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13 years; it’s been 13 years since this podcast began. A whole teenager-length of time since I myself was listening to this very first episode in high school. I wondered if it would be challenging to write about this episode, as I definitely listened to this opening pilot countless times that summer alone. I can tell you how it feels to be wrapped up in a warm blanket of memory upon hearing the opening song again, but I feel like a review should also come with a first impression. To that, I can remember the smile on my face as I sat in my bed in my parent’s house and listened to this episode from my tinny iPhone speakers on a humid summer night. I thought the show would be *scary*, when I first learned about it, and so was slightly on edge listening to the first couple of episodes, but kept being happily surprised by its tone and the world it was crafting.
Given that this is an auditory experience I’m writing about, I would be remiss if I didn’t first mention the voice of our narrator and guide to Night Vale, Cecil Palmer. It is even smoother and lovelier than I remember, perhaps the platonic ideal of a small town radio host. I recall that one of the things that drew artists and creatives to WTNV was sharing their renditions of Cecil and the other characters and entities of the show. I saw so many beautiful designs back then, so many drawings of angels and hooded figures and of course, Cecil. I think in my mind I will always imagine him as a Native American man, one of the very first artistic interpretations of him I ever saw floating across my Tumblr dashboard.
On the topic of voice, I think the creators of this show really hit on something simple but special with the radio show idea. Talk about effective use of your medium! Not only that, but it is a great en media res way to experience the world of Night Vale. There is a casual familiarity to Cecil’s explanations of the strange happenings that really sells to me that this is all par for the course for the citizens of this desert town. Yet we are still able to find ourselves, seamlessly, at the inciting action of a story: the arrival of Carlos and his team of scientists. They are trying to unravel the countless oddities of Night Vale and, as curious outsiders, are a perfect conduit for change and upheaval in a town accustomed to keeping its head down about the general ominous happenings.
And the imagery here, the unmarked helicopters, the secret police, the paranoia and conspiracy of small-town USA, the cultish hooded figures and vaguely-extraterrestrial lights above the Arby’s—the marriage of political and supernatural mysteries that so often color the worldview of the conspiracy theorist, ring true to me. In Night Vale there exist both 10-ft tall radiant multiracial angels and vaguely menacing government agents, and it is a place that I have known.
I’d like to take a quick second to admire the prose of this show; the first episode has a line that has stuck with me for many years for its precise and macabre comparison: “He has a square jaw and teeth like a military cemetery.” I also remember being instantly endeared towards Cecil for his open attraction to Carlos, and it was no less true this time around.
Speaking again on the effectiveness of the medium, the use of music here is just as lovely as I remembered. The ‘weather’ report actually being a song is another great way that the show subverts the listener’s expectations of the radio-broadcast format. Usually it is being subverted by the content of Cecil’s reporting: the strange happenings of the town, and by treating them like they are commonplace. But here we subvert the setup of the broadcast itself. And this is without even discussing Disparition’s ‘The Ballad of Fielder and Mundt’, the opening song I mentioned earlier. I don’t think I’m capable of untangling this song from the memories it carries, but I will say that even without the influence of nostalgia, if I heard this song for the first time today, I would still put it on repeat on my headphones because it’s that good. It’s an instrumental track—no vocals, but no less enveloping and consuming. The bandcamp page for this song tags it with the genres of “experimental,” “ambient,” “dark,” “electroacoustic,” and “gothic.” This is the exact kind of song, as I said, that I could listen to on repeat as I write or draw.
Now, WTNV is not a comedy podcast in the way many other are. Instead it is a surreal comedy. The humor in this, absurdist in the face of the unknowable, still manages to take me off guard and chuckle like it was the first time hearing it. I’d forgotten, somehow, about little offhand comments like the one from Old Woman Josie about her angel visitors—”She’s offering to sell the old light bulb, which has been touched by an angel (it was the black angel, if that sweetens the pot for anyone).” And the deadpan delivery of many of these lines, such as the NRA bit—Cecil describing the vinyl stickers the NRA was selling which proclaim “Guns don't kill people. It's impossible to be killed by a gun. We are all invincible to bullets and it's a miracle.”—works super well.
The NRA bit there is also a good example of the writers taking the piss out of something it fundamentally disagrees with. We can see this again when Cecil talks about the white man with “the Indian-headdress” with obvious derision, likening his get-up as a racist caricature. There is acknowledgment of the world as a strange and unknowable place, and yet rather than anyone else here it comes from the mouth of someone unmistakably progressive in their beliefs. While I’m unsure if I fully processed it, this was extremely affirming to me at the time. You do not have to fully see yourself in a piece of art to enjoy it or to have it impact your life, and I’d say it’s even recommended to seek out art made by and about those who are very, very different from you…but I can’t pretend that the resonance I felt here was not a bonus.
You grow up in a small town—as many people do—and you have your preconceived notions about the world outside. About the ‘real world’, the one that adults inhabit, full of freedom and mystery and opportunity.
I feel like I was an entirely different person the first time I listened to WTNV. And I was, in many ways; life will do that do you. But it adds another layer of unreality to this listening experience for me. I feel—as I have felt many times in my life—like I am watching myself, the self of the past in this case, from the outside and observing their feelings as they hear these words for the first time. Despite the warm feelings of nostalgia, there is a distance there, there is a younger me that I don’t recognize reminding me they still exist within me.
I look forward to going on this journey together, and am excited to see what I rediscover about both myself and this lovely podcast. Until next time, goodnight listeners.
Goodnight.