The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [166]
In the next wolf scene, Loretta and Nicholas Cage’s Ronny (the sexy brother of her lumpy fiancé) famously tell each other their pasts. This includes a reference to Ronny’s ex, who left him when he lost part of his hand in a bread slicer:
Loretta: You tell me a story and you think you know what it means, but I see what the true story is, and you can’t. She didn’t leave you! You can’t see what you are. I can see everything. You are a wolf!
Ronny: I’m a wolf?
Loretta: The big part of you has no words and it’s—a wolf.
As he carries her to the bed, she tells him to ravage her so completely that there is nothing left for his brother to marry. And he agrees: “There will be nothing left.” The third wolf comes when she scolds Ronny for betraying his brother, Loretta’s fiancé. Ronny hotly retorts: “You tell me my life? I’ll tell you yours. I’m a wolf? You run to the wolf in me, that don’t make you no lamb!” So she’s a wolf, too. In the last wolf scene, Ronny and Loretta have been to the opera as a last date, and they are walking. She still plans to marry Johnny. At the opera, they had bumped into Loretta’s father with another woman. We are sure by now that the mother preaches the wisdom of marrying a tame friend not because she did so, but because she did not, and suffers for it.
After the opera, Loretta asks to be taken home, but Ronny has them meander to the doorstep of his apartment. Noticing where they are, she says she must leave, and it is his last chance to convince her. Loretta’s ambivalence about switching to Ronny is not just about the social embarrassment of canceling an engagement and telling people you are in love with the ex-groom’s one-handed brother. After her parents’ example, the death of Loretta’s first husband only confirmed that true love will clobber you. In the original Moonstruck script, the speech ends like this:
Come upstairs with me, baby! Don’t try to live your life out to somebody else’s idea of sweet happiness. Don’t try to live on milk and cookies when what you want is meat! Red meat just like me! It’s wolves run with wolves and nothing else! You’re a wolf just like me! Come upstairs with me and get in my bed! Come on! Come on! Come on!
It is uncanny how powerful the wolf theme is, as a modern marker of authenticity. This is the speech Cage delivers in the film:
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!
At first she rolls her eyes a little, but she is persuaded, and so are we. We have almost no opportunities for wildness outside of our private homes, and even there the only place we still use animal metaphors in a positive way is the bedroom. The wolf in the bedroom is key to who we are. What gets Loretta to give a new answer to her mother’s question (“Ma, I love him awful”) is that Ronny says the storybooks are bullshit; that we should not evade the wolf and settle down with the gentle woodsman or the virginal Red Riding Hood, as the case may be. Instead recognize yourself as the wolf, and when you see another one, run out to meet it and go bay at the moon. Romantic love is imagined as sufficiently intimate and wild as to make up for all the intimacy and wildness that once filled the town. What Ronny offers Loretta appears to be a random, desperate plea; but look again. The speech is not an argument for the thing he is offering, but rather the speech is itself what he is offering: here it is, my passion; I can get us this high, this wild. His audience is not to be