It’s been nearly a month since I saw Amarcord with a theater full of rambunctious ghosts in the bowels of the abandoned, walled-off Wannado City. My mood has only improved with each passing day, unlike my cousin and his cunt wife, but I’m starting to get paranoid. Even though this place was supposedly abandoned a decade ago, there’s 5G everywhere… I can feel it in my feathers… I’m looking at the Console and Terminal and Activity Monitor of all of my devices just to make sure that no one’s watching me. Why? What do I have to hide? I’m just a rooster in an abandoned mall/makeshift fake city full of bones and ghosts. There are no skeletons left to party with, and all my rowdy friends have settled down. I’m not prepared to go home yet, but I’m losing my mind in here. Why am I so tired?
Odile the Duck was nagging me about putting some Nicholas Ray movie on the bill for next week, something called On Dangerous Ground from the early-1950s, pre-Rebel Without a Cause… she says, “it’s got an incredible first two reels, then it kinda derails in the country…” Doesn’t this duck know how to do business? Well… I suppose not, since Wannado City was never given a proper chance to succeed. They never let animals try to fail, it’s always written off from the start. Odile may be a dolt, but she’s got good intentions: entertainment for ghosts. Even the dead need to pass the time. “So what should I play then?” I recommended Fight Club and then walked out of the theater and into the galleria. From behind the box office, I could hear her grumble, “But we only have the last four reels…”
Alright, fine Odile: let’s play The Spy Who Loved Me. “Austin Powers? No, no, too dirty for me. I prefer Brendan Fraser.” Okay, Monkeybone, then. “What’s that?” You’ve never seen Monkeybone! Alright, we’re showing that. I was going to show a theater full of ghosts a movie with mythical cartoon animals in Hell! I checked if the library—massive, somehow—had a print, and they did, and when I wound all 10 of those Monkeybone reels, there was applause… then silence… then applause again when the monkey started molesting women… then silence… more silence… some giggles from the faux-Stephen King cameo… more silence… no one’s likes the movie, no one likes the movie, everyone hates me, I’m all alone in this world, there’s no one to talk to and nowhere to turn, I’m as helpless as I ever was.
Odile walked up to the projection booth and kissed me on the beak. “What a picture,” she said, “What a picture. I’m not even sure she watched it, because if she did, she was in the minority: Monkeybone nearly closed down my ghost theater in Wannado City. A lot of people were really offended by the movie, but to be fair to the filmmakers, they never intended any ghosts to see it. “Well isn’t that presumptuous?” They all said it. They were right. Hollywood has a duty to make movies for ghosts—they’re create so many of them as it is. But are any casting couch victims sitting in my seats at Cineplex Bennington? Probably not. But you never know—we are in the same state as Orlando. Maybe next week I’ll just play Ghost and Starman to make my exit from this place as fast as possible.
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