail. It is a chapbook of poems that they created and curated from some hand coded algorithms back in 2014 and 2015. I don’t know the exact methods employed but I’m guessing something along the lines of Markov chains and semi-automated versions of the cut-up poetry techniques popularized by the Dadaists. It is a pleasant artifact of a time before large language models and ChatGPT and the mass weaponization of computational poetics. The way the work is presented, I cannot tell what Everest wrote and what was a nice accident of combinatorics but there was an image in one of the poems that firmly lodged itself in my mind: “tidal websites”.
What would it mean for a website to be tidal? Maybe something that comes in and goes out, is maybe only occasionally available. A website driven by the force of the moon, one you can only read or visit when it’s high tide—or should that be low tide, like walking to a tidal island from the mainland? So how do I go about defining what the tide is, when it is high tide? And where?
My parents somehow always have the balance on their car stereos set all the way in the back so, on road trips in my childhood, my brother and I in the backseat would get screamed at by calm, often British voices reading whatever audiobooks my parents hadn’t heard yet from the local library. My brother and I still occasionally joke about the yowling of one audiobook actor performing a precocious, mystery solving cat from one of Lilian Jackson Braun’s novels. On some long family road trip when I was a teenager, my parents got the audiobook of Barbara Kingsolver’s “High Tide in Tucson” for the drive. The title story, about how a hermit crab she accidentally brought home to Arizona inside her luggage would get very active at specific times of day, has stuck with me the last few decades. She had heard that some sea creatures exhibit this kind of behavior at high tide and she decided that that’s what her hermit crab must be doing. She consulted tidal charts for the Bahamas where she’s picked up the shell it was living in as well as the California coast and the hermit crab’s activity didn’t correspond to either location’s tide. She decides that the crab must be attuned to, wait for it, high tide in Tucson.
So of course I wanted a website, a tidal website, that would be available only when it is high tide where I live in Eastern Tennessee. The obvious way to do this would be to use an API from NOAA and pull in tidal data from a weather station on the Gulf Coast with roughly the same longitude but I really didn’t want to rely on someone else’s data on someone else’s computer, because who knows how long it's going to be available or maintained. I wanted a way to do it myself, to build my own device to measure the force of the moon. I understand that actual tides are complicated but for my purposes, it would be enough to know when the moon was directly overhead or in an antipodal position; good enough is good enough. Living in a landlocked area with light pollution and frequent cloud cover, my only real way to measure the relative position of the moon is with microgravity.
After considerable research on microgravity measurement and instrumentation, I begrudgingly accepted that any hobby-grade accelerometer (one mass produced for a previous generation of smartphones) that I can get a breakout board for is going to be multiple orders of magnitude too coarse to pick up the gravity swings caused by the moon. I also realize that the only thing I would want to put on a tidal website is a screed against the internet as it now exists, rotting and unusable, and that maybe other people have already written versions of that essay in ways that are more thoroughly researched and compelling than what I had in mind.
Another reason the moon has been more on my mind this year was the eclipse. I had known for over a year that I was going to see the recent solar eclipse but I waited until a few weeks beforehand to actually start making plans. My plan was to pick a bunch of national and state forests in the path of totality from southern Illinois through Ohio, places where you can just show up and camp wherever in the woods (No Rules, Just Right: the National Forest Service), and then a couple of days before the eclipse, pick one based on which had the most favorable weather forecast. The most likely candidate, based on travel distance and historic cloud cover values for the month of April, was Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. The friends I had planned to go with had to back out at the eleventh hour and I realized that I had no desire to spend two days in the woods in southern Illinois alone. There had been signs that my friends were going to have to back out so I had been reaching out to other friends online and lined up two back-up viewing opportunities in Ohio.
Sunday morning, the day before the eclipse, I write myself a short essay or maybe pep talk about how maybe a little heartbreak is good actually, not totally believing it but hoping a future version of myself can or at least use it to contextualize some future heartbreak. I unpack the backpacks packed for camping and repack them for a couple of nights sleeping on a cot in a basement AirBnB. The last thing I do before running out the door is type “lycanthropy” into WebMD on a lark and read the article on Clinical Lycanthropy. The first half of the drive to Mt. Vernon, Ohio is the I-75 corridor, which is 200 miles of striated sedimentary road cut and redbuds exploding in their other-worldly shade of fuschia. A couple of nights before, while talking about morel hunting season, my friend Shawn described the season up in the nearby Smoky Mountains, which starts a little later, as going back in time two or three weeks. I have the same experience watching the redbuds bloom as I drive north.
I see a highway sign for the KFC birthplace and museum in Corbin, Kentucky and impulsively pull off the interstate. I take photos of the dioramas in the museum and selfies with the Colonel. A Kentucky Colonel is an actual semi-paramilitary commission, now honorary but originally a sort of precursor to the National Guard as I understand it. You can nominate people to the governor of Kentucky for a commission. Some governors barely issued any but my understanding is that the current governor, Andy Beshear, is basically rubber stamping any application that comes across his desk. I’ve given serious thought to nominating my friends as a joke but then I think a lot of them might not find getting signed up for the Kentucky Reserves, honorary or not, all that funny. The KFC museum doesn’t have a gift shop as far as I can tell, just a restaurant, but I don’t really eat fast food if I can help it so I left. Driving through Lexington, KY, I imagine that every Jersey Mike’s sandwich restaurant is not a franchise named after a singular Michael but is instead an independent owner-operator concern, each run by a different guy named Mike from New Jersey, signposts from some great Michael-from-New-Jersey diaspora.
Rounding a curve and looking down from the edge of the plateau across the Ohio River, Cincinnati looks like the biggest city on Earth, like an impenetrable wall of buildings. I don’t even realize that I’ve crossed the river until my GPS welcomes me to Ohio. The interstate shoots straight through the middle of the palisade of large buildings and after a very short tunnel, you emerge and the city is already past you. There’s no depth to it, it’s all just façade, just a big Hollywood western town set, just a big wall to scare off everyone from the south. After Cincinnati, the main thing is water parks and then nothing. Just miles of last year’s corn stalks and the scarlet fields of red clover planted as winter cover crop.
It’s all too flat for me. I get a little nervous when there’s too much horizon. I have an atavistic need for forests and mountains, somewhere to run and hide out until things calm down. I need the partisan terrain. At breakfast at a diner on the following morning, I see a man who could have been Philip Seymour Hoffman if he faked his death. I do not acknowledge him and I do not point him out to my friends just in case. Later in the meal, my friend Stephen caught a shiny Snorlax; good auspices abound. In the afternoon we walked from the basement we were staying in to a city park. While we were walking, we’d stop to see a little sliver of the moon occluding the sun and then a little bit more each time we checked. We saw deer in a field and tried to imagine how they would interpret the eclipse. The light changed slowly and the edges of shadows began to blur. At a certain point everything had the color of an American movie set in Mexico. This halflight lasted for what felt like a long time and then it quickly got dark and cold. When the eclipse reached totality, a friend yelled that we could take our glasses off. I spent about ten seconds trying to take a photo with my phone before getting disgusted with myself for not just looking at the marvel itself. I threw my phone down into the grass and watched awestruck at what appeared to be a hole punched in the night sky with some supernatural horror trying to suck the sky through the hole at three in the afternoon. Walking back afterward, I tried to make myself stop and look at the partial occlusion of the moon finishing its path across the sun through my cool chipboard glasses, but after the awesome spectacle of the total eclipse, I could not bring myself to care about this lesser miracle.
My review of Ohio is that it is exactly like everywhere else, a little too flat for my tastes, but sometimes the moon completely swallows the sun if only for a minute or two, though your mileage may vary: three and a half out of five stars.
I kept putting off watching Moonstruck because I knew that this was going to be a massive letter about the moon and I knew that I was going to have more thoughts about the moon that I was going to feel the need to share because as I said at the very beginning, two thousand words ago, I have been thinking a lot about the moon this year. I also was trying at various points to organize a movie night for my friends around it but either couldn’t work out scheduling issues or tackle the fundamental issue that the number of people I wanted to invite, that I wanted to share this movie with, was more than would fit comfortably in my living room around my little television.
In May, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Joseph Beuys’s seminal performance, “I Like America and America Likes Me”, wherein he locked himself in a gallery for three days with a wild coyote while wrapped in a woolen blanket, I somehow gave myself or at least finally noticed and self-diagnosed an inguinal hernia. Also in May, I stood on my balcony with a pair of birding binoculars to get a better look at the full moon. I spent June waiting for the perfect opportunity to watch this movie and found none I thought good enough. The night of the summer solstice was also the Strawberry Moon and we stayed out late at a friend’s farm training telescopes on the moon. On the ride back into town that night, from the passenger seat of my friend’s car, I found myself deeply touched and inspired by a sign out front of the U-Haul store that read “ANY CAR CAN TOW TRAILERS”.
Moonstruck is a movie about how everybody is obsessed with the moon and how the moon makes everybody insane and horny; it’s unclear whether the filmmakers consider these facts related. It is an incredibly charming romantic comedy about Loretta, played by Cher, who agrees to a marriage of convenience which is immediately threatened when she meets her brother-in-law to be, Nic Cage’s Ronny. The movie also follows Loretta’s extended family and the dynamics of their relationships.
The subtext of the movie is that it’s about werewolves. When Loretta first meets Ronny, he’s a feral man, living in a sort of self-imposed exile shoveling wood into the ovens in the basement of the bakery that bears his name. He’s sweaty and wild-eyed, ranting about how he blames his brother for an incident that left him with a wooden hand, an incident that Loretta quickly realized had nothing to do with her fiance. She calls Ronny a wolf, says that he’s got a wolf inside that would gnaw its own paw off to escape the trap of a bad love, and she says that he keeps himself locked away, refusing to date because he’s afraid of what the wolf would do if it got trapped again. But the thing is that this movie isn’t about how Nic Cage is a werewolf. The full moon affects everyone; everyone is transformed into someone they themselves barely recognise. They all become werewolves. On the second day, Cher has her hair dyed, blown out, and gets a manicure which functions as a stand-in for the classic fur and claw growth of the werewolf transformation. The movie ends in the morning, with the whole extended family gathered around the breakfast table, trying to come to terms with the damages they caused while the moon was full.
This movie is one of two Nic Cage movies that are in the Criterion Collection and of the two, this is the one whose inclusion feels easier to justify. It’s big and silly in an operatic way but it is earnest and consistent; I don’t feel like it’s often that I recommend the movies I watch for this project but if you have not seen this one, please consider it. The art house theater a couple of blocks from me is playing two Nic Cage movies this month that I haven’t seen yet but my ambition is to start writing about his other movie in the Criterion Collection soon.