It happens when you least expect it. Practical to the core, Loretta Castorini (Cher) is distressed upon waking up in bed next to Ronny Cammareri (Nicolas Cage), a melodramatic baker, and her fiancé’s brother. After Ronny loopily says that he’s in love with her, already perturbed, Loretta slaps him across the face—twice—and yells:“SNAP OUT OF IT!”The audience gasps and bursts out into giggles. More importantly, the audience remembers—because there are very few such cool slaps, delivered with such cool lines.But how did this one outburst sneak out of a Brooklyn bakery and into the film history books? Why has this, what could have easily been a throwaway gag in a lesser movie, become a cultural artifact that is still quoted, memed, and weaponized almost forty years later?That’s what we are going to do, unpack the anatomy of this scene: the build-up, the delivery, and the enduring afterlife of four words—and two very famous slaps.The Alchemy of a Perfect Scene The Setup: Loretta’s DilemmaLoretta, a widowed bookkeeper, thinks that certain bad lucks—such as marrying at a City Hall—ruined her marriage, and is now kinda superstitious. Soon after Moonstruck opens, she gets engaged to a steady but dull Johnny (Danny Aiello). After Johnny goes to Palermo, Sicily, to tend to his ailing mother, Loretta visits Ronny, Johnny's estranged brother, to smooth out things between them so he can attend their wedding. But Ronny, a perfect antithesis to his brother’s plodding decency, is a man of unbridled emotions and theatrics, driven by ferocious...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Today