Thomas Zane in the first Alan Wake game is mysterious. We never see his face, only ever experiencing him as this person in a diving suit that is also, possibly, just a bright light beaming out of it. Still, ultimately what we learn of him feels like it more or less adds up: he was essentially the first person to go through what Alan does, seeing his romantic partner lost in the lake and then using Cauldron Lake's strange properties to alter reality and allow her to return. He's the predecessor to Alan who screwed up and didn't see the limitations on this power, and allowed his beloved to become a vessel for the Dark Presence.
Thomas Zane, the poet, has a pretty strong bit of evidence in support of his existence, which is Emile Hartman. Before Hartman got doubly infected by the Dark Presence and the Hiss and transformed into something showcasing a lot more body horror than anything else I've seen in Remedy games, the not so good doctor fit pretty neatly into the story, linking Alan's experience with the story of Thomas back from 1970, a 40-year gap bridged by this narcissist seeking to exploit both artists.
But all of that starts to get thrown into doubt starting in Control.
The same poem that Hartman seems to misinterpret and make the slogan of his unethical laboratory masquerading as a mental health center, Jesse quotes when speaking with a therapist. For a time, she seems to understand that Thomas Zane is a poet, but her therapist corrects her, finding that the only artist with that name she could find was a filmmaker from Finland.
Modern-day (or at least 2019's) Jesse believes that she was wrong, and that Zane really is a filmmaker. It's an odd thing: Alan Wake II establishes that some people are immune to the re-writing of reality performed in the Dark Place, as Saga and her grandfather and great-uncle see through the fiction that Logan drowned. One might imagine that a parautilitarian as powerful as Jesse might have a similar immunity, but then... perhaps not. Her powers might not be the right ones to allow for such an immunity.
There's a possible reading of Alan Wake's story that we can't really rely on any of it being "real" within the world of the story, where there is nothing but interpretation as to the fundamental facts of what happened. This anarchic reading is a valid one, but it's also one that I think leaves us little room to speculate within.
If we don't take that view, I think that this suggests to me that Thomas Zane really was a poet. The notion that "Tom the Poet" was actually a character in a film by filmmaker Zane (a distinction I usually make by referring to "Thomas" as the poet and "Tom" as the filmmaker, though the name of that movie confuses it a bit) does seem to push more in the direction that "Tom" is the real one, but given the nature of these games, I find it plausible that either Thomas "fictionalized" himself (as he is described in This House of Dreams as having written himself out of existence) by making the real him into this character from a movie, or that an external entity has laid claim to him by fictionalizing him.
That leads to the next question: is Tom Zane, then, a villain or an ally?
Tom and Alan have two face-to-face meetings, which take place within film strips that Alan discovers in the mostly-empty Room 665 at the Oceanview Hotel (interestingly, while he also goes to Room 665 in these films, the layout is entirely different.) In the first, Tom is a wild and off-putting character, but a seeming ally: one who warns Alan not to let Scratch get his hands on the manuscript, and points him to the hotel as a potential source of inspiration. He dresses and acts more like a rock star from 1970 than a filmmaker (and I know there's a theory floating around that he might be the Loki from the Old God of Asgard) and seems paranoid when Jesse Faden appears on the television in the room.
It is noteworthy, of course, that his warning about Scratch altering the manuscript ultimately leads Alan to a self-destructive act. As we discover (it's not the most obvious plot point on a first play-through, or even a second) at the end of Initiation, Scratch isn't really there for any of those confrontations that Alan has in the writer's room. One finds a manuscript seemingly written by Scratch and begins making changes to salvage it (the one after, interestingly, the chapter that has us go around the Oceanview,) the next comes in after having gotten the impression that Scratch drove Alice to suicide and shoots the first one in the head, only to realize his mistake and pass out, getting summoned to the beach at the end of Return's first chapter, and then the last walks in on the carnage, seeing that first one and wondering what the hell has happened (this one actually being the Alan from Initiation's first draft, after the level in Caldera Street Station). The point is, Alan's actually turned against himself, thinking in each case that his other selves are actually Scratch (which... is sort of also true, but not in the sense that he thinks).
We get a preview of Alan getting more violent at the start of the chapter that ends with him shooting his other self in the head, because when Alan visits Zane's room again, he starts the film off aiming his gun at Zane's head. Zane acts innocent, trying to calm a confused Alan but also confessing that, yes, he did collaborate with Scratch because Alan had stopped writing. Weirdly, though, when Alan seems to be calming down, or at least redirecting his emotions from rage to confusion, Zane's face contorts into one of... well, villainy. A smug smile curls his lips and, through film edits, he trades places with Alan, seemingly about to shoot Alan in the head. But as they blink back and forth, Alan pulls the trigger and shoots Zane.
But once we're out of the film, we see the rest of it play - a bit of footage that extends past the final edit, where Zane appears to still be alive, his violent death only a moment of drama for his own film. He also does this beginning with the second half of one of Thomas Zane's poems: "Oh mercy. Thousands have gone missing beyond the labyrinth of me. When you're lost, you're lost in your own company."
So... what the fuck? (Alan literally says this, likely simultaneously with the player.)
It seems to me that Zane is trying to provoke Alan to shoot him. But much as Alan is safe in the writer's room (even when the writer's room becomes a setting for his story, because that kind of makes it a new writer's room) Zane seems to be able to step outside the fiction of his films and survive even when the character he's playing dies.
That, though, raises a very interesting question: is Tom Zane really just a character? And if so, who the hell is playing him?
Zane claims that Yöton Yö is a companion piece to Return. When we see the film, Zane plays Alan Wake in it, and the plot is more or less that a cult ritually sacrifices Alex Casey to die and take Alan's place in the Dark Place to allow for Alan to return.
This does, of course, kind of happen in the game. The Dark Presence is blown out of Alan and then enters Alex Casey, who... travels into the Dark Place or perhaps brings the Dark Place to downtown Bright Falls. Very briefly, Alan is technically out and free - though he's also in a world swarmed by Taken and with no hesitation jumps back in to save the day (or at least try to).
But it does strike me as interesting that, as far as I know, nowhere in Alan's writing does he say that for one person to escape the Dark Place, another has to be taken by it. Alan does say that a sacrifice needs to be made, which is why he chooses to stay in the Dark Place and make Alice's escape possible. But this is the choice of a hero, not the sacrifice of a victim.
Casey, in Nightless Night (I guess I should just use the English title to avoid having to make so many umlauts,) is for certain a victim. He doesn't choose to be sacrificed for someone else's benefit. He's just led in and trapped.
It's also, though, interesting that Zane casts himself as Alan in this story. Naturally, there's a meta weirdness here because the actor who plays Alan's body is the same as the one that plays Zane, and throughout Nightless Night, the convention seems to be that because it's a Finnish film, the Finnish mo-cap actor for a character also provides their own voice. Thus, if we were to see an authentic, non-Zane Alan in Nightless Night, it would still be embodied and voiced by Ilkka Villi anyway - severely blurring the line between Zane and Alan even further.
Thus, if I had to guess, I think Zane is probably plotting to essentially take Alan's place in escaping the Dark Place.
Which... when you think about it, is kind of what the Dark Presence wants to do, right?
Sure, maybe Zane is actually the real Scratch, the true imposter Alan that wishes to enter into the world and wreak havoc. But wait, we can go more unhinged.
It's nearly two in the morning as I write this, and I don't want to lose the thread here. The question of whether Zane created Alan or Alan created Zane is fertile ground for debate and discussion, but I wanted to present a different take:
Is Zane future Alan?
The change in voice is, of course, a little hard to account for here. But on a metaphorical level, I think there's something potentially potent: if we take the idea that Zane wants to exit the Dark Place, and can only do so by leaving Alan within it, could that actually be something more metaphorical? Our future selves are constantly replacing our past selves. Personally, I think the continuity of consciousness is the strongest evidence for something existing beyond the material world, but on a physical level, our bodies are constantly undergoing a cycle of destruction and creation. It's just happening on such a staggered scale that we never notice it - we have cells that die and cells that reproduce, and the factoid I always heard (though it's the sort of thing that could be bullshit) is that about every seven years, every cell in our body has been replaced. This raises some Ship of Theseus questions about personal identity (the soul essentially being a popular answer to that question that, as someone who is not religious, I nevertheless feel is a comforting one).
But if the Dark Presence is, in a literal sense, the Jungian shadow, and that arriving at the self requires a confrontation with and an integration of the shadow, it could be that Zane as a persona was created to be a kind of guide into the darkness - a demon whose very villainousness is required to put Alan on the path to reaching that place of self.
I'm not entirely sure we'll ever get a definitive answer here. Indeed, it's possible that Remedy will want Zane to be a part of the whole RCU beyond even Alan's story (Tom the Poet having been an element even as far back as Death Rally). But even if the guy's tailor-made to make us speak feverishly about what the hell he could mean, it's not like I won't enjoy doing so.
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