Book vs. Film: Eddie and the Cruisers

Posted on May 31, 2019 by JoeNazare

(It’s officially beach season, and the masses have begun the sun-and-fun-minded migration to the Jersey shore, so I thought it would be a good time to re-post this piece first published on my old Macabre Republic blog back in 2011.)

Eddie and the Cruisers was the first movie I ever watched when my family purchased a VCR back in the mid-80’s. Today, I own the DVD, and have watched it countless times. For all my familiarity with the film, though, I was oblivious to its literary source. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I finally purchased and read the 1980 novel by P.F. Kluge that inspired the movie. So how do the two versions stack up against one another? Read on… (caution: plot spoilers).

The novel is narrated by Frank “Wordman” Ridgeway (Tom Berenger’s character in the film), so Eddie and the Cruisers is literally and figuratively his book. He forms the central character, even as he plays Nick Carraway to Eddie Wilson’s Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American novel is referenced several times throughout the book). The narrative thus proves much more personal/confessional than the film version. Frank’s voice–inflected with world-weary cynicism–also creates distinct echoes of hard-boiled detective novels (cf. the work Raymond Chandler).

Like the film, the book shifts back and forth in time, moving back through the decades to the Cruisers’ heyday, and contrasting that golden age with the tarnished nature of the band members’ modern lives. Kluge’s scenes, though, take time to unfold, whereas the film (thanks to jump-cutting) often offers smoother–and more poignant–transitions.

The cast of characters is more fully developed in the novel, which helps elevate them from background figures to major suspects in the mystery stemming from the popular resurgence of the Cruisers’ music. For instance, Wendell, who doesn’t deliver a single line of dialogue in the film (and is killed off midway through), is integral to the plot of the novel.

The book does a much better job of establishing Eddie’s dream, the musical goal he is trying to accomplish (something more complicated and significant than in the film version). On the other hand, director (and co-screenwriter) Martin Davidson more skillfully handles the subject of Eddie’s death: the question of whether the nascent rock star’s demise was an accident, a suicide (a consideration the book seems to shy away from), or possibly even a faked death.

While the film wonderfully captures the vibe of the Jersey shore scene of the mid-20th Century, Kluge’s novel extensively details the sights, sounds, and smells of the Garden State. Readers travel with the Cruisers from Newark to Camden, Asbury Park to Atlantic City. In effect, Kluge (a native of Berkeley Heights) has penned a Springsteenian ode to New Jersey.

The film’s major advantage, however, is its musical aspects. In the novel, Frank has to resort to quoted lyrics and his own paraphrasing narration (he acknowledges his struggles to depict the Cruisers’ performances: “How can I recapture that night? I can’t sing it, play it, or relive it. All I can do is recall bits and pieces.”).The film’s viewers, meanwhile, get to see the Cruisers in action, get to listen to the soundtrack (which I would rank as one of the top five in film history) furnished by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. Indeed, it’s doubtful that Eddie and the Cruisers would have struck such a chord with its audience if not for its interpolated songs–the enthusiastic anthem “Wild Summer Nights,” the haunting ballad “Tender Years,” and, of course, the bar-rocking classic “On the Dark Side.”

Perhaps what most distinguishes Kluge’s Eddie and the Cruisers is its dark, sinister tone (as it slips into the dark side of American Gothic). A derelict Quonset hut forms an eerie yet integral setting; the book climaxes with a series of bloody murders. The film opts for a milder air of spookiness, but its final scene raises goosebumps for a whole other reason. The music builds to a shattering crescendo, the documentary footage of the Cruisers fades to black, and suddenly the reflection of an older, bearded Eddie Wilson (he’s alive! he’s alive!) appears in the storefront window. A delightful twist ending, especially for anyone who happened to have read the novel (where Eddie’s fate is much different) first.

I absolutely loved Kluge’s novel, and have cruised through it twice since obtaining a copy. For all its strengths, though, the book is hard-pressed to match the film version for sheer, affective power. That’s why, using the 10-point divvy system, I ultimately give the edge to the 1983 cinematic incarnation:

Film: 6 ⇔ Book: 4

Lore Report: “Perspective” (Episode 115)

Posted on May 28, 2019 by JoeNazare

“People tend to view things through the lenses of personal experience and the folklore of their day. Today we have a lot more scientific knowledge at our disposal, and a better understanding of how our universe works. But history is long and deep; communities have encountered the unexplainable countless times over the centuries, and every time they have, they’ve done their best to frame it in a way their contemporaries would understand. But just because they happened long ago doesn’t make these events any less mysterious. In fact, some tales can be downright terrifying.”

In episode 115 of the Lore podcast, “Perspective,” Aaron Mahnke focuses on the colonial community of Gloucester, Massachusetts, during the time of King William’s War in the early 1690’s. He strikes a chilling note early on with the story of Ebenezer Babson, who returning home one day spies two mysterious figures stepping back outside (when Babson subsequently interrogates his family inside, they prove unaware of any intrusion). From here, matters escalate, and the Babsons are forced to take refuge inside the Gloucester garrison, which is continually harassed by an increasing number of odd-looking, musket-wielding strangers (at first assumed to be scouts, these antagonists clearly aren’t French or Indian soldiers). Skirmishes persist over the course of three weeks, during which the attackers display a knack for picking themselves back up after being shot. The garrison defenders are slow to catch on that this is no mortal foe, but eventually conclude that they are confronted by forces of the devil (who has perhaps recently migrated from Salem). All told, Mahnke’s extended narrative here doesn’t have a great payoff (the listener is way ahead of the Gloucester folk in recognizing the supernatural aspect of the attackers), and fails to form the “downright terrifying” tale that Mahnke teases in the intro.

Mahnke admits that this Gloucester account is drawn from the writings of Cotton Mather, an integral figure in the then-recent Salem Witch Trials. The highlight of Episode 115 occurs when Mahnke shifts his perspective onto Mather in the concluding segment. According to Mahnke, another witch panic might easily have broken out in Boston (as Mather observed a seemingly demonically-possessed young girl, Margaret Rule). The podcast takes a mostly critical look at Mather; Mahnke invokes the reverend-rebutting Robert Calef, who denounced Mather as a “foolish instigator” who “contributed directly to the death toll in Salem.”

The stories in “Perspective” are set in a time and place not far removed from the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, and demonstrate how those unsettling events resonate beyond the infamous village. This episode thus makes a fine companion piece to another Mahnke podcast, Unobscured, which explored the Salem Witch Trials at length in its inaugural season.

American Gothic Inspiration, Part II

Posted on May 24, 2019 by JoeNazare

As I mentioned in a post last week, Flame Tree Press is releasing a new anthology titled American Gothic Short Stories, which includes the first publication of my story “Gothic American.” To celebrate the release of the anthology, Flame Tree has put another Author Q&A post up on its Fantasy and Gothic blog. One of the prompts this time around is: “What are your favorite stories from this genre?” Click on over to find out my choices, along with those by writers such as Lucy A. Snyder and Ramsey Campbell.

Mob Scene: We Have Always Lived in the Castle (book and film)

Posted on May 21, 2019 by JoeNazare

Shirley Jackson was no stranger to angry villagers. As Jonathan Lethem has noted, “the motif of small-town New England persecution” runs through Jackson’s fiction, filtered from personal experience: “It was [Jackson’s] fate, as an eccentric newcomer in a staid insular village [North Bennington, Vermont], to absorb the reflexive anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism felt by the townspeople toward the college” [where Jackson’s Jewish husband worked as a professor]. Life in North Bennington would lead Jackson to draw up the classic story “The Lottery” (which I covered in a Mob Scene post last year). The author’s most extensive depiction of angry villagers, though, occurs in her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle (whose long-overdue film adaptation arrived in theaters and on demand last week).

In the novel, Jackson’s Blackwoods (the narrating Merricat; Constance; Uncle Julian) live isolated in their fenced-off family home, ostracized by the community. They are the object of scorn, the subject of a dark nursery rhyme that is often tauntingly chanted at them. Some of the hostility stems from class resentment, of a wealthy family perceived to set itself above and beyond the common folk. No small part, though, is played by fear, for dark scandal haunts the Blackwood name: six years earlier, most of the family was killed off, and Constance accused (but found innocent in court, at least) of poisoning them at dinnertime by lacing the sugar bowl with arsenic. Six years later, the Blackwood home is a largely shunned place, and the survivors inside treated like witches by the lore-building locals.

The burning resentment and dread of the Blackwoods flares out of control when Merricat sets fire to the home (in the attempt to cleanse the place of her intrusive, duplicitous cousin Charles, a true American Gothic hero-villain). Along with the fireman battling the conflagration, the villagers arrive at the scene, but act less like concerned onlookers than joyous witnesses of an auto-da-fe. “Let it burn!” the uncaring refrain resounds outside the blazing walls. In a shocking twist, the flames are brought under control, but the crowd goes berserk after the fire chief turns around and throws a rock through one of the tall windows of the home. The act inaugurates an orgy of destruction: looting, vandalizing villagers promptly wash over the home like a “wave.” One of the more respectable townspeople denounces the rioters as “crazy drunken fools,” but intemperance isn’t an adequate explanation for such a transgressive outburst. Long-held inimical feelings have flooded to the surface, resulting in a deluge of unneighborly behavior.

As dramatized in the film, this mob scene is even more stunning. The Blackwood home is torn apart by a pack of wild men and women, its furnishings strewn across the lawn like viscera. The mob’s persecution of the Blackwoods is made even more poignant by Merricat’s voiceover: “The sound of their hate is another kind of fire moving through the bones of our house. I know now that all of my [protective] spells are broken. What was buried here in this village, their want for our ruin, has come to the surface at last.” There’s one salient difference between the book and film versions of the scene. In Jackson’s novel, the villagers are wary of actually touching Constance or Merricat, but in the film the pair of sisters are roughly manhandled. A lynching seems very well in the making, until the crowd is cowed by the announcement that Uncle Julian is dead inside the house.

Further outrage against the Blackwoods is thus avoided, but plenty of damage has occurred. The alleged high-and-mighty have been brought low, their denigrated den of eccentricity devastated. The shock troop of American Gothic, the angry mob, has reduced the Blackwood home to a Gothic ruin: “Our house,” Merricat narrates in the novel, “was a castle, turreted and open to the sky.” Ironically, this violent transformation really hasn’t changed much, only obviated the circumstances of the Blackwoods’ existence all along (as also signaled by Jackson’s book title). The House of Blackwood has fallen into decrepitude, and the weird sisters now shuttered up inside are shuttered at all the more. “We fixed things up nice for you girls, just like you always wanted it,” the mocking villagers proclaim during the sacking of the manse, but Merricat and Constance were fixed in their situation of ugly Othering long before their unfortunate fort was stormed.

American Gothic Inspiration

Posted on May 17, 2019 by JoeNazare

Flame Tree Press is set to publish its latest anthology, American Gothic Short Stories, which includes a new tale by me titled “Gothic American.” In conjunction with the book’s release, Flame Tree has asked the contributors to discuss the genesis of their story idea. My response, along with 18 others, has been posted on Flame Tree’s Fantasy & Gothic blog. So head that way to find my verbal signpost pointing to one of the greatest landmarks of our Macabre Republic:

Lore Report: “The Gateway” (Episode 114)

Posted on May 15, 2019 by JoeNazare

Episode 114: “The Gateway”

“Some stories leave no impression on the pages of history, and others do. And this tale, of the father and son who leap from the wall, is one of the latter stories. It’s powerful, and even disturbing, but beyond all of that, it’s significant. Not so much because of the contents of the tale, but because of where that wall is located. It’s in the American city of San Antonio, and the sight of a building and a battle that have both become legendary parts of out nation’s history. And in the process, it has transformed into a gathering place for tales of tragedy and loss: the Alamo.”

The latest episode of the Lore podcast is a bit of a slow-starter. Narrator Aaron Mahnke spends the first half of the “The Gateway'”s 40-minute runtime sketching a historical account of San Antonio. The area was a “powder-keg of tension and frustration,” marked by a long, tangled history of imperial rule and rebellion. “That’s why,” Mahnke tells his listeners, “you’re getting a deeper tour. Because some marks left on a city aren’t simple to explain; they’re complex and interwoven into a number of larger issues.” Nevertheless, the episode could have benefited from some condensing of this background material.

If the setup proves protracted, the ultimate payoff is a rich one. In the second half of “The Gateway,” Mahnke delves into the types of stories that captivate the Lore audience. As a site of much bloodshed and death, the Alamo unsurprisingly has accrued a haunted reputation. Mahnke recounts reports of the sightings of ghostly figures and of the lingering sounds of battle, but even more fascinating is the account of a supernatural, post-siege defense of the Alamo (an alleged stand-off that saved the subsequently historic landmark from demolition). From here, Mahnke expands the focus, and takes a look behind the origin of the name of the “Six Flags” amusement-park company. The episode concludes with a visit to the nearby Menger Hotel, possibly “the most haunted in Texas,” and whose resident spirits include an ex-President.

While more narrative space could have been devoted here to “haunted San Antonio” than “historic San Antonio,” “The Gateway” ultimately leads to a representative episode and a rewarding listen.

Stephen King, Uncut and Cutting Up

Posted on May 9, 2019 by JoeNazare

“The more respect we get in this field, the less I feel like we’re doing our job.”–Stephen King

Last week, Shudder released a podcast episode of the interview Eli Roth conducted with Stephen King for last fall’s History of Horror series. The podcast features a slew of material that was never televised on AMC. It’s great fun to listen to King cracking jokes and spouting genre wisdom, and to listen to both he and Roth enthuse about horror films (classic and campy). These two should do a weekly show together–it could be like Siskel and Ebert for our Macabre Republic!

Some of the treats in store for listeners of the podcast:

*discussion of the first film that ever “terrified” King

*the identity of the film that King made his son turn off halfway through, because King himself found it “too freaky”

*behind-the-scenes insight on how the legendary cockroach-explosion sequence in Creepshow was filmed

*King’s identification of his typical starting point when writing shorter fiction

*the purpose/value of horror films, according to King

*the author’s thoughts on watching film adaptations of his own work

*the revelation of King’s near-involvement with a popular Spielberg genre film

*an outline of King’s various critiques of Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining

*an account of the vampire figure in cinema (what types of undead bloodsucker King relishes and disdains)

*why King felt Rob Reiner was the “perfect director” for Misery

“The worst horror movie I ever saw was fucking great.”–Stephen King

A.G. Exemplary? Considering the American Gothicism of Charles W. Chestnutt’s “Po’ Sandy” and “The Sheriff’s Children”

Posted on May 5, 2019 by JoeNazare

The latest installment of a recurring feature exploring just how “American Gothic” are works of literature collected in anthologies bearing that titular label. Continuing to work through the contents of editor Charles L. Crow’s American Gothic: An Anthology 1787-1916:

“Po’ Sandy” by Charles W. Chestnutt

In the frame story to Chestnutt’s 1899 tale (collected in The Conjure Woman), the white narrator John tells of his decision to tear down an abandoned one-room schoolhouse on his property and build a detached kitchen for his wife Annie. He is dissuaded, though, by his coachman, the elderly ex-slave Julius McAdoo, who claims (shades of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”) that the schoolhouse is haunted. Julius launches into the story of the eponymous slave: poor Sandy was dutiful and hard-working, so much so that he was constantly loaned out by his master (who at one point unfeelingly traded away Sandy’s wife while Sandy was toiling far away). When Sandy complained to his second wife, Tenie, about such enforced separation from his loved ones, the latter revealed that she was a conjure woman, and helped him stay at home by working a spell that disguised him as a tree on the property. Minor, and somewhat comic, trials ensued from the transformation (including an incident involving a feisty woodpecker), but true tragedy unfolded when Sandy’s master unwittingly cut down the tree and turned into lumber for the eventual schoolhouse. Tenie (who had herself been sent miles away at the time to serve as nurse for one of the master’s family members) thus had her best-laid plan fail miserably, and the grief-stricken woman is later found dead on the floor of the schoolhouse (which is said to contain the spirit of the groaning, mutilated-while-metamorphosed Sandy).

Annie–a more sympathetic listener than her husband–considers Julius’s account of Sandy a “gruesome narrative.” John, meanwhile, dismisses the “absurdly impossible yarn,” and soon thereafter is forced to consider that the “old rascal” Julius had an ulterior motive for conjuring such a tale: he has worked to preserve the schoolhouse so he and his Baptist brethren can use it as a church. Uncle Julius, though, is more than Chestnutt’s version of Uncle Remus, weaving local-color fiction in a humorous dialect, and “Po’ Sandy” does not just recount a wily hoodwinking but more seriously works to open eyes. “What a system it was,” Annie exclaims after hearing Julius’s story, “under which such things were possible!” She is not talking about fantastic sylvan transformations but the way slavery, beyond just subjugating individuals, tore apart black families. Chestnutt proves the ultimate trickster figure here, as his comic-cum-Gothic tale exposes “the darker side of slavery.”

“The Sheriff’s Children” by Charles W. Chestnutt

This second Chestnutt tale first published in 1899 features an American Gothic staple: the angry mob. The quiet, isolated village of Troy in Branson County, North Carolina (whose society “is almost primitive in its simplicity”), is shocked by the foul, midnight murder of Civil War hero Captain Walker. A “strange mulatto” (not coincidentally, Chestnutt himself was of mixed heritage, both of his grandmothers having been slaves impregnated by their white owners) is spotted near the scene and promptly arrested. But a rabble of locals, drunk on “moonlight whiskey,” is hasty for justice and intemperately decides to form a lynching party:

They agreed that this was the least that could be done to avenge the death of their murdered friend, and that it was a becoming way in which to honor his memory. They had some vague notions of the majesty of the law and the rights of the citizen, but in the passion of the moment these sunk into oblivion; a white man had been killed by a negro.

When the bloodthirsty mob arrives at the jailhouse, Sheriff Campbell fends them off, but he proves no heroic precursor to Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch. The sheriff is acting from a sense of duty as an elected official, not from moral outrage at his racist constituents (“I’m a white man outside,” he tells the angry villagers, “but in this jail I’m sheriff; and if this n—-er’s to be hung in this county, I propose to do the hanging”). The sheriff’s misguided sense of superiority (“He had relied on the negro’s cowardice and subordination in the presence of an armed white man as a matter of course”) also allows the prisoner to get the drop on him. In a major plot twist (spoiled somewhat by Chestnutt’s chosen story title), the inmate Tom reveals that he is actually the sheriff’s own flesh and blood, callously sold off as a child along with his slave mother to a speculator. Now, in true Gothic fashion, a “wayward spirit” has “come back from the vanished past” to haunt” the sheriff; Tom’s bitter indictment of his abandoning father recalls the creature’s eloquent confronting of Victor in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Just as Tom is about to commit patricide, he is disarmed by the sheriff’s pistol-toting white daughter Polly. The experience has a nonetheless transforming effect on the sheriff, who resolves to help his son (who is innocent of the crime) beat the murder charge. But the sheriff’s turn toward atonement is a case of too little too late: the next morning he discovers that Tom had deliberately “torn the bandage from his [gunshot] wound and bled to death during the night.” Faced with the perceived impossibility of a fair trial, and the hopeless prospect of societal acceptance, Tom has opted for suicide in his jail cell–cementing his status a tragic mulatto figure, and the legacy of “The Sheriff’s Children” as a Gothic critique of race relations in the South.

Lore Report: “Word of Mouth” (Episode 113)

Posted on May 1, 2019 by JoeNazare

“All of it adds up to a larger idea, though: the belief that the human body, however temporary and fragile it might be, also contains incredible power, and that this power can be transferred to others. And other than extinguishing that power, death can oftentimes be the key to unlocking its fullest potential. All you need is a human corpse, a pressing need, and a very strong stomach.”

Ever wonder why a person would consume ground-up human skull? Would rub his/her sore gums with the tooth of someone who died a violent death? Would drink warm blood from the slashed throat of a gladiator, or eagerly have a hanged man’s hand brushed over their own? If so, then this is the Lore episode for you.

“Word of Mouth,” the latest installment of Aaron Mahnke’s hit podcast, opens with a discussion of sympathetic magic (the belief that “objects could have power related to their appearance or origin story”) and the macabre artifact known as the “Hand of Glory.” Invoking the likes of Galen, Paracelsus, and Pliny the Elder, Mahnke sketches the development of the practice of “corpse medicine”: the seeking of the allegedly healing powers of the deceased, particularly the bodies of criminals who have just experienced a violent death. The episode provides wonderful insight into the way the masses used to relate to the capitally punished (I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the executioner, whose public service apparently extended beyond the hanging or axing of the convicted).

Mahnke’s narrative builds towards the topic of “medicinal cannibalism” (sufferers invest in a cure for their various ailments by ingesting human corpses!). Our host, though, does not allow us to dismiss all of this as the crazy lengths our less-enlightened ancestors once went to in order to feel better. No, Mahnke takes pain to show that the line between primitive superstition and modern medical science is a blurry one at best.

To its credit, “Word of Mouth” is filled with intriguing background information and limited in its resort to illustrating anecdote (save for one extended story concerning the 1861 beheading of a German murderer). As I listened to Mahnke treat the purported restorative result of drinking human blood, I kept waiting for him to bring vampire lore into the discussion. While this never happens, the closing segment does tie in another figure familiar to Universal Monster-lovers: the Egyptian mummy.

As an avowed van of this podcast, I often fret that at a certain point Mahnke will inevitably run out of interesting things to relate. But “Word of Mouth” proves that he still has plenty to relate. Luckily for us, after 113 episodes Lore remains the epitome of grimly fascinating.

Joe Nazare

Dispatches from the Macabre Republic

Monthly Archives: May 2019