192 - It Doesn't Hold Up

Howdy, Jeffrey Kraner here.

You probably know that Welcome to Night Vale does live tours.

We've done seven of those tours, in fact.

If you never got to see these tours, or even if you did and you want to relive them, we have live recordings available to you right now over at nightvale.bandcamp.com.

You can find those seven different live show performances, including our most recent show, The Attic.

We've also got some one-off events like our Thrilling Adventure Hour crossover show, our first-ever live show, Condos, as well as The Debate.

These albums are only $5 and they're so much fun.

So while we're between tours, tide yourself over with our live albums.

That's nightvale.bandcamp.com.

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 Nine Fast, Nine Furious, or that one about the beach that makes you pope.

No, no, no.

I wanted to talk today about a classic of American cinema, a movie I've long been fond of.

But upon re-watching 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 Baloo.

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 don't usually 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.

Now, of course, Helen Miran does not speak English.

Her native language is Birds in a Colombian rainforest, which, if you completed at least sixth 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.

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 Miran, 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, that 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 Baloo.

To start, this movie is from the 1960s, and there are, of course, some outdated jokes and tropes that are not appropriate here in...

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 that they had cast a white actor to play a First Nations man.

Oof.

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 school teacher 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 Blue, 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 single role except for the two balladeers who sing the narrative chorus throughout.

Those 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.

Oh, and Jane Fonda plays Cat Baloo.

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 Baloo in a moment.

But first, we got great news this week.

Earlier this year, Nightvale's leading dinosaur expert Joel Eisenberg had a recurrence of throat spiders.

He had been in remission for nearly five years before receiving this terrible diagnosis back in February.

It has been a rough six 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 13th, Dr.

Duff performed a successful and miraculous arachnidectomy.

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 Nightvale 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, you know, teach the controversy, Joel.

So did anyone else watch Cat Baloo?

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 But then last night, the television turned itself on.

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 the film.

But soon, I started to notice the face.

At around 15 seconds, and 30 seconds, between the two balladeers in the far background, there's the city courthouse, and 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.

And he's looking right at the camera again.

No, 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 3655, 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 just living their normal, boring lives after watching a weird, experimental short film.

But Cat Blue 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 Nightvale Scorpions kick off their season on September 3rd against defending district champ, the Red Mesa Ant Carpenters.

The Scorpions won seven games last year thanks to a strong defense.

They allowed the second fewest points in the district, but eight 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 going to 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 rules that say 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 Baloo, I was feeling paranoid, but in a way that I was aware that I was being paranoid, you know, 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.

And his hat hides his face.

And then he walks slowly forward, lifting the shovel.

And he keeps walking forward, down screen of Jane Fonda, who is still giving the performance everything she 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 mean, I could barely discern any other sounds beneath the electrical hum of the owls.

Oh, yikes.

Um,

okay, the orange light is flashing again.

It's oh, it's almost solid.

Crap.

Um,

let's go to the weather.

Somewhere in the middle of a pocket scheme, my eyes were blank, my hands came up clean Somewhere in the middle of a pocket scheme

My eyes went blank and my hands came up clean Somewhere in the middle of a pocket scheme

My eyes went blank and my hands came up clean Somewhere in the middle of a pocket scheme

My eyes were blank, my hands came up clean

I nearly lost my mind

Underneath Phoenician skies

No end I can see

The truth is after me

We know and we don't care We go where eagles dare dare

I took off on my own

And now I'm a million miles from home In the middle of a pocket scheme My eyes were blank, my hands came up clean Somewhere in the middle of a pocket scheme

My eyes went blank and my hands came up clean Somewhere in the middle of a pocket scheme,

my eyes went blank, and my hands came up clean.

Somewhere in the middle of a pocket scheme, my eyes were blank, and my hands came up clean.

And in the end, it showed I wasn't feeling up to code.

I banged another gong and hoped you tweakers would sing along.

And when that seam was sewn, he died of everything I've known.

I ran and I can swim.

I can't change the mess I'm in.

In the middle of a pocket scheme, my eyes were blank, my hands came up clean.

Somewhere in the middle of a pocket scheme,

my eyes were blank, and my hands came up clean.

Somewhere in the middle of a pocket scheme,

my eyes were blank, and my hands came up clean.

Somewhere in the middle of a pocket scheme,

my eyes went blank, my hands came up clean.

Somewhere in the middle of a pocket scheme, my eyes went blank, my hands came up clean.

You know what I just realized?

I think I was watching the director's cut of Cat Baloo.

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.

I mean, 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 thin 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 soil.

Someone.

It's just an arm at first.

And 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.

I knew.

I knew.

I knew.

I knew.

I knew.

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, the like, it's 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, three 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.

And 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, here I am,

wondering how many ghosts there are in the world.

Must be billions.

It 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.

Welcome to Night Vale is a production of Night Vale Presents.

It is written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Kraner and produced by Disparition.

The voice of Night Vale is Cecil Baldwin.

Original music by Disparition.

All of it can be found at disparition.bandcamp.com.

This episode's weather was Pocket Scheme by Brooke Pridemore.

Find out more at broookpridemore.bandcamp.com.

Comments, questions, email us at info at welcometonightvale.com or follow us on Twitter at nightvale radio.

Or learn how to speak French simply and easily by moving to France and spending many years trying to learn the language.

Check out welcometonightvale.com for info about our summer merch in the Night Vale store.

Yes, you can still be weird, even when on the beach.

Today's proverb: stop and become the flowers.

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.

You might know me from the League Veep or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

We love movies, and we come at them from different perspectives.

Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't.

He's too old.

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dude 2 is overrated.

It is.

Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unschooled, Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-season, and case you missed them.

We're talking Parasite the Home Alone, From Greece to the Dark Knight.

We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks, we've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look, and we've talked about horror movies, some that you've never even heard of, like Kanja and Hess.

So, if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure.

Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to hit the follow button.

Hey, y'all, it is Jeffrey Kraner speaking to you from the year 2025.

And did you know that Welcome to Night Vale is back out on tour?

We are.

We're going to be up in the northeast in the Boston, New York City area, going all the way over to the upper Midwest in Minnesota.

That's in July.

You kind of draw a line through there, and you'll kind of see the towns we'll be hitting.

We'll also be doing Philly down to Florida in September.

And we'll be going from Austin all the way up through the middle of the country into Toronto, Canada in October, and then we'll be doing the West Coast plus the Southwest plus Colorado in January of 2026.

You can find all of the show dates at welcometonightvale.com slash live.

Listen, this brand new live show is so much fun.

It is called Murder Night in Blood Forest, and it stars Cecil Baldwin, of course, Symphony Sanders, me, and live original music by Disparition, and who knows what other special guests may come along for the ride.

These tours are always so much fun, and they are for you, the Die Hard fan, and you, the night veil new kid alike.

So feel comfortable bringing your family, your partner, your coworkers, your cat, whatever.

They don't got to know what a night veil is to like the show.

Tickets to all of these live shows are on sale now at welcometonightvale.com/slash live.

Don't let time slip away and miss us when we are in your town because otherwise we will all be sad.

Get your tickets to our live U.S.

plus Toronto tours right now at welcometonightvale.com/slash live.

And hey, see you soon.