'An honest contrivance': Opera and Desire in 'Moonstruck'

Abstract

Opera can circulate through many layers of a mainstream film and set in motion desires inside and outside the fiction. Moonstruck (1987) sports a special tone that Pauline Kael has characterized as contrivance that plays against the real thing, without producing irony. Opera's exaggeration, artifice, and ritual figure prominently in the special tone, and the music and story of La Boheme play a major role. Excerpts make up a substantial portion of the soundtrack, the protagonists attend a performance of Boheme and display affinities with the opera's characters, and Boheme's connection with the Metropolitan Opera is underlined. A close reading of how Puccini's music is used, incorporating Werner Wolf 's theories of intermediality, examines why certain cues are taken verbatim and others are instrumental arrangements, and the consequences for desire. Two major diegetic engagements with Boheme receive extended treatment: at an actual performance, and at the phonograph (one of the latter creating the climax of the film).The prominence of opera in the film at so many levels reveals an urge towards the genre of opera-film. Moonstruck fulfils spectators' desires, ambivalent though they may be, for recognizing and yielding to the kitsch qualities already present in La Boheme: a prime example of how film can reveal something fundamental about an opera.