Director's Notes – Episode 103

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Growing up in the 80s, it was pretty common to spoof the clean-cut suburban culture of the 1950s. 80s music celebrated the digital to the 1950s analog and manual instruments. 80s hair was tall, teased, bright and wild, compared to the slicked parts and bobbed dos of the 50s. Sarcasm and cynicism were the cornerstone of a good 80s comedy diet, where the 50s took most everything at face value. 

Pop culture icons in the 1980s bent genders, subverted authority, and punked rock. The movies I loved to watch as a kid played against the older tropes of the golden era of the silver screen. Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid contorted the classic suit-wearing gangster flick; Once Bitten, the vampire horror drive-in picture; and The 'Burbs took the track homes of white flight and gave it a sinister comic twist. 

I don't mean to paint the 80s as great and the 50s as terrible. I'm pretty glad to see a decline in cynical humor in teen movies from when I was a kid. And both decades had little regard in their comedy films for non-whites. (omg, never ever look up 1986's Soul Man. omg.) But in terms of their depiction of teen love, angst, camaraderie, etc., the 80s were definitely moving down a much more realistic and nuanced path, even if still really flawed.

One of the worst of these 80s spoof films (which I watched several times, so maybe I should walk back the word "worst") was Beach Blanket Bingo, starring 50s teen stars Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. This movie elevated the naïvete that was most on display in the 1950s beach party. The bopping dance moves and beach balls and Dick Dale knock-off pop were overused tropes, but it's hard to not go back to that image of 30-something looking teenagers saying "golly, surfs up" while girls in one-pieces snuck illicit sidehugs behind Chevy convertables with blond haired quarterbacks. 

There's no way actual kids in the 50s weren't into way cooler shit. The 1950s said nothing about how much fun drugs, sex, and music could actually be. Marijuana was a frightening killer, but doing the stroll to Buddy Holly was a bonkers good time. Okay.

The original idea of this episode of Welcome to Night Vale (103 - Ash Beach) came from this image: a bunch of dopey kids in bright swimsuits, carrying surfboards, and twisting on a sand-slathered soundstage. Obviously, it's the 2010s and it's Night Vale, so let's make it about horrifying, dead-eyed forms rising from a waterless beach of black ash, and causing people to misremember their lives. 

So, imagine the Beach Boys' version of "Sloop John B" playing underneath each of those scenes. Imagine those ghastly figures wrenching their would-be hips back and forth as they alternated their arms up and down. Then imagine screams as beachgoers try to wipe the ashes from their burning skin and recall anything that resembles their own lives. 

"Let me go home, let me go home/
I want to go home, let me go home/
Why don't you let me go home"

- Jeffrey Cranor
March 1, 2017