Critical Approaches to Welcome to Night Vale

Podcasting between Weather and the Void

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319930909
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319930916
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Social Sciences

With well over one-hundred episodes, the podcast Welcome to Night Vale has spawned several international live tours, two novels set in the Night Vale universe, and an extensive volume of fan fiction and commentary. However, despite its immense popularity, Welcome to Night Vale has received almost no academic scrutiny. This edited collection of scholarly essays—the very first of its kind on a podcast—attempts to redress this lack of attention to Night Vale by bringing together an international group of scholars from different disciplines to consider the program's form, themes, politics, and fanbase. After a thorough introduction by the volume's editor, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, the eight contributors not only offer close analysis of Night Vale, but use the program as the impetus for broader explorations of new media, gender, the constitution of identity, the construction of place, and the human relationship to meaning and the non-human.

© The Author(s) 2018

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (ed.)Critical Approaches to Welcome to Night Valehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93091-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Between Weather and the Void—Welcome to Night Vale

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock¹

(1)

Department of English Language and Literature, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, USA

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Email: [email protected]

Lights, seen in the sky above the Arby’s. Not the glowing sign of Arby’s. Something higher and beyond that. We know the difference. We’ve caught on to their game. We understand the lights above the Arby’s game. Invaders from another world. Ladies and gentlemen the future is here. And it’s about a hundred feet above the Arby’s. (Fink and Cranor, Mostly Void 7)

Abstract

In this introduction to the volume, editor Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock first offers an overview of the podcast’s history and considers reference points and sources of inspiration for the program, before focusing attention on the program’s juxtaposition of ordinary and strange, and the roles of voice and sound on the program. Attention is paid to how the program creates a sense of intimacy between announcer Cecil Baldwin and the listener, as well as to how the program subverts expectations. Night Vale’s humor and absurdity are also explored, as are the program’s politics and values, including its anti-corporatism and emphasis on inclusivity.

Keywords

AbsurdityAnti-corporatismDiversityHistoryHumorInclusivityInfluencesIntimacyMusicPoliticsValues

End Abstract

As Welcome to Night Vale co-creator Joseph Fink tells it in the introduction to Mostly Void, Partially Stars, the published transcripts to the first 25 episodes of Night Vale, the paragraph above about lights above the Arby’s—which appears in the pilot episode (“Pilot”)—was the first bit written for the program and captured the “mood” he was hoping to achieve. “For a long time after,” continues Fink , “when I was trying to make something fit the world of Night Vale, I thought back to that first paragraph I wrote and tried to capture the same feeling I had when I wrote it” (Fink , “Introduction” xviii). In starting to think critically about Night Vale—about what it is, what it means, how it means, why it has become so popular, why it matters, and so on—perhaps we can let ourselves be directed by Fink , who points out for us a particularly rich and resonant passage present from the start and highlights for us the roles of “mood” (“Introduction” xviii) and “feeling” in his own consideration of the program. So let us begin, like Fink , with two lights against the backdrop of the night sky. The first is the familiar red and white neon sign of the fast food chain (probably the one with the name plastered across the front of the outline of a cowboy hat)—real-world, working class (maybe even a bit red-necky) everyday American capitalism. And then we mentally pan up to the other light, “something higher and beyond that,” the antithesis of the commonplace first. In the space of “about a hundred feet,” we shift our view from the quotidian to the interstellar, from the familiar world of weather to the mysteries of the universe and the void—and we find them in close proximity, one literally hovering over the other. The sublime—extraterrestrial life and the profound expanse of the universe—comingling with the profane in a kind of cosmic comedy: aliens at the Arby’s.

In intertwining the familiar with the weird and exotic, Welcome to Night Vale, for all its brilliant strangeness, participates in a well-established narrative tradition. In order, therefore, to consider what Night Vale does that is new, it is useful to cast a backward glance over its generic affinities. First, however, a bit of background on just what Night Vale is may be useful. Typically airing on the 1st and 15th of each month, Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast—an episodic series of digital audio files that can be streamed online or downloaded. Premiering on June 15, 2012, the series purports to be a community radio program broadcast from the fictional town of Night Vale. Located somewhere in the Southwestern US, Night Vale is, as characterized by Fink , “a town where every conspiracy theory is true and people just have to go on with their lives” (“Introduction” xviii). Described variously as “‘A Prairie Home Companion’ with LSD in its drinking water” (Barton), a place “where David Lynch meets ‘The Twilight Zone’” (Baker-Whitelaw), “like a local news Twin Peaks” (Virtue), and “Lake Wobegon meets H.P. Lovecraft” (Maksym), Night Vale, as co-creator Jeffrey Cranor explained in a National Public Radio interview, presents “a mundane, quaint American town, sort of overrun by ghosts, or spirits, or conspiracies or underground societies” (“Welcome to ‘Night Vale’”).

From humble beginnings in June of 2012 with 50 total downloads in its first week, the program’s popularity swelled until in August of 2013, two months into its second year, Night Vale surpassed the podcasts Radiolab and This American Life to become the #1 podcast on iTunes, having been downloaded 8.5 million times in August alone (Cranor , “Introduction” xiv). Cranor attributes this success to fan enthusiasm on the social networking website Tumblr—and then correlates this enthusiasm with three factors: solid writing, originality, and perhaps most importantly, the program’s representation of the same-sex relationship between Night Vale Public Radio (NVPR) host Cecil Palmer (voiced by Cecil Baldwin) and scientist Carlos (originally voiced by Jeffrey Cranor until episode 17, and then voiced by Dylan Marron). Max Sebela, a creative strategist at Tumblr, reported that fandom began to “spiral out of control” on Tumblr starting around July 5, 2013, with over 183,000 individual blogs and 680,000 Night Vale-related notes in a one-week period following episode 27, “First Date,” in which Cecil recounts his first date with Carlos (Carlson). “Many fans have told us that this relationship means so much to them,” writes Cranor (xv). As Bottomley observes, “the podcast has consistently remained in or near iTunes’ Top 20 rankings in the United States ever since [August of 2013], and regularly charts internationally too” (179). The success of the podcast , which in December of 2016 celebrated its 100th episode, has subsequently led to several touring live Night Vale shows and two novels so far set in the Night Vale universe: Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel (2015) and It Devours! (2017).

For Bottomley , the success of Night Vale, “an independent production, made on a shoestring budget by a small group of creative personnel with no ties to the traditional radio industry, a podcasting network, or any other major media institution” (182), is all the more remarkable for its doing so “in a space increasingly dominated by professional media producers” (180). While celebrating Night Vale’s uniqueness, however, Bottomley does offer a helpful overview of how the program arrives at its unusual format through the “remediation”—the appropriation and refashioning—of older media forms: notably radio drama and community and talk radio. The podcast , as a scripted narrative written, performed, and produced to be heard, explains Bottomley , is a throwback to the days of radio drama (183), and Night Vale’s generic affinities—a mix of comedy, science fiction, and horror—recalls the most popular forms of programming during the “golden age” of radio during the 1940s and 1950s. Welcome to Night Vale, although a podcast , carries on the tradition of radio programs such as Inner Sanctum Mystery (1941–1952) and The Mercury Theatre on the Air (1938) (the latter of which is perhaps most famous for the broadcast of its adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938, and the ensuing panic). Bottomley also points out that, while the topics Cecil discusses on Night Vale may be unusual, his presentation of them is actually quite familiar, as its use of the primary codes of radio production—speech, music, noise, and silence—are in keeping with standard radio production (185). And while Cecil’s quirky commentary or confessional moments may not correspond to the kind of news presentation one is used to from American National Public Radio, for example, there is nevertheless “a long and rich history of more marginal forms of talk radio” (186) from which Night Vale borrows. Radio practices familiar to us today from talk radio and community radio “provide the context in which [Night Vale’s] narrative operates as entertainment” (Bottomley 185).

Night Vale, too, as its creators acknowledge, derives inspiration from a range of literary, televisual, and cinematic sources, both older and contemporary. The horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft is one frequent point of reference and seems especially apropos given that Night Vale co-creator Jeffrey Fink served as the editor for a 2010 anthology of fiction titled A Commonplace Book of the Weird: The Untold Stories of H.P. Lovecraft—a collection of weird fiction to which both he and Cranor contributed stories. Lovecraft’s weird fiction of the 1920s and 1930s is built on the premise that the universe is a much stranger place than human beings acknowledge and that human achievement counts for very little when considered in light of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Between Weather and the Void—Welcome to Night Vale
• 2. “Everything About Him Was Just Perfect. And I Fell in Love Instantly”: Life and Love in Welcome to Night Vale
• 3. Our Friendly Desert Town: Alternative Podcast Culture in Welcome to Night Vale
• 4. On Floating Cats, Good Boys, and Shapeshifting Zookeepers: Animals in Night Vale
• 5. “It Would Make More Sense for It to Be There Than Not”: Constructing Night Vale as a “Place”
• 6. “More Reassuring Noise in This Quiet World”: Narrative Intimacy and the Acousmatic Voice of Night Vale
• 7. Who Killed Cecil Palmer? The Role of Memory in Night Vale’s Self-Narrative Rupture
• 8. Ode for the Lights Above the Arby’s: Reading Welcome to Night Vale Through the Lens of Poetry
• 9. “Fear the Night Sky!”: On the Nightvalian Void and an Ethics of Risk
• Back Matter