oleggini-monsters-welcometonightvale.pdf

University of Zurich HS 2014

English Department

Prof. Dr. Martin Heusser

Monsters. Ghosts. Spirits

Blindfolded Against the Existential Terror of the Void:

Visuality and Monstrosity in the Podcast Welcome to

Night Vale.

Martino Oleggini

Hrststrasse 70, 8046 Zrich

[email protected]

0795257472 03.03.2015

Martino Oleggini Monsters. Ghosts. Spirits.

Blindfolded Against the Existential Terror of the Void:

Visuality and Monstrosity in the Podcast Welcome to

Night Vale.

A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights

pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale. (1 Pilot, 00:00). From the

beginning of its very first episode, the podcast Welcome to Night Vale clearly shows its cards,

immediately establishing the surreal tone that is arguably one of its most defining feature. Written

by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, this twice-monthly podcast in the style of community updates

for the small desert town of Night Vale (About, par. 1) exponentially rose to popularity during

the summer of 2013, when it earned the title of No. 1 podcast on iTunes (Carlson, par. 2). While

the specific qualities that led to Welcome to Night Vale's success can only be subject to speculation

and are hardly graspable beyond an entirely subjective analysis, it suffices to [t]ake a look at the

numbers (The Making of a Podcast Phenomenon, par. 1) to realize that the cultural significance

of the success itself is unquestionable: in a timespan of merely three months, Welcome to Night Vale

rose from a modest 150'000 downloads in June to a record-setting 5'800'000 downloads in August

(The Making of a Podcast Phenomenon, par. 3-5). Moreover, a less quantitative and more

qualitative approach to this podcast might highlight Welcome to Night Vale's significance in a way

that transcends the mere popularity. In other words, Welcome to Night Vale's depiction of a series of

horrifyingly ordinary events might prove, if examined under an academically dignifying light, to be

a meaningful landmark for both contemporary artistic production and cultural milieu. This

monstrous podcast might therefore, to some extent, be equatable to what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls

an embodiment of a certain cultural moment of a time, a feeling, a place (4). In the first of the

seven theses that he proposes as a framework to critically approach texts that deal with monstrosity,

Cohen interestingly hints at the etymological connection between the word monster and the

semantic field of revelations and warnings: the monster is a sign that needs to be read or, as he puts

it, a glyph that seeks a hierophant (4). A significantly different aspect of this etymology, however,

seems to be overlooked or at least tacitly implied by Cohen, a nuance that reveals itself easily to a

native speaker of Italian with the realization of the complete homophony between the word monster

and the verb form for I show.1 There would thus seem to be, both etymologically and conceptually, a

1 Both are spelled and pronounced, at least in the Northern variety that I speak, ['mostro].

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deep connection between the dimension of monstrosity and that of visuality. With this in mind, the

significance of Welcome to Night Vale as a monster text becomes hardly ignorable, especially if one

considers the fundamentally non-visual nature of a medium such as an audio podcast. In order to

achieve its monstrous atmosphere, Welcome to Night Vale exploits various aspects of visuality, such

as the ontological and epistemological implications of seeing and being seen, the visual's

relationship to the verbal, and the too easily overlooked connection between sight and power.

Linking these observations with a recognition of the significance of images in contemporary

Western culture,2 one should be able to eventually see that Welcome to Night Vale's treatment of

visuality indeed makes it a monster of its time.

A first, perhaps not too obvious but extremely significant way in which Welcome to Night Vale

exploits visuality in an unsettling way is by reflecting on the ontological implications of seeing and

being seen, and, more often, of their negation. Needless to say, the question of what exactly these

implications are is one that has been debated for as long as debates have been carried out. From

Plato's cave to Foucault's take on Bentham's Panopticon, questions of vision have always been a

crucial part of speculations on existence itself.3 For French phenomenologist philosopher Maurice

Merleau-Ponty, for instance, it is a defining property of being human that the one who sees can

also be seen (Shapiro 300), whereas the existential liberation from the cave of shadows in Plato's

myth is described by Gary Shapiro as climbing a ladder of vision (294). Welcome to Night Vale

sheds a new light on the question of seeing and being particularly insofar as it can be regarded as a

collection of moments in which the essence of being, of reality itself is called into question. In other

words, in this podcast we as listeners are often brought to (often simultaneously) think, cringe, or

laugh about instances that challenge our assumptions on existence in an often very visual manner. In

the fifth episode, The Shape in Grove Park, to mention only one, although very meaningful,

example, the speaker clearly is gripped by a deep ontological doubt: he follows a train of thoughts

that brings him to question both his own existence and that of the world that surrounds him,

possibly an empty universe [] held aloft merely by [his] delusions and [his] smooth, sonorous

voice (7:07). Interestingly, this existential crisis is sparked by the realization that he may be the

2 The notion of Western culture (and even the mere assumption that such a notion can even be invoked) is crucially

undermined not only by the geopolitical developments of the last twenty-five years, but, perhaps even more

significantly, by the technological ones of the last decade. Here, the term is used to indicate a struggle for a

measured generalization, to allow in other words for a cultural positioning of both the text and its reading that is

neither too narrow nor too ambitious. It is however crucial, at least in a footnote, to acknowledge the highly

problematic nature of the term.

3 An even very superficial sketch of the historical development of the debate is obviously far beyond the scope of this

paper. Moreover, I feel the urge to note here that any reference to philosophical concepts stems from a very partial

understanding of their complexity, which is in turn gained only through secondary filters.

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only one able to see [the Shape Formerly4 in Grove Park that No One Acknowledges or Speaks

About] (6:49). Additionally, a few minutes later he furthers his reflections on his own and the

surrounding reality's existence when he is handed a cup of coffee by intern Leland (11:55). It is only

when Leland is no longer in [his] field of vision (12:00) that the speaker is brought to question

once more the terrifying possibility (12:09) of him being the only person in the universe. And

finally, it is only through a minute (predominantly visual) description of Leland's movements

(12:25) that he is finally able, after a perhaps coincidental and yet meaningful discourse marker

such as I see (12:35), to be reassured [] about [his] lonely and solipsistic vigil (13:08).

Visuality, therefore, can here be seen as operating both as a deeply disturbing force when it is

negated and as a reassuring anchor when it is affirmed, both as the cause and the remedy for

existential crises.

The picture, however, seems already significantly more complex if one considers the way in

which Welcome to Night Vale's uncanny world is deeply rooted in the link between visual and

verbal. Once again we are faced with a question, that of the nature and extent of the relationship

between visual and verbal mediums and codes, that cannot be easily answered, as Roland Barthes'

words in his book S/Z hint at: why maintain [literature and painting] any longer as objects at once

united and separate, in short, classed together? (qtd. in Davidson 69; original emphasis). Against

the dimly lit background of this question, however, the examination of the depiction of visuality in a

verbal medium such as an audio podcast can prove to be highly meaningful.5 After Cecil's

aforementioned existentially crisis, for instance, he interestingly concludes the episode (and,

fictionally, his broadcast) with a highly performative, almost Cartesian6 affirmation of his identity

such as this is Cecil (5 The Shape in Grove Park, 19:33). This acquires a surprising depth of

meaning if one confronts it with Michel Foucault's ekphrastic description of Diego Velzquez's

painting Las Meninas. In a clearly self-reflective movement, Foucault analyzes the art historians'

and his own struggle to name the all figures in Velazquez's painting7 and denounces the proper

4 Formerly, because it has at this point of the narration been moved in front of the radio station from which he is

transmitting. This footnote will serve as a pretext for a quick observation regarding the plot and its importance in the

analysis: it is basically impossible to have a clear overview of the storyline of a series counting to this day 62

episodes of about 20-30 minutes each. Given this impossibility and the general sense of randomness and scarce

causality that pervades the development of Welcome to Night Vale's plot, it seems however safe to read occurrences

in the text as at least partly independent from the overall plot.

5 Gone unmentioned so far, but always lying underneath the surface of the argumentation, has been the crucial

observation that a podcast like Welcome to Night Vale is a very particular kind of verbal medium, one that, unlike

any form of writing, does not require the use of visual perception. The implications of this seemingly trivial

observation appear to be extremely far-reaching, and they call for far more research on the genre of fictional

podcasts than has been done so far (virtually none).

6 Somewhat paraphrasable with a sentence like I see, therefore I am.

7 To be precise, Foucault comments on his choice not to include the proper names of the figures in his ekphrasis.

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name [] as a trap or artifice, one that would give us an illusion of security (Shapiro 258). In the

painting, Foucault argues, the position of the observers is rendered uncertain by the interplay of

gazes and reflections, thus compelling them to verbally assign fixed positions to the painted figures

by naming them,8 in an attempt to fixate their own floating standpoint (Shapiro 246-7). Similarly, I

would argue, Cecil feels the need to cement his newfound ontological certainty through the verbal

attestation of his own name, that thus gives him the illusion of security about his own existence

that visual clues could not grant him, at least not in a stable manner. Verbal and visual, it would

seem, work together to reestablish Cecil's position in his world, fixating his role as both an observer

and a linguistic subject. As easily as this positive, almost symbiotic relationship between verbal and

visual can be established, however, it can be reversed and exploited to unsettling effects. Echoing

once more Gary Shapiro's reading of Foucault's ekphrasis, the podcast is full of moments that

highlight the way in which [the verbal and the visual] can sometimes uncannily coalesce while at

others they necessarily fail to coincide (250). Packed with more or less detailed reports of sightings

such as that of Old Woman Josie's angelic encounter (1 Pilot, 1:29) or John Peters' first spotting of

the Glow Cloud (2 Glow Cloud, 1:15), Welcome to Night Vale's language clearly struggles to

establish its control over the shifting and hardly comprehensible visual dimension of the fictional

world created by Fink and Cranor. Dramatically often, however, this struggle results in a complete

failure: the Shape Formerly in Grove Park, for instance, can only be described as indescribable (5

The Shape in Grove Park, 6:35), whereas Cecil himself can only be sketched with the extremely

vague litotes not tall or short, nor thin, nor fat (19A The Sandstorm, 18:00). The interplay

between the complexly related realms of visual and verbal seems therefore to create an extremely

unstable balance that constitutes one of Welcome to Night Vale's most striking features, seemingly

supporting one another at times but always on the verge of critically collapsing and destabilizing

each other.

Welcome to Night Vale's treatment of a strongly verbal visual dimension is not however limited

to a more or less complicated equation between the two realms, but extends to a more subtle,

hermeneutical metaphor. The visual world, in other words, is very often strongly semiotic, resulting

in a sort of text that has to be read, a complex system of signs that have to be deciphered but are,

more often than not, misinterpreted or simply undecipherable. In perfect coincidence with Jeffrey

Jerome Cohen's theory, the visual in Welcome to Night Vale assumes a strongly monstrous quality

8 To assign, that is, a proper name to each of the figures on the painting, thereby identifying them with specific

historical figures.

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precisely insofar as it etymologically signifies,9 insofar as it can be described as a series of glyph[s]

that [seek] a hierophant (4). Different kinds of birds, for example, seem to have specific meanings

that are supposed to be read, yet pigeons can either mean that your mother is dead, or that all is

well (14 The Man in the Tan Jacket, 11:44) and as for hawks... well, no one knows what hawks

mean, or if they are real (12:15). Listeners and fictional speaker alike struggle to defeat the

monster by completing a somewhat coherent hermeneutic, by accomplishing a meaningful reading

of visual signs. It needs to be pointed out that what is deeply monstrous and unsettling is not the

meaning itself, but the potential lack thereof: a hummingbird's foreshadowing of the impending

destruction of the whole universe is perfectly acceptable (11:53); it is a hawk's unclear meaning that

is terrifying and has to be accounted for by negating the very existence of hawks. This obsession

with the interpretation of visual clues is particularly evident in the several occurrences of color-

related codes: the town's mandatory lottery decides whether Night Vale's citizens will be

ceremonially disemboweled and eaten by the wolves (8 The Lights in Radon Canyon, 00:58)

based on the white or purple color of a piece of paper, whereas the belonging to the curious

hierarchy of the town's boy scouts is governed exclusively by a distinctly scarlet envelope (2

Glow Cloud, 6:34). Once again, however, it is when only complex frameworks fail to account for

some meanings that fear seems to be legitimate: helicopters, for instance, respond to a clear color-

coded classification, yet easily readable blue and black helicopters10 exist alongside mysterious,

unpredictable and terrifying helicopters painted with complex murals depicting birds of prey (1

Pilot, 3:18). Perhaps the most meaningful example in this respect is the appearance of a mysterious

glowing cloud (2 Glow Cloud, 1:11) in the skies of Night Vale. Arguably one of the most

disturbing events in Welcome to Night Vale's story line, the passage of the Glow Cloud has one

particularly striking feature, namely its vagueness. Its first appearance is surrounded by mystery

with respect to both its causes and its consequences. Cecil's memory is completely erased and, at

the end of the episode, he is forced to acknowledge that we may never fully understand, or

understand at all what it was and why it dumped a lot of dead animals on our community (16:31).

Aside from the Glow Cloud's clearly ungraspable nature, however, it is the reason of this resistance

to understanding that is interesting in this analysis, a reason that can be found in the Glow Cloud's

9 It becomes, creates and carries meaning across by means of signs.

10 Obviously, both blue and black helicopters are described as more or less dangerous presences, and their existence

alone can be cause of terror or at least bewilderment for the (non-fictional) listener. Yet the crucial argument here is

that the normally terrifying nature of known helicopters is accepted by the fictional listeners and by the speaker as

non-threatening precisely because of their easily accessible meaning. What is truly horrifying, in Night Vale, is what

cannot be understood, what escapes categorization. What is central to my argument, once again, is that this

resistance to a clear and definitive reading is clearly a visual one.

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very name: perhaps not surprisingly at this point, the Glow Cloud is first described as glow[ing] in

a variety of colors, perhaps changing from observer to observer (1:27). Once again, it is not the

mere consequences of an event that are terrifying, but rather the lack of understanding of its causes,

a lack that is most often expressed in terms of a partial, shifting or unclear vision, or at least in

terms of an imperfect interpretation of visual signs.

Closely linked to the hermeneutical dynamics of visual and verbal in Welcome to Night Vale is

its approach to the epistemological implications of seeing. If to see means to read signs and to find

meaning in visual clues, the step towards the more profound question of the role of sight in

acquiring knowledge (and in the very possibility of knowing at all) does not need a Pindaric flight

to be taken. Fink and Cranor's podcast, indeed, repeatedly draws from the problematic equating of

seeing and knowing, questioning the epistemological role of vision11 and often radically subverting

it. Astronomy classes at Night Vale's elementary school, for instance, conduct stargazing sessions

only with blindfolds on every participant, in order to protect them from the existential terror of the

void (5 The Shape in Grove Park, 10:49), strongly recalling the Nietzschean warning that

[w]hen you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you (qtd. in Shapiro 263). Eyesight

is therefore here not only questioned as a source of knowledge, but it is also strikingly denounced

as a potentially maddening influence.12 Moreover, the connection to Nietzsche's statement becomes

more poignant if one considers Welcome to Night Vale's treatment of the knowing (i.e. scientific)

gaze as a non-unidirectional vector. Particularly interesting in this respect is the figure of Carlos the

scientist. Introduced in the first episode (1 Pilot, 2:03), Carlos has grown to become one of the

most popular characters in the series probably because of his romantic relationship with Cecil (The

Making of a Podcast Phenomenon, par. 3). Welcome to Night Vale's speaker's instant infatuation

with Carlos ( 1 Pilot, 5:53) is probably the reason of his frequent insistence on the scientist's

handsome appearances: we are told several times, for instance, that his hair is perfect (5:14) and

his grin seems to create an almost angelic aura that surrounds him (4:48). Together with Cecil's

appreciation of Carlos' beauty, then, we are repeatedly informed of the scientist's findings, that seem

11 This, it must be said, is of course strongly related to the ontological role of vision that was outlined in the second

paragraph of this essay. Cecil's existential crisis, indeed, could have easily been described in terms of a question of

knowledge. This paragraph, however, focusses on Welcome to Night Vale's treatment of institutionalized knowledge,

of science, or in other words of the question of who has to be trusted when it comes to the transmission of

knowledge, a question that is resolved in a visual yet surprising manner.

12 A parallel that here sadly has to be relegated to a footnote is that between Welcome to Night Vale's warning against

peeping into the void and the horrifying work of H. P. Lovecraft. If Lovecraft's horror fiction can roughly be

described, with the words of Michel Houellebecq, as a terrifying account of what hides behind the veil of reality,

and can sometimes be glimpsed. Something revolting, in fact (qtd. in Hanegraaf 89), the similarities that are often

hinted at by Welcome to Night Vale's fans (Carlson, par. 7) yet are strongly rebutted by its creators (Mackintosh, par.

2) seem to be worthy of a more in depth analysis.

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however to clash with everyday observations: a house that appears to exist is in fact simply a mental

projection (8:29), a earthquake shook the town unbeknownst to its citizens (10:42) and the sun

didn't set at the correct time (15:15) on a particular day. Another character, on the other hand, is

treated by Cecil with feelings of the same intensity but of opposite sign: the Apache Tracker,13 who

claims to be able to read tracks on asphalt (9:38) without really being a Native American, is

peremptorily discarded as an asshole (3:13). From what we learn about the Apache Tracker,14 it

would seem that he applies a very thorough method of investigation, that leads him to find

disturbing evidence (2 Glow Cloud, 2:29) after having observed (2:50) the crime scene at the

post office and having thus confirmed his ability to literally read tracks by reporting the words

written in blood on the walls (3:01). Carlos and his team of scientists, on the contrary, seem to

conduct their research with bizarre methods such as standing in a group on the sidewalk in front of

the nonexistent house, daring each other to go knock on the door (1 Pilot, 9:04) and, when asked

to provide explanations for the curious phenomena they report, they [sit] in a circle around a desk

clock, staring at it, murmuring, and cooing (15:38). The accuracy and subsequent trustworthiness

of scientific observation, it would seem, does not depend on the characteristics of the gaze, of the

methods of observation, but rather on those of the observer. The stunningly handsome but

scientifically inaccurate Carlos is therefore a credible source of knowledge, whereas the

ridiculously looking Apache Tracker, with his cartoonishly inaccurate Indian headdress (2 Glow

Cloud, 2:23), is ignored because, by Cecil's own admission, its really hard to take him seriously in

that headdress of his (1 Pilot, 9:47). As the parallel between the two characters seems to indicate,

hence, the direct connection between seeing and knowing seems to be turned upside down, making

way for an epistemology based on being seen, rather than seeing.

This inversion of the visual vector of scientific authority is only one of the many instances in

which Welcome to Night Vale comments on the often very visual nature of power structures. As the

already mentioned incipit of the series immediately anticipates, Night Vale is constantly under the

surveillance of mysterious light that citizens must elude by pretend[ing] to sleep (1 Pilot,

00:00). Indeed, the constant presence of more or less legitimate agencies that subject Night Vale's

citizens to an often very invasive surveillance is one of the most strikingly prominent aspects of

Welcome to Night Vale. And yet, perhaps precisely because of its high frequency, what seems at first

a particularly terrifying aspect of Night Vale's everyday life becomes quite soon part of the normal

13 He first appears as the Indian Tracker in the first episode (9:26).

14 We do not indeed learn much about the Apache Tracker in the few episodes that I took into consideration. Yet I

would argue that, if not in his own right, this character can be seen as significant at least in his strong opposition

with Carlos

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daily routine. As youtuber Mike Rugnetta, host of the channel PBS idea channel, eloquently puts it,

Welcome to Night Vale turns unspeakable abomination into unremarkable absurdity (How Does

Night Vale Confront Us With the Unknown?, 2:45).15 This accustoming being strongly related to

power structures, it can easily be seen how the process quite powerfully echoes once again Michel

Foucault's thought. In his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the French

philosopher traces the historical development of the administration of capital punishment as a

progressive concealment of the apparatuses devoted to it (Shapiro 292). As the visual dimension of

power shifts from the spectacular Medieval public executions to aseptic rituals hidden behind a

modern prison's closed walls, then, the highly visual nature of power relationships becomes more

subtle and ungraspable, resulting in what Gary Shapiro calls historical unconscious of the optical

(293). Foucault then goes on to elaborate, based on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a theory

according to which power ultimately comes to be exercised through the constant threat of perennial

surveillance. The system is ultimately successful when the surveillance appears so capillary that it

does not need to be present at all: individuals govern themselves because they are in constant fear of

being observed, although they might at any time not be observed (Shapiro 298). Night Vale's

society, I would argue, represents an even further, hypothetical and dystopian step in this historical

development: its members have become so accustomed to a morbid obsession with constant

surveillance that the agents of such surveillance have simply ceased to be frightening, but are

instead perfectly normal and acceptable elements of the daily routine and do not even need to be

concealed. The already mentioned presence of menacing helicopters, for instance, is seen as a

positive educational tool, as the blue helicopters of the sheriff's secret police [will] keep a good eye

on your kids, and hardly ever take one (1 Pilot, 3:10). Particularly interesting in terms of the

implications of visuality in power structures is the lurking presence around Night Vale of

mysterious hooded figures (1:02) at which citizens are invited not to look for any period of time

(1:19). Almost an embodiment of the very essence of concealment, these frightening figures

represent one of the clearest examples of the way in which the obscure forces that govern Night

Vale hide in plain sight. A painfully obvious example, in this respect, is the construction, in the third

episode, Station Management, of a stadium at the expenses of the Night Vale Business Association

whose only purpose is to host the annual parade of the mysterious hooded figures (1:39):

15 Rugnetta's video focusses on the parallelism between Lovecraft's work and Welcome to Night Vale that has been

briefly outlined in a previous footnote. While perhaps not particularly relevant in terms of academic discourse, I

nonetheless find his argumentation to be particularly interesting and at times even illuminating, and I credit this

video as the spark for my reflections on this podcast.

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paradoxically enough, the very symbol of visual entertainment16 hosts a public display17 of figures

whose vision is explicitly prohibited. Similarly paradoxical occasions abound throughout Welcome

to Night Vale's episodes and they regularly involve a government agency, usually Night Vale's City

Council, issuing requests for visual reports of allegedly non-existing events: the invitation to fill a

brief questionnaire about mysterious sights that definitely no one saw (2 Glow Cloud, 5:39),

closely followed by a lapidary if you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget (5:57) is

self-explanatorily bewildering. Furthermore, Welcome to Night Vale exploits visuality in terms of

power relationship in an even more obvious way by describing the apparently exciting occurrence

of contract negotiation season (3 Station Management, 2:35). Perhaps one of the simplest

examples of power distribution in what we know of Night Vale,18 the relationship between Cecil and

his employers is crucially coded in terms of negated visions: listeners are provided only with very

vague descriptions of Station Management, large shapes shifting around (3:19) that can barely be

distinguished behind the frosted glass (3:17) of the office door. Very overtly, then, this visual

vagueness is linguistically connected to power, as Cecil admits that negotiation is tricky when

you're never allowed to glimpse what you're negotiating with (2:46) and as we later listen to his

terrified voice communicating that Station Management [] was not pleased with [his] description

of their physical attributes and is now threatening to shut down [his] show or possibly [his] life

for good (11:59). Clothing themselves in a visuality of this kind, power structures assume in

Welcome to Night Vale what Andrew Hock-soon Ng describes as a crucial characteristic of

monstrous figures, which, he claims, occup[y] a position of indefatigable power as long as [they]

remains unseen or partially seen, or doubtfully recognized (12).

After having shown several different ways in which Welcome to Night Vale exploits visuality in

order to achieve a monstrous or at the very least unsettling atmosphere, it seems now sensible to

attempt an examination of the extent to which this podcast can itself be considered an etymological

monster. Although the significance in contemporary Western culture of the recent explosion of the

relatively new medium of podcasts has yet to be academically explored, that of the other major

cornerstone of my argumentation, namely visuality, has received slightly more interest. Emma

Kimberley, for instance, examines the way in which, after 9/11, our world is mediated [] through

discourse, through visual images and, most powerfully, through combinations of the two (781) and

16 Modern stadiums are after all the descendant of what N. H. Julius saw as the architectural response to the very

principle of the spectacle-driven polis: 'To render accessible to a multitude of men a small number of objects': this

was the problem to which the architecture of temples, theaters and circuses responded (qtd. in Shapiro 301).

17 Etymologically, a parade is precisely this.

18 A power relationship, that is, that only involves two parties in a very clear subordination: Cecil is clearly

hierarchically inferior to Station Management, and very knowingly so.

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then exemplifies her findings by reading an ekphrastic poem by American poet Claudia Rankine.

Interestingly, Kimberley outlines the way in which Rankine, by poetically recreating the dynamics

of American visual and verbal advertising, chooses to foreground visual and narrative frames as a

comment on the fact that all representations, whether they acknowledge it or not, are framed (782).

In Welcome to Night Vale, I would argue, a very similar operation is being performed and renders

itself visible in, for instance, the mentioned insistence on reported descriptions. Especially

meaningful is the way in which Cecil, perhaps infrequently but very memorably, comments on his

own role not only in framing the reality we are presented with but in the very process of creating it.

The incipit to the fifth episode, The Shape in Grove Park, for instance, is interesting in terms of

visual and verbal framing, and of the covert control that media have over the perception of the

reported reality: Cecil's invitation to close your eyes, let my words wash over you. You are safe

now seems to tap precisely into the idea of media discourse blindfolding the public by means of

the interplay between words and images, thereby presenting an often sugarcoated version of reality

that is assumed and consumed as the unfiltered truth. In this and other instances, therefore,

Welcome to Night Vale seems to perfectly fit Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's account of the monster as an

embodiment of a certain cultural moment (4), at least insofar as it presents some characteristics of

some of its fellow (i.e. contemporary) cultural monsters. Another, personally more intriguing aspect

of Welcome to Night Vale's connection to the cultural milieu that both produced and consumed it is

related to a more capillary distribution of imagery in the current society. Drawing on a famous essay

by psychologist Daniel Kahneman,19 filmmaker and television personality Jason Silva appeared a

popular video in which he elaborated a positive view of the effect that the success of photo

filtering apps on social media (The Instagram Generation, 00:32) had on current generations of

young adults. The Instagram generation20 (00:25), he argues, experience every moment as

something that will be reflected upon later (00:42). Now, while the cognitive implications of the

phenomenon are perhaps not particularly interesting for the purpose of this analysis, what certainly

is interesting is the (apparently self-aware) addiction that contemporary culture seems to have with

regards to images and visuality. This is in turn interesting in relationship to Welcome to Night Vale if

19 Kahneman presents his theory on perception and memory in a talk whose video is accessible on youtube (The

riddle of experience vs. memory). He suggests the existence of two different selves that cooperate in shaping

human perception, an experiencing self and a remembering self.

20 Interestingly enough, Kahneman is credited by Silva and several internet articles (Grenoble, par. 2; Arata, par. 2)

with attributing this particular mode of perception to the Instagram generation, and perhaps even with the coinage of

the term itself. However, Kahneman does not use this term in his TED talk nor in his famous book Thinking Fast

and Slow (as a quick electronic research through both the talk's transcript and the e-book clearly highlight), although

he does speak of anticipated memories (The riddle of experience vs. memory, 9:34) in his talk and does connect

this concept to photographic imagery.

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one considers the astonishing amount of visual art that the podcast's growing fan base has produced

(Carlson, par. 23). As Mike Rugnetta once again cleverly remarks, Welcome to Night Vale's lack of

canonized depiction (How Does Night Vale Confront Us With the Unknown?, 4:29) is at odds

with the practices of a modern fandom (4:38), which therefore has to overcome the lack of much

needed visual counterparts to the verbal medium and rely on its own creativity to provide such

counterparts. Welcome to Night Vale, thus, seems to be perceived as monstrous and terrifying (thus

explaining the fandom's need to capture it) precisely in its very odd and constantly shifting

visuality. In other words, this monster is a particularly scary one in that it not only is a manifestation

of the culture that produced it, but it also at the same time compels that same culture to be its visual

manifestation, thereby trapping it in a loop of malign complicity in which culture and cultural

product become mirrors of each other, recalling Jean Baudrillard's definition of a simulacra [sic.]

a creation of a reality that never existed (Keisner 416).

Precisely for this reason, painting a satisfyingly coherent picture of Welcome to Night Vale and

its use of visuality for the creation of a monstrous narrative is particularly complex. It could be said,

that is, that attempting to outline visual phenomena in this podcast is tantamount to obsessively

producing pictorial representations of its events. And indeed, at the end of such an attempt the

feeling is that much more remains to be said not only because of the immense amount of material

and observations that have remained unexpressed, but also and arguably especially because of the

almost parasitic connection that, it has just been argued, Welcome to Night Vale establishes with

both its enthusiastic fans and its fascinated scholarly readers. So much more could be said, in other

words, precisely because Welcome to Night Vale's monstrosity shape-shifts while and because one

looks at it and analyses it. Any reading of this podcast opens up new possibilities, any attempt to

fixate its meaning increases the doubting shadows that surround it, and Welcome to Night Vale ends

up inhabiting the gap of the Derridian diffrance (Cohen 4). Naturally, the attempted reading of

aspects of being, knowing, reading and controlling are only a very partial account of what could be

said on the visual, let alone on other aspects of this podcast. Parallels could be drawn with other

works, particularly with those of H. P. Lovecraft, and certainly more genre-specific attention could

be reserved to Welcome to Night Vale, perhaps even allowing for ground-breaking observation on

the new medium of podcasts (and on internet media as a whole). Nevertheless, an attempt to capture

a snapshot, to briefly sketch at least parts of the immense cauldron of meaning that boils in Night

Vale does not seem meaningless. Especially when projecting it against a background of established

philosophical concepts, an analysis of Welcome to Night Vale's use of visuality proves fruitful not

11


only in its own right,21 but also and perhaps more interestingly as a lens through which those

concepts acquire new facets and nuances. Welcome to Night Vale not only complicates questions of

seeing, reading and knowing within its narrative structure, but it arguably does so in its outer frame,

the one that interacts with attempts of reading it, shaping them and influencing their language,

opening new horizons just as one reaches the ones that were intended, at least partially removing

the academical blindfold that was forced upon the analysis to keep it as specific and coherent as

possible; in a way, it uncannily recalls Nietzsche's cautionary aphorism: when you read long into

Welcome to Night Vale, in other words, Welcome to Night Vale also reads into you.

21 Not only, that is, in order to understand Welcome to Night Vale itself, using philosophical concepts as a reading tool.

12


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