Episode 82: (Not) Welcome to Desert Bluffs…

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So a lot of this week’s episode is… unexpected. And yet simultaneously super expected. 

On one hand, I did not think I would do back-to-back podcast discussions in a post-podcast saga age, particularly topics from within the same podcasting family, but something just hit me this past week. And that gets back to the point that this was super planned out episode. Or rather, it’s a concern I’ve been holding onto for a while. Since my master’s program, to be precise,when I presented a paper on Welcome to Night Vale, arguing that this podcast was participating--albeit indirectly--in the larger discourse surrounding concepts of utopia. 

Now I should clarify that this was the sort of pretend conference that a university would hold essentially and largely devised as a way to pad out the resumes of those students who could throw together a paper or presentation in time for the deadline. Cynical to say? Yes, and if administrators from my master’s program hear this podcast and take offense, I’m hating the game, not the player. I understand that academia is a cut throat stage, and I can appreciate that this school wanted to give their students a leg up or two, all while still being incredibly cynical that it has come to this point.

I offered up that caveat in the first Welcome to Night Vale, and I offer it again because it is the nature of this conference that saved me from an objection that maybe even you have when you listen to me mention this argument. 

For one, an academic conference of any sort is not the typical realm for podcast discussions. It’s gradually becoming a forum, yes, but this gradual invasion, if you could pardon the term, did not start in political philosophy, nor has it really reached that field yet. I don’t doubt it will get there, but that’s in the future not in the past, particularly the section of the past that includes the day I gave that talk.

Which is to say, that I gave that talk to people who could not call me out on any inaccuracies or object to my theory in any meaningful way. I was also partially basing my argument on a reading of Thomas Moore’s Utopia that was a fairly wide interpretation of a fairly old work. And also, that text has somewhat fallen out of fashion in certain… okay, in every circle. 

And as for this podcast, Miscellany Media Reviews, while it was sort of a revival of that potential reckoning, it never happened. I mean, maybe it would have had there been a comment section or a Twitter account specifically for this podcast. Or maybe the “othering” that could have potentially proven me wrong is just widely accepted because... 

It’s Desert Bluffs.

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And yes, I’m talking about Desert Bluffs. The Desert Bluffs. That’s the exception to my initial argument that Night Vale, this small desert community where every conspiracy is true, where the government lies, shady figures roam the streets, and the Sheriff's secret police round up, well, anyone, could be considered utopian in the lens of more modern sensibilities because for all it’s problems, there’s a universal acceptance that marks the way Night Vale citizens interact with each other. Cecil’s sexuality is never held against him, even when he pines for Carlos and his perfect hair on company time, race never seems to come up except through the originally appropriating Apache Tracker who was criticized for his actions very directly, and all other worldly beings have the necessary accommodations given to them, so that they can live a full and fulfilling life in Night Vale. Whether you have to put “fulfilling” in quotes because Night Vale is a different matter. 

The citizens of Night Vale are good to each other and look out for each other without the tribalistic fault lines that we see in our world. However, that’s the citizens of Night Vale. The citizens of Desert Bluffs are a very different thing. Literally, you could say. Which is part of the problem.

So this episode of Miscellany Media Reviews is going to revert a bit more to analysis than the review you all know and maybe sort of love but probably just like. Or it’s more of an episode tangentially related to what this show normally is. 

But ultimately, to fully understand the impulse that Welcome to Night Vale taps into and what it means to so many people, one needs to understand Desert Bluffs. And the animosity that has rightfully been sewn between these two communities. And yes, I said “rightfully.” Just let me explain already.

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Hi. It’s M. Welcome to Episode 82.

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Maybe you think my initial argument is fine or at least think that whatever pitfalls it does have aren’t related to that other town. Because Desert Bluff and its citizens, at the very least, are kept separate from Night Vale by a very firm town line. While it’s true that Night Vale is closer to Desert Bluffs than any other community because of… geography, I think is still the term or whatever plane of time and existence this desert is on, there’s still an intense rivalry there. Especially in sports but in other things as well. And in those other things, or even just in sports, the actual town line takes on a stronger and metaphorical role. Suddenly, the divide isn’t just a municipal one but a very real one in the hearts and minds of citizens. But that’s just in the beginning. Oh and spoilers, I guess. It’s hard to know what is a spoiler and what is just town history, especially when you can just jump into Welcome to Night Vale at any point or any episode. I mean, sure, it’s a fictional town’s history, but that’s maybe just a hair split.

But anyway Desert Bluffs gets annexed into the Night Vale municipal body by Mayor Cardinal in a move that was the definition of not well received. And I mean it was super not well received. Protesting actually happened. Protesting! In a town that had already put up with quite a bit. Oh and then there was the formal discrimination against Desert Bluffs citizens from the Sheriff’s Secret Police. 

But by that point in the story of Night Vale, all of that might have made sense to you. You could understand where it all came from, and maybe that’s why this reckoning I’ve constantly been anticipating hasn’t come yet and never would have. Desert Bluffs is so successfully “othered” that we come to expect this sort of reaction, or a rejection, as it were. Because they were not, are not, and never will be a true part of Night Vale. And that’s not something the mayor can change. 

But in my mind, the point would still stand: how is this not a contraction? A place that I say is defined by acceptance failing to accept these newcomers. I mean, it didn’t happen with Carlos, right? Yes, technically, but it was a different case.

But the more I think about it the more I have come to the conclusion that the citizens of Desert Bluffs don’t provide any sort of contradiction, despite what I might have feared when I was in graduate school and when I made the first episode about Welcome to Night Vale. Maybe the conclusion I’ve reached is a bit more complicated, but I’ve come to realize that Desert Bluffs has a particular role in the story from the beginning that affects the resulting thematic takeaway, particularly when it comes to this notion of utopia that I keep insisting is there. 

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Welcome to Desert Bluffs can be seen as the parallel to Welcome to Night Vale in that other desert community. But it can be hard to know for sure because those of us who listen to Night Vale’s community radio show only get two glimpses into that other community. Episodes 19 and 70 are split in half, and in one half, we get the view from Desert Bluffs... and Kevin.

Well, Kevin, the voice of Desert Bluffs, makes other appearances as well. And through those episodes and Kevin’s appearances, we get an accurate glimpse of what Desert Bluffs is like and how it operates. And, well, to make it easy on all of us, I’ll just leave it at this: Desert Bluffs is  way too cheery and happy. Like, it might not be a fake countenance of manufactured elation. That might be exactly what Desert Bluffs has become, and it reached that point because at one time, it was a community owned and run by the corporate entity of StrexCorp. This was in the beginning though, and StrexCorp’s story doesn’t end so well either.

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Now, StrexCorps might seem just like Night Vale’s shadow forces painted with dollar signs on top. But not quite. Night Vale’s governed by mysterious forces, and some have malicious intentions, and some are just… hanging out. Envision a spectrum that runs from the Sheriff’s Secret Police to the Angels that definitely don’t exist (right?) but had also hung around for a while, changing light bulbs and all that.

In some ways, these are not just reflections of our world and the forces that govern it but also of us to varying degrees. Particularly when you step away from making any sort of value judgments about these urges. Because, let’s face it, tools don’t have purpose beyond what we use them to do. A hammer can either build a home or destroy it. 

So for one, we have desires for some level of control, at least over our own lives and our own directions, but when you consider all the factors that influence us, it’s easy to see where this plot gets lost. We also have a desire for a sense of order, preferably one that we devised and/or could easily live with. And we also have a desire to just chill and help people. Elevation to political or celebrity status doesn’t change our impulses or the relationship we may or may not have with them. We only bring them up with us as we go. They become integrated into the social order, and hopefully, they were shaped properly or with some sense of justice or right relations. But still, as an organic material, they can grow and evolve with time. They can improve or be improved within one capacity or many. Either by ourselves or by those around us. 

It’s this sort of pruning, or a pruning that happened in a very specific way, that we see in Night Vale. It is the urge to discriminate amongst citizens that has been cut away. And for all its problems, the resulting unity can bring comfort to those in Night Vale in the face of those problems. Like Street Cleaning Day, which might be a catastrophe of the highest order, but my neighbors will not sacrifice me to the onslaught so I’ve got that going for me.

It’s not a perfect solution, I know, but it is a step forward. A step in the right direction, you could say, that we have not taken yet.

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But StrexCorp and other corporations don’t react to this phenomenon in the same way. It’s not necessarily their business, no pun intended, to curb or shape human impulses for the actual better. Not quite an object good but something adjacent to it. Rather, it’s more profitable to either commander these impulses with a tailored product line or better yet offer the solution to these impulses that create a step towards a life of worry-free bliss: the same sort of elation that you see in Desert Bluffs that isn’t actually possible in our real world. In many ways, Desert Bluffs stands as a sort of test case for what could be possible if economics alone were to govern human ills and not so ills. It’s this impulse to provide marketable goods that erased the realities of an organic existence, and then all that is left is the sensation of joy, deserved or otherwise.

Or that’s what we think. We tend to think of joyful and happy as a sort of default state because it’s the less menacing of all the emotions we feel. And it’s certainly better than nothingness. 

It’s an extreme case that stands completely opposite of Night Vale. It has to, narratively speaking. But beyond that, these philosophies cannot co-exist. Or at least not easily. If you are able to devise a system in which they can, I would love to hear about those schematics. But from my perspective, you cannot have the complete removal of something while still having the thing. And even with StrexCorp gone and Desert Bluffs having suffered from the fall of their house of cards, the momentum is still there. The citizens of Desert Bluffs have had their worldview shaped by this quest for perfectionism that first of all is never possible or sustainable but also is something Night Vale passionately rejects and has to because it would be a contradiction to try and incorporate it into their world.

The citizens of Desert Bluffs, then, represent that urge to clean the slate of what is otherwise human: of desires and passions that, yes, can destroy us but not necessarily. They are also a part of who we are.

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Consequently, the rejection of Desert Bluffs, as a concept that its citizens or--I guess--former citizens embody isn’t an offensive one but a defensive one. 

I do think we should, even if only for our own sake, classify different kinds of acceptances and rejections into this more offensive and defensive category system. Because I can’t be faulted for protecting myself, or I should not be, from someone who has already demonstrated the capacity to wish me ill or to pursue my grief. And arguably, that’s what you have here. Desert Bluff as an agent of StrexCorp or part and parcel with StrexCorp--the line is a bit unclear--has beyond a rivalry with Night Vale because it has actually done it wrong in very recent memory.

The later type of rejection is the assertion of a boundary as a form of protection. Like gothic style walls around a castle. Or a dog park in Night Vale, you could also say. And also not. The wall I’m talking about is meant to keep things out for the sake of what is inside. And I still am greatly unsure about what is in the Dog Park but that might be a personal problem. But all the same, both walls are meant to keep a destructive intermingling from happening. 

The hatred in all of Night Vale for all that is in Desert Bluffs is a rejection of this force that seeks to sterilize or strip away this flawed but entrenched aspect of our nature. An attacking force that, I should remind you, exists on this side of the RSS feed as well.

We are under immense pressure to purge ourselves of our own emotions and struggles and live this manufactured existence much like what is developed in Desert Bluffs. We are called by this force to change, and we could reject it in a similar albeit less dramatic way. We can choose to live by the virtues of Night Vale, which does mean being defensive in a certain context. It means protecting oneself and preserving one’s more authentic, though potentially flawed nature. 

However, it is a boundary that is not always effectively modelled for us. But  at least there’s Welcome to Night Vale, offering us a pretty important lesson. Neat.

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This has been a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. In addition to this show, My Hugot, The Oracle of Dusk, and Aishi Online. We’ve got yet another show launching on February 12th. Temporal Light. 

Oh and just a fun question. How do you know who you are? Zaneta thought that was a throwaway question, one just used to make people uncomfortable. Until she saw her face where it should not have been: crafted by a mysterious artist who hid it in such a way that there’s only one angle where you could see the secret. And Zaneta knew exactly where to stand.

So what is going on?

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