Rewatch/Rewind: Eddie and the Cruisers

Or, how this odd little 80s relic was the most exciting thing to happen to my hometown.

(Rewatch/Rewind is a feature in which I revisit a film that once made an impression on me, but I haven’t watched in at least a decade. Spoilers should be expected.) 

New York City is a city so heavily represented in media and pop culture that even when other cities, such as Toronto or Vancouver, stand in for it we know it’s supposed to be New York City. If everything you knew about the geography of the United States came from watching television, you’d assume the entire northern part of the country from New Jersey to Maine is “New York City,” a vast and unknowable land mass populated by the nouveau riche and guys who are just trying to walk ovah heah.

Live here long enough and you become jaded to the idea that your neighborhood bodega (the one that still sells tie-in candy from the last Kung Fu Panda movie, coated in a thick layer of Miss Havisham dust) might randomly show up in the background of a George Clooney crime-drama. The day you become a “real New Yorker” is not when you battle a flying cockroach in your apartment, but when you accidentally walk through a Law & Order shoot on your way to work. Disaster movies will send you into a rage as the characters inevitably try to escape Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge, which is only a good idea if you’re determined to die in Brooklyn.

ANYWAY, I didn’t grow up there, so it was initially a strange experience to see everyday sights treated as significant landmarks in film and television. I was born in Atlantic City, which you would think, given its unique decayed elegance vibe, would be a popular setting for a movie or TV show. Nevertheless, there’s only been a small number of movies filmed there (and, of course, Boardwalk Empire), but none of them, save for a single episode of What We Do In the Shadows, capture what a truly bizarre place it is, and the Shadows episode wasn’t even filmed there.

Representation is even more scarce in the smaller towns around Atlantic City. Somers Point, where I lived from age 7 to 15, is a quaint little seaside town, so quaint that when I read Stephen King’s IT for the first time I was shaken by how much Derry reminded me of it, save for being sandwiched between the ocean and a bay, rather than near a backwoods river. The town library was run out of an old church. The one “Jewish” delicatessen in town was owned by an Irish family. The biggest event of the year was a “baby parade,” which always got a glowing write-up in the local paper. It was the perfect setting for a story about a small town that looks pleasant on the outside, but something sinister lurks just below the surface.

Instead, all we got was Eddie and the Cruisers.

Do you remember Eddie and the Cruisers? You probably do if you’re a certain age (old). According to a 2016 Washington Post article, it’s become a “major cult film,” but I see no evidence that that’s true. If it’s left any sort of imprint on pop culture, it’s entirely because of “On the Dark Side,” a one-hit wonder that only became a hit nearly a year after the film’s initial release.

Much of it was filmed in Somers Point, and it remains, to date, the most exciting thing that’s ever happened there. No shit, it’s even mentioned on its Wikipedia page.

I’m unsure why Somers Point was chosen as the filming location, other than probably because it was then the site of Tony Mart’s, a nightclub that hosted a handful of notable music acts before they were famous, including The Band and Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels. It seemed as good a setting as any for a story about a rag-tag group of musicians who seem to be on their way to the big time before tragedy strikes, but from the breathless write-ups it got in the local papers you might have thought we had been selected to host the 1984 Summer Olympics. Though there were no big name stars in the cast, and it was going up against such heavy hitters as Flashdance and Never Say Never Again, surely Eddie and the Cruisers would put little ol’ Somers Point on the map.

Even randomly chosen extras got their own features, including Amy L. (not her real name), a classmate and “friend” of mine. I put “friend” in quotes, because she wasn’t really that so much as we traveled within the same group of preteen girls, and when I say “traveled,” I mean I mostly lingered on the edges, with acknowledgment by the other girls dependent on what day of the week it was. Was it Tuesday? They might let me get a sentence in. Was it Thursday? Then I might be shunned like an Amish man caught with a nudie mag. There was just no way of telling.

I didn’t like Amy L. (not her real name), but she was also the unofficial leader of this “friends” group, so I had to pretend that I did. This meant pretending to be excited, for weeks on end, about the fact that she had been chosen (randomly, but still) along with a few other kids I didn’t know, to be an extra in Eddie and the Cruisers, which by that point had been so hyped up by the local media that you might have thought we were looking at the next Rebel Without a Cause. I wasn’t quite sure what an “extra” was at the time, but considering that Amy (not her real name) and the other kids got a half-page spread in the newspaper (with a photo!) dedicated to them and their experience on set, it seemed like a big deal, like maybe they got lines and hung around with the stars. Amy herself did little to dissuade that notion, and became even more insufferable, in that way that only kids who are obsequiously well-behaved around teachers but real little pieces of shit to other kids can be.

Was I jealous? You bet I was. When I finally did watch Eddie and the Cruisers, maybe a year or so later, I was both shocked and delighted to see that in the one (1) scene Amy (not her real name) and the other kids were in, they were so far off in the background that they weren’t even in focus. It could have been literally anyone. I could have told people it was me, and they would have had no reason to believe otherwise, if only “Hey, did you know I was a gray blob in the background of Eddie and the Cruisers” was a good conversation opener.

The deflated reality of Amy and the other kids being hyped as some sort of Lana-Turner-discovered-at-Schwab’s Hollywood fairy tale was in keeping with everything else about Eddie and the Cruisers, which ended up flopping at the box office. It’s a weird nothing of a movie that’s part mystery, part suffering artiste melodrama, and a whole lot of Baby Boomer lamenting for one’s fading youth, coming fast on the heels of The Big Chill, another movie about Baby Boomers lamenting their fading youth that also co-starred Tom Berenger, only that time with a Magnum P.I. mustache.

Twenty years after up-and-coming rocker Eddie Wilson was believed to have died in a car accident, reporter Maggie Foley (an uncredited Ellen Barkin, who could not look more bored) wants to make a documentary about his legacy, and the mysterious “lost” second album he recorded with his band the Cruisers shortly before he disappeared. The surviving band members, including schoolteacher Frank Ridgeway (Tom Berenger), all lead sad, unfulfilling lives (one character lives in a trailer park, another in a flophouse motel), and seem to have spent much of the past two decades thinking of little else but Eddie and their failed dreams of stardom.

Time has been particularly unkind to Cruisers manager Doc Robbins (Joe Pantoliano), so much that he wears what appears to be a false nose and a toupee unceremoniously dropped on his head, and looks like Carl Sagan after a weekend-long bender. It’s understandable that Eddie would still loom so large in Doc and everyone’s lives, though: played in flashbacks by a very handsome Michael Pare, he’s a combination of James Dean, Elvis, Jim Morrison, and whatever other doomed young artist you want to throw in there. More than anything else, however, right down to the gravelly singing voice and bared biceps, he’s Bruce Springsteen, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Eddie is the kind of musician that Hollywood loves, who rejects the idea of becoming a star because he only cares about the music¹, maaaaaaan. After one whole album he’s already tired of this corporate bullshit, and decides that the Cruisers’ next album is going to be inspired by the writing of Arthur Rimbaud, an idea so hilariously misguided that it’s hard to stay on Eddie’s side for the rest of the film, even though you’re obviously supposed to. Anyway, after the record label very understandably rejects the album, Eddie hides the master tapes, presumably dies in a car accident shortly thereafter (though his body is never found), a mystery ensues over someone (spoiler, it’s Doc) looking for the tapes, and in the end it’s revealed that Eddie’s still alive.

It’s both a very silly movie, and yet, despite that plot description, not nearly silly enough. Even when there’s a scene when the 60s-era Cruisers, whose average age is 35, roll up on a college campus wearing leather jackets and scowling like they’re doing a dinner theater production of The Wild One, it takes itself very, very seriously.

The most interesting thing about it comes by way of its soundtrack: though he does a commendable job of lip-syncing, Pare’s vocals are provided, along with the rest of the original music, by John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band, one of several (and arguably the most successful) Springsteen clones grown in a petri dish between 1978 and 1985. It’s a puzzling choice for a movie so steeped in 60s nostalgia, particularly one in which the core message seems to be “Good old-fashioned American rock ‘n’ roll music is dead, and this is its eulogy.”

This is likely because it was based on a book published in 1980, presumably in response to the popularity of disco, but it didn’t make much sense at a time when Bruce Springsteen was just a year away from releasing the most successful album of his career. If anything, rock was on a distinct upswing, with John Cougar Mellencamp, ZZ Top, and Bryan Adams (Canadian, but my point stands) dominating the charts.

Let me be clear, “On the Dark Side” is a great song, but it’s great because it sounds specifically like mid-80s Springsteen². It wouldn’t have made audiences sigh wistfully and wish to be in a different, more innocent time, it was reflective of the time they were currently living in. Hearing it now might make you wish you were in a different time, but that time is 1983. Like Grease’s convoluted nostalgia for the 50s as viewed through the lens of the 70s, whatever nostalgia³ there may be for Eddie and the Cruisers is for the 60s but Brundleflied with the 80s. It’s a genius bit of mind-fucking, and I don’t think anyone even did it on purpose.

1. The only rock star you could reasonably make the argument that they were actually like that was Kurt Cobain, and one suspects that if he had gotten real, effective help for his mental and physical health issues he would have been much more comfortable with the idea.

2. The soundtrack’s two follow-up singles, “Tender Years” and “Wild Summer Nights,” if anything, sound even more like Springsteen pastiche.

3. There is a fair amount of it, it’s just mostly centered on a tiny little town in New Jersey, which is so dedicated to it I’m surprised there isn’t an annual “Eddiefest” held there.