giornata, 2/20/25

a wolf without a foot and a vampire with a silver volvo

Giornata is my Thursday weekly media diary, covering whatever I read, watched, or listened to in the last week. Usually, this is my paid subscriber benefit, but this one is free!

Moonstruck (1987, dir. Norman Jewison)

Moonstruck may be the most programmed movie in the greater Philadelphia repertory scene. I’ve seen it in theaters four times in three years and it is being shown again later this month! The everlasting appeal of Italians being played by non-Italians.¹²

It’s, by my measure, the most romantic rom-com. When Harry Met Sally… is funnier, but it has equal parts cruelty and romance. Not a bad thing! I think this is often what is missing in many modern romance novels. Conflict is traded for cutesy fuzziness and it makes the novel aspect of the whole thing worse.

Moonstruck is never mean, though it does have bite to it—all the world building around Loretta and Ronny’s love story that is so lived in, and the extreme theme of mortality. Death and aging everywhere in the movie. I feel like I’m always wishing romance novels acknowledged death more, not to the detriment of an HEA, but because to me, it makes them more romantic! Characters in Moonstruck think about death all the time.

When Loretta and Ronny meet, they have both stuck themselves in amber. Loretta, a widow, fears taking any steps that would cause bad luck. She gets engaged to Johnny Cammareri, a man she does not love, to continue her practical, no-highs-or-lows life. Ronny, Johnny’s brother, has not had a romantic relationship since he accidentally cut off his hand in a bread slicer at the bakery where he works, which also led to his fiancé leaving him. They meet after Johnny sends Loretta to the bakery to invite his brother to the wedding. They both clock the other one as afraid of moving forward and in a moment of passion, sleep together. Practical Loretta wants to act like it never happened, but Ronny insists that they at least go to the opera together before the affair ends.

While Loretta and Ronny have frozen themselves out of fear, other characters in the film thrill seek, romantically, in order to avoid thoughts of aging. Loretta’s father is having an affair (mirroring Loretta’s affair with Ronny) and her mother concludes that he is doing this because he fears death. In his biggest solo scene, Mr. Castorini gives a speech to his WASP-y plumbing clients about the types of pipes. Vincent Gardenia’s passion and pride in his work, and in upselling to these yuppies, paints such a vivid picture of a man who is proud of his life. But then next we see him, he is repeating the story to his affair partner. Surely his wife and daughter have heard this speech ad infinitum, but the newness helps him avoid feeling stagnant.

John Mahoney’s character, a professor who dates his students, who are often seen dramatically leaving him at dinner, mirrors this impulse. He and Mrs. Castorini meet when she is dining alone, contemplating her husband’s affair. She asks him about his dating habits, with knowing judgment. He tries to explain his bad behavior:

I teach these classes I've taught for a million years. The spontaneity went out of it for me a long time ago. I started off, I was excited about something and I wanted to share it. Now it's rote, it's the multiplication table. Except sometimes. Sometimes I'm droning along and I look up, and there's this fresh young beautiful face, and it's all new to her and I'm this great guy who's just brilliant and thinks out loud. And when that happens, when I look out among those chairs and look at a young woman's face, and see me there in her eyes, me the way I always wanted to be and maybe once was.

This is a middle-aged man who chases young women he teaches. A creep! But the magic of Moonstruck is it is simultaneously empathetic toward his man and clear that it is tragic that he has not accepted that time will pass and he will age. Nobody’s a villain in the movie; everyone’s a person.

The pipes speech and Mrs. Castorini’s dinner date with John Mahoney are scenes out of a slice of life, family film, which Moonstruck certainly is, alongside the romance. But if Moonstruck were more centrally focused on the love story between Loretta and Ronny, it would be less romantic overall!

After Ronny and Loretta go to the opera, they end up back at his apartment and Loretta insists that they end the affair, pointing out their bad timing. But in a speech that people always laugh at during a theater (I guess because it is Nicholas Cage giving it) though I always cry, Ronny ties together the theme of mortality and romance:

Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but 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. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!

That speech doesn’t work unless we get the pipes speech (I and II) first.

Twilight (2008, dir. Catherine Hardwicke) on 35mm

From a romance about death, to a romance about the undying.

I’m exactly the right age to have been obsessed with Twilight (I was 13 when the first book came out). But I was not. All through high school, I thought the whole series was too concerned with sex to be interesting to me, an anxious prude (I say affectionately). This sounds silly say about a famously conservative series, but the books and films do care about sex a lot. But in an on-the-ground vigilance way, channeling sexual impulses into scary vampiric metaphors and inventing a boyfriend who does all the coercive control bits, without ever suggesting that you bone.

Maybe at 13-17, I sensed that I didn’t need to be uploading more purity culture anxiety than I already had. My sister is six years younger than I am and we’re both online enough to see the rhetoric of people in their early 20s. I’m also in genre fiction spaces enough to see both the handwringing about sex from “puriteens” and the handwringing about the handwringing. I am worried about the conservative impulse to control sex in media that has vertical appeal across generations, and is often hidden in benevolence from people who think they might be able to gold star their way out of book bans, if only they write, read and uplift the stories that are doing it the “right way.” Read Sanjana below for more!!

sex, romance, and adolescence

But while watching Twilight, I thought about the purity culture of my youth and just thought about how time and energy were given over to whether any given young woman was a virgin or not. I didn’t even have directly unlearn conservative evangelical Christian impulses (though those were the community values I grew up around, just not within my family), but I remember this as a pervasive theme of casual conservations, whether in person or media.

When “Driver’s License” by Olivia Rodrigo went viral on Tiktok, it was one of the first times I felt acutely disconnected from the youth pop music zeitgeist. I could not muster energy to care about the “drama” that people kept explaining and reexplaining. “No you don’t understand, he taught her to drive.” I felt like that there wasn’t much there there beyond the lyrics, yet I kept seeing videos of it being “explained.” But what I noticed more than anything was the absence of discussion of the details of Rodrigo’s specific sex life. I don’t think the desire for salacity or feeling owned information about sexuality has tempered; I think it just manifests in different, possibly even more insidous ways now. This is just one way I see the conversation not having regressed quite to the point that it was when I was learning how to drive.

Still—I had a great time watching Twilight in theaters! The viewing was the most like watching The Dark Knight, which I saw last year in theaters for the first time in over a decade (also on film). Annoying as a realization as it is, rewatching films that I saw only a few times before I had a smartphone is always striking because I always remember them so well. And I am even a purist about not using my phone while watching films now, even at home! There may also be something just about films of our teen years being indelible, but I think speaks worryingly large volumes about the effect of the little screen how well I remember any movie I saw before 2012, compared to after.

“Anywhere Is” by Enya

I have had to lock in at work this week, no longer given the grace of “Go Birds!” distractions. The best way I know how to focus is to listen to the same song over and over again. I try not to pick songs that I absolutely love because I’ll invariably create a sense memory of a certain span of weeks that I am using it as a focus aid. For whatever reason, I picked this Enya song this week. I’ve never really thought about Enya, other than a passive “congratulations on having that castle named Manderley.”

“Anywhere Is” is probably the Enya song that sounds the most like a Phil Collins song, which does make sense why I would glom onto it. There is a strong, forward-moving beat and very literal, square-sounding lyrics, two things I associate with Collins’ pop music. I am sure I have listened to it a hundred times in the past five days.

In-Progress

We just recorded our Reformed Rakes episode on Mary Balogh, so I’m now in the middle of reading a bunch of things but finished no books last week.

Here’s what is on my metaphorical nightstand (I read almost everything on my phone. I hate this about myself).

Lessico famigliare di Natalia Ginzburg: Assecondmi per un secondo, mentre scrivo in italiano. Adesso, leggo Lessico famigliare a italiano. Non avevo sentito niente Ginzburg, ma è spesso elencata per “donne per traduzione” elenchi di lettura. Perché sto studiando l’italiano, ho scelto di leggerla nell’originale italiano. Fin qui, mi piace la sua specificità linguistica, che è uno dei temi principali di questo libro. Il libro paral delle stranezze linguistiche della sua famiglia e i personaggi spesso parlano il dialetto Torinese o Milanese.

Lessico famigliare by Natalia Ginzburg: Humor me for a second as I write in Italian. Now, I am reading Family Lexicon in Italian. I hadn’t heard anything about Ginzburg really, but she is often listed on "women in translation" reading lists. Because I am studying Italian, I chose to read it in the original Italian. So far, I like its linguistic specificity, which is one of the main themes of this book. The book talks about her family's linguistic quirks and the characters often speak the Turin or Milanese dialect.

Cold-Hearted by Heather Guerre: Chels and Beth have been trying to get me to read this shifter romance for I think two years at this point. It is happening!

His Lordship’s Mistress by Joan Wolf: Upcoming episode! Excited to read more Signets after my Balogh deep dive.

Ulysses by James Joyce: The book that is literally on my nightstand. An unfortunate thing that I learned about myself is that I can’t read the weekend of an Eagles playoff game and I can basically only handle reading Ulysses on weekends. Ulysses reading journal will be back this weekend!

And if anyone wants to book club this month’s non-romance romance, it’s going to be Certified Copy by Abbas Kiarostami.

1. Most people in this film are Italian! Cher and Olympia Dukakis are not.

2. I saw someone make a joke about how Boston and Philadelphia are the same, but Boston is Irish and Philadelphia is Italian, which I do think minimizes the Italians of Boston and Irish of Philadelphia. But the Eagles just hired Kevin Patulo to be their offensive coordinator, meaning our head coach, defensive coordinator and offensive coordinator are all Italian-American. So.