There are no atheists in foxholes. There are lots of agnostics in pantries. There are only a couple of deists in dirt bike racing. Welcome to Night Vale

###

It’s a slow news day. The wind is still. The roads are empty. And not a sound can be heard, neither joy nor fright. So I thought I’d bring you a movie review, listeners.

It’s not a new film. I didn’t go see some recent summer blockbuster like Space Jam or 9Fast9Furious or that one about the beach that makes you Pope. No, I wanted to talk today about a classic of American cinema. A movie I’ve long been fond of, but upon rewatching it last night, I’m wondering if it “holds up,” as they say.

Of course we’ll be talking about Lee Marvin’s 1965 comedy western Cat Ballou. More on this in a moment, but first…

###

I'm so thrilled to announce a special guest on today's show. Today's guest is someone you're all familiar with. Their work has been seen and heard all over the globe. Wow, I usually don't get nervous about interviewing celebrities. But yet here I am, hands quivering, knees sweating, teeth elongating.

On today’s show we have -wow- Dame Helen Mirren! She's in town to promote her new memoir "Your Face Is My Piñata, Jabroni."

Of course, Helen Mirren does not speak English. Her native language is Birds in a Colombian Rainforest, which if you completed at least 6th grade in public school, you'll be able to follow pretty easily. (Still, it's annoying that Station Management wouldn't spring for an English Interpreter. She is a legend of British stage and screen, after all.)

Welcome to the show, Dame Mirren. Please, tell us about your new book.

[60 seconds of rain forest sounds. It should feel like a ridiculously long time, and it should end abruptly]

I'm sorry to cut you off, Helen, but we're almost out of time. There’s an orange light that flashes, reminding me to move to the next segment. The closer we get to being out of time, the faster the light blinks. Eventually the light will blink so fast as to become a single unbroken glow. I have never waited long enough to find out what happens next.

As they say in radio: Clock. Not Content.

So thank you, Dame Mirren, for coming in today. It’s an honor to meet you. Please go. I think you’ve done enough.

###

Today’s episode is brought to you by the concept of stasis. Don’t get up. Stay there. To move is to change. To change is to become someone else. To become someone else is to die. Stay still. Stay very very still. Every action is destruction of the world as you know it. Do you like this moment? Well, then if you do something, anything, just the slightest breath of change, this moment will die. It will be murdered. Murdered by time, with you as its accomplice. Stasis. Don’t do it. Everything’s fine, just as it is, right now.

###

Okay, time to talk about Cat Ballou. To start, this movie is from the 1960s, and there are of course some outdated jokes and tropes that are not appropriate here in… uh, just checking today’s calendar… ah, yes… 2021. It’s strange how a lot of these things I never noticed until this most recent viewing, though. Like I didn’t remember they had cast a white actor to play a First Nations man. Ooof. Nor the number of sexist comments. Nor that there was a series of humorous asides about Christian Zionism. I am fully at fault for not recognizing these things. I really should have a more critical eye toward Hollywood.

All of that said, there’s so much of this movie I don’t remember at all, from the social justice angle to basic plot and characters. For instance, I somehow never even noticed that Jane Fonda played the title role. In my memory, the schoolteacher-turned-outlaw, Catherine Ballou, was indelibly portrayed by a baby-faced Lee Marvin. I can envision him so clearly, hardly looking a day over 30.

Cat Ballou – the way I remember it – was about a young woman who meets an outlaw in the old west, also played by Lee Marvin. And she hires this outlaw to protect her father’s ranch from a hired killer (also played by Lee Marvin). In fact, in the film I remember, Lee Marvin plays every role except for the two balladeers who sing the narrative chorus throughout. These two singers were played by Nat King Cole.

But when I watched the movie last night, Lee Marvin plays just two roles: the hired assassin, and the drunken outlaw hired to stop the hired assassin. And Jane Fonda plays Cat Ballou. The story, otherwise, seemed roughly the same, but there’s this B-plot about a ghost that I have no recollection of at all. In every scene, I noticed somewhere in the background the face of a man. The man never speaks, never changes his facial expression from a narrow-eyed, thin grin, almost never appears in a close-up, and except for the final act, he is always looking directly at the camera.

My husband Carlos, who watched the movie with me, didn’t notice anything strange about the way the film ended. But Carlos also tends to fall asleep about 45 minutes into every movie we watch. It’s the perfect balance of annoying and adorable.

More on Cat Ballou in a moment, but first, we got great news this week.

###

Earlier this year, Night Vale's leading dinosaur expert, Joel Eisenberg, had a recurrence of throat spiders. He had been in remission for nearly 5 years before receiving this terrible diagnosis back in February. It has been a rough 6 months for Joel.

Lead surgeon Dr. Veronica Duff said the spiders had eaten away most of Eisenberg’s esophagus. In turn, Dr. Duff said, the spiders acquired the ability to speak in Eisenberg's exact voice, but without the mental capacity to communicate in a known language. Wherever Eisenberg went, those around him could hear Joel mumbling gibberish in thousands of tiny voices without his swollen lips even moving.

But! On July 13, Dr. Duff performed a successful and miraculous arachnid-dectomy. She also replaced his vocal cords with part of his intestines, and Joel Eisenberg is well on the road to recovery. He’ll be back at Night Vale Community College this fall teaching his students that dinosaurs did not walk the earth with humans. Somehow Joel also thinks that dinosaurs are toothy chickens. I mean, welcome back and all, but teach the controversy, Joel!

###

So did anyone else watch Cat Ballou? It was on television last night. (That makes me sound old, but there’s a good reason for that. I am old. So very...very...old) The point is that I somehow ended up on Channel 19, which usually is an empty channel, a blank screen. But then last night, the television turned itself on, and there she was: the Columbia Pictures statue famously morphing into a cartoon and firing off her pistols. I knew exactly the movie, and I couldn’t turn away.

Believe me, I tried to turn away, but Jane Fonda was so captivating, so understated, in the title role. And I was trying to understand how in my dozens of viewings I never even knew she was in this film.

But soon, I started to notice the face. At around 15 minutes and 30 seconds, between the two balladeers, in the far background there’s the city courthouse. Just to the right of the front door is a man. He appeared as a black smudge at first, but the longer I looked the more I could see that thin mouth, those threatening, beckoning eyes.

Again at 23 minutes, he’s in the crowd watching the square dance. Everyone’s heads are facing left into the circles of dancers. Every head except one. He’s looking right at the camera again. Not at the camera… at me.

It was then that I knew who it was, but not exactly who it was, like in a dream. And I paused the DVR and showed the man to Carlos, and Carlos thought he was just an extra. If you pay close attention to Hollywood extras, you’ll invariably see one of them acting strange, he said.

But at 36:55 in the top right, behind the stone well in the thicket, he’s there again. If you have a copy of this movie at home, go watch it, and tell me I’m not imagining this. It reminds me of The Ring, that old horror film about the videotape that if you watch it, you die… eventually… of something. Just like every human ever. It’s actually a super dull movie about people living their normal, boring lives after watching a weird experimental short film.

But Cat Ballou felt far more personal. This viewing resonated with me more than it ever has before. More on that in a second.

###

But first, sports. The Night Vale Scorpions kick off their season on September 3 against defending district champ, the Red Mesa Ant Carpenters. The Scorpions won 7 games last year thanks to a strong defense. They allowed the 2nd fewest points in the district, but 8 of their 11 defensive starters graduated last year. In fact, all eight of them tied for Valedictorian, and they each gave an inspiring speech at graduation, all eight speeches delivered simultaneously in a cacophony of motivational catchphrases.

Coach Latrice Beaumont has confidence in her new starters, but she’s always on the lookout for the best talent for her team, even if it involves thinking a bit outside the box.

"I'm gonna enroll some bears into the high school," Beaumont said, "and then teach them to play defensive line. Just some standard black bears, maybe a kodiak or two. There's no rule that says a bear can't play football,” she concluded.

District head of officiating, Jake Kemp, said there absolutely is a rule against bears playing football. When asked to cite the rule stating this, Kemp laughed and then vomited up half of a seafood burrito into his travel mug.

This has been sports.

###

Up to this point in watching Cat Ballou, I was feeling paranoid, but in a way that I was aware that I was being paranoid. Just seeing things. But then at 56 minutes and 56 seconds in, Jane Fonda stands in front of an old shed and throws rocks at the ne’er-do-well boys who got her into this mess. And behind her on the left, a man stands with one arm on his hip, the other resting on a shovel. His hat hides his face. Then he walks slowly forward, lifting the shovel. He keeps walking forward, downscreen of Jane Fonda, who is still giving the performance everything she’s has, as if some rogue extra isn’t ruining the shot.

The man then lifts the brim of his hat and looks right into the camera. His lips are moving, but not like speaking, more like undulating. It’s hard to hear if he is making any noise, because the audio mix on this movie was terrible. I could barely discern any other sounds beneath the electrical hum of the owls.

Oh, yikes! [quickly] The orange light is flashing again. It’s almost solid. Crap. Uh… Let’s go to the weather!

###

Weather: “Pocket Scheme“ by Brook Pridemore, https://brookpridemore.bandcamp.com

###

You know what I just realized. I think I was watching the director’s cut of Cat Ballou. That’s got to be it. Hollywood loves their focus groups and many tiers of executives giving notes. And sometimes the original artistic vision gets corrupted.

That must be it. It was weird that the final 20 minutes of this film were an unbroken tracking shot following the mysterious figure through the woods. He never turns around. The camera just follows him. It’s dusk, so we don’t see everything that we want to see. It is mostly shadow drawn in thick black swaths across the pink-purple of approaching twilight.

And in the end the man leads the camera to a tree. It’s completely silent. No dialogue. No musical score. Not even the natural sound of footsteps on rocks and leaves. And the man, still with his back turned, digs into the base of a tree. It’s a very familiar tree. Probably one Hollywood uses all the time for film shoots. And after a couple of minutes of digging, we see something in the dirt. Someone. It’s just an arm at first, but then the fingers wriggle, and then the soil gives way. And then a head pushes through. And crawling out from below the tree is another, younger man.

I have to admit, this scene was brilliant, but it didn’t really connect to the plot of young Catherine Ballou trying to save her family farm. Still, it was harrowing, and quite moving.

So the younger man lifts his face to the camera, and I knew who he was before he even showed his eyes. [tapering off] I knew. I knew. I knew. I knew.

[pause]

But before we can see him, fully. Cut to black. Credits. Suddenly I was unsure. And under the credits, the sound of owls, that rhythmic, hissing sound that owls make, you know, like hydraulic pumps lifting a car.

I woke Carlos up -- his head fully across my lap, his eyes closed, a slight wheezing snore emanating from his nose. I rewound the film, but the DVR cut off before the final sequence, so I couldn’t show him. And he said “Cecil, I know it’s your favorite movie, but it’s also very old. Maybe it doesn’t hold up like you want it to.”

“Maybe,” I said, “But I know what I saw.”

His expression shifted from know-it-all to empathetic-skeptic.

“I think it’s my dad,” I said.

“Which one? The one under the tree, or the one with the shovel?” Carlos said.

“Both,” I said.

“I’ve never heard you mention your dad before,” he said.

“Neither have I,” I said.

And then we both repeated “Huh” back and forth 3 times, before folding the blanket up, placing it back on the top of the couch, starting the dishwasher, checking in on Esteban, who was still fast asleep, and heading to bed ourselves.

Later, in my dreams, I saw the man from the film, and I was scared. But I sat with him long enough that the fear subsided, and I asked him if he was my father.

He began to speak, but the sound was slow to my ears. And before I could hear what he said he was gone, and so were his words, replaced by the bright morning sun and the gentle piano tune of my alarm. And here I am wondering how many ghosts there are in the world. Must be billions. Feels arrogant to assume that just because I see one, it has to be related to me.

Maybe I will meet him again. I’d like to ask him about the owls. I don’t think they’re supposed to sound like that.

Stay tuned next for my review of Lee Marvin’s tour-de-force performance as every single one of the von Trapp children in The Sound of Music, for which he also won the Academy Award for Best Musical Score.

And as always, good night, Night Vale. Good night.