The Ballad of Matt’s Island
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #191. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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A tongue-in-cheek but also painfully earnest look at pop culture and anything else that deserves to be ridiculed while at the same time regarded with the utmost respect. It is written by Matt Marrone and emailed to Stu Horvath and David Shimomura, who add any typos or factual errors that might appear within.
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“This is a song about lost love, and it’s the last time I’m ever gonna play this. So I hope you’re listening, Marie.”
– Herb McGwyer
When a friend of more than 30 years tells you she just saw a movie and asks you, “Did you write it under a pseudonym?” … you should probably go ahead and see that movie.
I watched The Ballad of Wallis Island on a recent plane ride. Maybe the elevation was the difference between just a few sniffles and actual thick wet tears rolling down my cheeks, but I doubt it.
“It really seems like characters you would write and the exact thing you would do if you won the lottery,” my old friend Liz wrote.
She was right.
If I won the lottery – or won it twice, in the case of the film’s folk super fan, Charles Heath – I would indeed invite the members of my favorite defunct folk duo to play a one-off reunion show on the beach of my semi-private Welsh island. They’d stay at my mansion, of course, and the £800,000 ticket price would be worth every shilling.
McGwyer Mortimer isn’t a real band, never was, but I dug their music. Not enough to download the full film soundtrack when my plane touched down, but enough to buy the best song, “Our Love” – the one at the heart of the film’s theme of moving on. It’s also the song Herb plays for the last time ever, with the hope that Charles’ late wife Marie is listening.
Charles can’t get Marie back. McGwyer can’t get Mortimer back. The world can’t get McGwyer Mortimer back. Not even a third winning lottery ticket could do any of that.
But Charles finds a way to move on. McGwyer moves on, too. And the world always moves on.
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On my return flight, I watched a horror movie called The Woman in the Yard. As it turned out, this film is also about dealing with the grief of lost love. There isn’t any bonny folk music in it, though, and the characters do a much worse job of healing.
There’s also a lot more explicit mental illness in The Woman in the Yard. The characters in The Ballad of Wallis Island are miserable and pathetic in a quirky, cutesy manner. It’s a comedy. They find truly wonderful and unique ways of dealing. They’re the kind of people I’d like to be, and I’m glad friends like Liz see me that way.
There are days when I feel more like I’m writing The Woman in the Yard. I’m not so nearly lovable in my anguish. I feel hopeless and anxious and I lash out. There is a sense of impending doom – the woman in the yard, veiled in black, creeping closer every time I peek out the window.
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These are extremes. My favorite folkie isn’t going to call himself my biggest fan at the end of my story, nor am I going to hop through the looking-glass into some fucked-up mirror-image world where I can fool myself that, ultimately, I did things right.
I’m weaving elements of comedy and horror together as I pass along.
I think the best idea is to keep the other genre in mind when straying too far in either direction. When I think I’m the walking embodiment of The Ballad of Wallis Island, I might appear to others around me like The Woman in the Yard. And when I feel like The Woman in the Yard, well, a dash of The Ballad of Wallis Island wouldn’t hurt.
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Also: I guess this is just what happens when you watch movies on a plane. Watching one brings out some extra emotion. Watching two somehow turns into a philosophy.
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Matt Marrone is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.
