It’s 2006, that queasy moment in history between 9/11 and the iPhone, when the digital hadn’t quite displaced the analog, the Great War on Terror seemed destined to last forever, and Apocalypse Theater was all the rage. The polar ice caps were shrinking by the month, Bird Flu was spreading unchecked around the globe, Kim Jong Il was about to test a nuke, and the water supply was tainted with killer nanobots. Looking back, it’s a wonder we survived.
But maybe that’s the real nightmare of existence: The world is always ending but never quite does. Night turns to morning, and morning means… the grind. The grind that drives our longing for the night.
Bert Cole, 60, a nighttime radio host (our version of the legendary Art Bell) is the cultural figure most responsible for turning the era’s dark matrix of fears and portents into addictive pop entertainment. Every night for hours on end, his rich, tobacco-scoured baritone holds captive an audience of tens of millions – lonesome truck drivers, bored security guards, insomniacs of every kind – hungry for ghost stories and hidden knowledge. He’s a loner by temperament, a Vietnam vet, cranky, curious, and patriotic, tortured by an aching back that he treats with a few too many narcotic pain pills. He enjoys other people, but at a distance, in the form of callers to his show, which is based at the isolated Nevada compound he shares with Lola, his beloved wife.
It’s Lola, a Filipina immigrant, who makes Bert’s nocturnal empire possible. She brews his herbal stamina elixir, empties his ashtrays, rubs his aching shoulders, and fills a hot bath for him after every show. She’s an earth mother type whose old-world ways border on witchcraft. Both she and Bert know he couldn’t survive without her, which is why she once made him a solemn promise: If something should ever happen to her, she’ll bring him a new soulmate from the spirit world to take up where she left off.
Sadly, that promise has come due; just a few months ago poor Lola dropped dead. A heart attack in the kitchen. Bert wore her out. (Maybe his chain smoking didn’t help her asthma.) You’d think she might want vengeance from beyond, but Bert is convinced she’s already found his match in the form of a gorgeous sweetheart in her twenties who Bert met and courted on the internet. They’re already engaged – true soulmates shouldn’t wait -- and he’s already flown off to the Philippines to seal the deal and bring her home.
The only problem for Bert -- the first of many – is that when he landed in Manila, his young would-be bride was nowhere to be found.
Our movie is the story of his search for her and the strange secrets uncovered along the way. The tale is framed as a nightlong radio broadcast, complete with inquisitive callers and special guests. Bert has been off the air for weeks, mystifying and frustrating his fans, and he owes them an explanation for his absence. He may even explain the huge bandage on his left arm – or not, because no one can see it. He’s on the radio. Who says that a show like his must match the facts? (It won’t, we’ll discover, and maybe it never has.)
The setting for the fateful broadcast is Bert’s high-rise condo in Manila’s “Global City,” a gated, guarded modern compound for businesspeople and wealthy foreigners built on a former US Air Force base. As an ex-Air Force man himself and a lover of order and efficiency, Bert loves his new command post. If only he had a helper and companion to restore his old routine.
Bert’s sidekick in his search for Maricel is “Kid” Quintana, the canny “limo driver” (his car is a Nissan hatchback with glowing pink wheels) who found him at the airport sitting dejected on the boxed fax machine he lugged all the way from the US. Kid tried to console Bert by reminding him that he isn’t the first American gentleman to be stood up by a cutie from the internet. It’s an industry here, extracting wire payments from lovelorn men who never get the goods. Bert insists his case is different; Lola will keep her pledge.
Kid remembers something that gives Bert hope. Last weekend in Ermita, Manila’s entertainment district, he saw a woman resembling Maricel being hustled into a car. Kid work as a ringer in the karaoke bars there, pretending to be a member of the audience, then delivering unexpected star performances for tips and drinks. He’ll ask around about the missing woman.
With Kid’s help as a black-market buyer of high-tech gear, Bert equips his studio. He uses its IDSN line to keep in touch with old friends and frequent show guests: Brenda Morton Pope, an investigative reporter whose beat is unexplained cattle mutilations, and Huntley Bieber, an idealistic “remote viewer.” They urge Bert to resume his show. His audience needs him; bizarre events are happening. A satellite photo has emerged showing a Colosseum on the moon.
Kid returns from his prowling with good news: a contact in Ermita recognized the photo of Maricel, IDing her as a fighter in naked wrestling shows who goes by the stage name “Scorpiana.” She’s linked to a local gangster, Howard Huge, who deals counterfeit narcotics in the bars and is famously volatile and jealous.
Bert is persuaded by Kid to hit the streets. His neon night out on the town flashes him back to Vietnam, where he served as a medic near Saigon. The bar girls, the con games, the cockfights, the fortune tellers. And the music, which inspired his young self to become a DJ on the base. Toward the end of the night, he encounters a mystic healer (a so-called “Psychic surgeon”) who extracts from his neck a wormy, sticky mass. “Your guilt for neglecting the women in your life.”
Near dawn they track down Howard Huge. He demands a deal. He will release his rights to his old girlfriend in return for airfare to Japan to reconstruct his mangled scalp, which she clawed off in a rage when he drugged her before a wrestling match. Bert is appalled, but he pays up. Howard gives him the name of her tiny island village, where he believes she’s in hiding from his goons.
Kid proposes a trip into the jungle – if someone buy him a used Toyota truck – but a terrified Bert consults his friends back home first. Huntley attempts to view the island village and has a vision of joyous, singing children leaping into a mountain of white feathers. Brenda checks with her sources at the Pentagon and learns of a research clinic near the village involved in classified “soul swapping technology.”
Then a fax arrives. It’s smudged and unreadable, but there’s a photo: Maricel naked on a bed, eyes closed, surrounded by shadowy figures. It’s time to go
The trip in Kid’s used Toyota is long and hot, with Kid singing songs from his karaoke repertoire that sound both familiar and bizarre, like hits from another dimension, another timeline. Kid explains that his voice is spiritual gift, the result of his ride on a “sky snake” as a boy. He was raised in “the old religion of the trees” in a village not far from Maricel’s, in fact. He suspects he and she may even be related.
As Kid starts singing again, Bert loses focus and drifts into a revery. He’s on patrol in Vietnam, guided by bouncing light or orb. It leads him to a clearing where Lola is tending a roaring fire. She’s burning Bert’s clothing, their sheets and blankets, and carton after carton of his cigarettes. Bert suddenly wakes when Kid slams on the brakes to avoid a creature on the road. He fears it was an aswang, a shapeshifting monster of the jungle, human by day, demonic after dark.
Kid and Bert take shelter at a small inn, where Kid retreats to bed read the Bible. Downstairs in the little makeshift bar Bert is approached by a trim, attractive woman of military bearing. She claims to have followed Bert’s career for years, listing her favorite episodes and callers, including the best known of all: A man on the run from Area 51 who’s line was cut off while he spilled its deepest secrets. She recreates the call in the man’s voice, then perfectly reenacts another call, implying that both were the work of the same actor. Then she goes further, informing Bert that she is his long-time military “handler,” feeding him information, true and false, to shape public consciousness of sensitive topics. Has Bert ever wondered how his local program grew so popular so quickly?
Bert is sullen but not surprised. He always suspected that The Powers that Be were watching him behind the scenes. The officer reassures him that he’s prized, a genius whose gifts were spotted early on and only nudged along as needed. National security is at stake. The government has been aware for decades of an approaching “dimensional disruption,” its specifics unknown, whose shocks must be prepared for. Bert’s role in this effort is indispensable and has made him a target for dark forces. “Maricel” may be among them. The officer warns him to be careful and vows to come to his aid at any time. “You have a team. You’re not alone. Your country needs you. Please don’t fuck things up.”
Kid and Bert enter the village the next day. It’s a meager, muddy, impoverished settlement. Dead chickens lie strewn along the road, supposed victims of the bird flu which Kid insists is a byproduct of research at the nearby lab. They are greeted by Espiritu, the head man, who thanks Kid for doing his duty by his sister and bringing her a worthy husband. Before Bert can process this information, Espiritu tells him that the ceremony must begin immediately, before the full moon begins to wane. “The wedding is tomorrow; the dowry is tonight.”
We cut to the studio in Bert’s condo, as we have many times throughout the movie. Bert washes down a pain pill with fresh drink and lights a cigarette from a smoldering butt. He looks exhausted. The call board is lit up red.
On the night of the dowry, Bert is bathed in seawater by three old women dressed in hooded robes. One looks like Lola and avoids his gaze. They serve him an elixir of bitter herbs.
Bert is led to a card table, the dowry table, where Espiritu sits with a pen and a large ledger. He lists Bert’s debts to the village and the bride’s family. A Maytag refrigerator with an ice machine. Repairs to the chapel, which was damaged in a storm. Tuition for Kid at the National Arts Academy. A satellite dish so the locals can hear Art’s show. As Bert agrees to each item in the contract, Espiritu stamps the section in the ledger: “THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOVE.”
The Ceremony starts at sunrise. Half Catholic, half older than Catholic. Drums. A priest. A veiled bride emerges from the trees and is led by children to the altar. Kid stands beside Bert like a best man at a hostage exchange.
And then the big moment. The veil is lifted. This is NOT the woman in the photo. She’s older, plainer, with shorter hair and a conspicuous scar across her neck. The village holds its breath. Kid shuts his eyes and clasps his hands in prayer. We see Bert’s confusion in close-up. His paralysis. He is surrounded and he must decide. The eyes of the hooded women bear down on him. Finally, quietly, Bert says, “I accept”
Back at the studio a few nights later, Bert winds up the broadcast. He tells a fairy tale. He casts the wedding in a golden light, enthuses about the beauty of his bride, and praises her family’s warmth and generosity. Brenda and Huntley call in with their best wishes and urge him to come home to Nevada. “Maricel is going to love Pahrump.”
As Bert delivers his closing words on the supernatural power of love, his bride emerges from the kitchen. Dressed in Lola’s robe and favorite necklace and wearing her hair in the same style, she demurely freshens his drink, empties his ashtray, and moves off toward the bedroom. She stands in its darkened doorway and sheds her robe, revealing on her naked back an enormous, lifelike tattoo. A scorpion, tail coiled, about to strike.