Cecil Baldwin, Part II
photo by Lee Faircloth
When we last spoke with Cecil Baldwin, it was a more innocent time, a quieter time. It was the year of May. That’s six years ago in 2020 time.
Cecil found himself marooned in his Brooklyn apartment in the midst of COVID quarantine and canceled plans, casting about for something to apply his talents and focus to. If you’ve seen our conversation with Cecil from May, you know he was planning a new audio project based on Homer’s The Odyssey.
It didn’t happen. And that’s what Cecil wants to talk about. Along with horror movies and what it means when you don’t get the art you want, but the art you deserve.
“What happens when you fail at something, or what happens when you do not succeed in getting a project off the ground?”
Actors are no strangers to rejection and what is often seen from the outside as failure. It turns actors either bitter or resilient, and Cecil Baldwin is among the latter. When his plans for the Odyssey project didn’t come to fruition, he took it as an opportunity to look at his own ideas about what success and failure are, and to ask what it means when you feel like you’ve failed.
“What happens when you fail at something, or what happens when you do not succeed in getting a project off the ground?” Cecil asks. “I think that's a really tough, but important conversation to have with artists — you are not failing because you failed to get a piece of art or a project from alpha to omega … as Westerners, we are so product driven. We are running to deadlines, we are running to bottom lines we were running to, ‘Is it a success?’ And by success, I mean ‘does it make money.’ If it doesn't make money, it's not a ‘success.’ And that's such a toxic environment to make art in quite often.”
As a part of the wildly successful Welcome to Night Vale podcast, and the NYC arm of the The Neo-Futurists, Baldwin knows the inner workings of industry success benchmarks. And he knows what it means to have the slate wiped clean by outside forces.
“It's so funny how this big overarching, auto-biographical reflection upon classical literature as related to 2020 pandemic times and my life just never happened,” he laughs. “It was the perfect audio experience in my brain. However, in reality, what I actually got to make is … a new horror podcast, a horror chat podcast with one of the writers of Night Vale. And it's been amazing, it's been so good. And it really is the art that I deserve, rather than the art that I had, like aspirationally dreamt of making.”
So, what exactly is the art you deserve?
“The art that you deserve is a very realistic way of looking at your limitations and your actual output and your actual skill set,” he explains. “The art you deserve is … once you move through that pie in the sky, dreamy, aspirational stuff, you get to what you can actually do, and what you actually have in front of you and the resources you have and, you know, maybe those two things collide, maybe they intersect. But in my case, they did not.”
Rather, he found another intersection in three of his passions — the energy and reach of the podcast format through Welcome to Night Vale, the immediacy of The Neo-Futurists, and horror movies. The result is Random Number Generator Horror Podcast No. 9, which Baldwin co-hosts with Night Vale writer Jeffrey Cranor.
“Jeffrey is terrified of horror movies,” Cecil says. “He is a horror novice. He’s terrified of spiders. He had like a big flying phobia for a while. But horror movies were just too intense for him. However, I think in the face of the pandemic, and this like, ‘Oh my gosh, I've got 14 hours of awake time between now and sleep time. What am I going to do with myself?’ I think like a lot of people they turn to film. And they kind of use that time to like catch up on movies that they've always wanted to watch. And in Geoffrey's case, it was unlocking the gate that led to the kingdom of the horror genre. So even though he's what we like to call squeamish, he's a horror novice, he’s still very interested and wants to know more.”
Baldwin and Cranor roll dice every week to choose what kind of monster and style of film they’ll watch next. “We learned very early on is that there is nothing less interesting than listening to two white dudes go, ‘What movie do you want to watch? I don't know. What do you want to watch?’” Baldwin says. The dice add not only an air of unpredictability to the show, they also keep Baldwin and Cranor on their feet, searching out new horror films and avoiding the ones that have been talked to death.
Horror films, like science fiction and satire, allow artists to approach issues from an oblique angle, tackling issues with more (or less) subtlety, and broadening a conversation that may have been avoided by audiences otherwise.
Baldwin uses the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers as an example. “Is it a metaphor for communism? Is it a metaphor for people of color? Is it a metaphor for homosexuality? Is it a metaphor for infectious diseases? And the answer is yes to all of those,” he says. “Horror, sci-fi and fantasy sometimes allow filmmakers to say things through metaphor that could never be said to the public at large. In the case of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, all of the the people who wrote it, the directors — we’re talking the height of the McCarthy era, the height of the Red Scare, as well as the height of the Pink Scare … there was something that was so potent in the air that it's like a lightning rod. You can't see lightning and till you catch it. And that was one of those films.”
When he reflects on his experience over the past six months, Baldwin says, “It's a really hard thing to do, to look at a big old mess and go, ‘Well, I feel like a failure because I didn't congeal this mess into something beautiful and perfect.’ However … I think one of the things that is kind of amazing about it is that out of the wreckage, you might be able to find pieces that do work, or when you do pick up that wreckage of mess, you might be able to look at it in different eyes. Time will give you new outlook on things.”
“You have to dare to reach for the stars,” he adds. “You have to dare. But not only not only that, you have to dare to fail. And you have to dare to fail gloriously.”
