In the third of Alan's main chapters in Alan Wake II, we travel to the Poet's Theatre, a cinema that was host to a murder involving the Cult of the Word and that revolved around the screening of a clip from the elusive film Yötön Yö, or "Nightless Night," made by Thomas Zane before he came to America and made his acclaimed film Tom the Poet, which supposedly is the basis of the Tom Zane we thought was the "real" one in the first game. (Though the line between real and fictional is extremely blurry.)
If you complete the mission, finding the murder scene and sending the ritual totem (in this case the deer-skull mask) to Saga so that she can enter the Overlap, on your way out of the cinema, you can wait in the theater and watch what might be the entirety of Nightless Night (I'm sticking with the English title now because my American hands are not used to typing accents).
Note here that a player could easily miss this, but staying inside the movie theater while it plays is possible - the restless shadows won't even bother you there.
Spoilers Ahead
So, first off, what does the title mean?
Well, the most obvious explanation is that Nightless Night refers to what it's like in Arctic countries at Midsummer. Above the Arctic Circle, the sun never sets during the summer, only dipping toward the horizon before rising before it can fully set, simply as a matter of planetary geometry. But this has been a big inspiration to Scandanavian and, more broadly, Nordic artists. Ingmar Bergman's films often deal with this and its wintery opposite, such as in Wild Strawberries, when the main character's journey south restores the day-night cycle, and in The Seventh Seal, the journey north reflects the characters' journey into death, as the wintery permanent nighttime awaits them.
Nightless Night has as its main character Alex Casey - or rather the Finnish version of him, Aleksi Kesä, also portrayed by Sam Lake (in this case both physically acting and providing the dialogue in his native Finnish) appearing as "The Detective." Baba Jakala (Barbara Jagger) plays "The Writer's Widow." Ilmari Huotari (a name we'll be familiar with if we did Saga's second chapter, Local Girl) is "The Murderer," and is notably the same actor as Ilmo Koskela. Ahti, then, is also in it as "The Janitor." Finally, Thomas Seine (aka Tom Zane) is "The Writer Alan Wake."
The movie is presumably from the 1960s, if we're still operating on the assumption that Tom Zane vanished in 1970, meaning that Alan hadn't even been born yet at that point (I believe he's supposed to have been born in 1975).
So, for the full analysis, we're going to go scene-by-scene. The film is, of course, edited in a disorienting way, so "scenes" might not always have clear beginnings or ends.
The film begins with the Detective in a mysterious dark space, but shortly, a door appears behind him with a cultist in a robe and deer mask wearing the symbol of the Cult of the Tree (notably not the Cult of the Word). The cultist opens the door, which bears the spiral mark signifying the Dark Place and is usually Alan's path back into the Writer's Room (not that he's ever truly left, right?)
Next, The Detective walks into the Writer's Room, hearing the sound a typewriter. He walks in and finds himself on the floor, bleeding and drying behind the desk, and the man at the desk typing reveals himself, looking just like Tom Zane, but growling at the Detective in a very Mr. Scratch kind of way. The narration he is writing talks about the Detective returning to his home town with a failed marriage and having been fired, and how he lusts after his first love, Barbara Jagger (well, Baba Jakala.)
Next thing we know, The Detective is driving down a country road with very bright sunlight in his eyes. The captions say there is a Midsummer "sea weather forecast," which seems to confirm that this is taking place at a time when the sun is not going to set - so this could be just about any time of day. He passes a sign on the road that reads "Kattilajärvi," which translates to "Kettle Lake," which is certainly not far off from "Cauldron Lake." (As a note, Sam Lake's actual name is Sami Järvi - which means the same thing).
The sun grows too bright for him as he is driving, and suddenly he is back in the dark void, and is now approached by a quintet of cultists in deer masks, but then, suddenly, he's facing a different door - this one with a poster portraying The Janitor (much as we've seen in both this game and in Control). He opens the door, and standing right there, posed the same way, is Ahti. Ahti laughs as if seeing an old friend, and then quotes the Thomas Zane poem from the first game: "Beyond the shadow you settle for, there is a miracle illuminated."
With a laugh, we're transported to a dance hall where Ahti and the Janitors perform the song, "Nightless Night," which we can hear Ahti singing at karaoke in the Suomi Hall in Watery (Suomi is the Finnish word for Finland). The Detective is dancing with "The Writer's Widow," who is supposedly played by Barbara Jagger. Notably, this is not an actor we've seen before, so it's possible this is the first live-action glimpse we've gotten of her.
Thy lyrics of Ahti's song are also interesting: it talks about a nightmare stalking the person the song addresses, of which many tales are told, and that he stares at you in the mirror. Talking about theme here, one of the big ones in Alan Wake is The Shadow - the dark reflection of ourselves. As we find out later, Mr. Scratch is not really a separate person from Alan, just the embodiment of his worst aspects and impulses and the fears he has about himself, which manifests when the Dark Presence (which the FBC calls The Shadow) takes him over.
The Detective and "The Writer's Widow" dance with one another, and he reveals to her that he left because she was with "Veikko" (Wake, Finnish-ized). With Wake gone, he offers to take her with him when he leaves town again, but she says not until morning.
Oh, and there's a couple dancing in deer masks, and suddenly the dance is gone, and in place the cultists surround him.
And now, the Detective is in the woods, meeting Ilmari Huotari, who is recounting to his gang about how he murdered his brother, to laughing approval. The confrontation is tense - while the Detective insists he's not "back" back, Huotari threatens to kill him too. Also of note, Huotari wears a Kalavala Knights jacket, making the parallels very clear. Huotari claims that his brother was intended as a sacrifice for the Master, but that he wans't good enough because it was the Detective who was the Master's chosen one, and the proper sacrifice.
As the gang closes in around the Detective, though, we cut back to him having a coffee with Ahti. Ahti asks why the Detective returned, and the Detective says he didn't mean to, but that he was drawn back because of a sadistic writer. Ahti says "the Earth is a cyclical song," which feels like an important idea. Ahti asks how things are going at the Federal Bureau of Control, but the Detective corrects him, saying that it's the wrong bureau, and that besides, he was fired. The Detective asks if Ahti needs a janitor's assistant, but Ahti says that he's looking for new work himself, saying the master of the farm he works with has gone and that he was hoping to get a job at the FBC.
As Ahti drinks a saucer of coffee through a sugar cube between his lips, we cut to a new scene. He's with The Widow in the woods, and they drink a toast to the Nightless Night, but as she pours the majority of the bottle down his throat, it seems like it's drugged. She begins to undress him as he has flashes of terror (not unlike some kind of Mr. Scratch possession) while The Widow recites "This is the ritual to lead you on," and then as the Detective arrives in the Writer's Room, we hear "he returns and you in turn are locked in the room."
And then the Detective is in the Writer's Room, and Alan/Alen/Tom approaches him, holding the Angel Lamp over his head.
Next, the Detective and Ahti are in a Sauna, drinking beers. They discuss Alen's perilous dive into the depths of darkness, and also the Detective's relationship with Barbara/The Widow. Did he have a crush on her? Was he scared of her?
Next thing we know, the Detective and the Widow are driving in the car while the "Sankarin Tango" from Control plays on the radio. They seem happy, but then a cultist appears in the back seat.
The Detective is back in the woods, and pukes up what appears to be a whole mushroom. He stumbles near a familiar well (looking just like the Huotari Well in Watery) and the cultists surround him and wrestle him to the ground. The lead cultist removes their mask, but seems to alternate between being Barbara and Ilmari as they stab the Detective in the chest. (There's a third figure who's hard to identify, with longer hair - possibly Alen/Tom?)
A light shines over the well, and Alen/Tom emerges, messianic, from its depths.
Somehow, the Detective, clothed again and no longer bloody and dying, witnesses the return, but as he turns away, he finds himself in the Writer's Room. He says to himself "It's not a loop, it's a spiral," and screams in terror as the credits roll.
So, what the hell was all of this?
Well, there's one aspect of the story of Alan Wake that we kind of gloss over. The reason that Alan encounters his writer's block, which first inspires their trip to Bright Falls, is that he decided to kill off his popular Alex Casey character, feeling he was trapped writing the gritty detective novels.
Thus, in a certain sense, it's his sacrifice of Alex Casey that allows him to escape the trap he had found himself in, much as we see portrayed in the film.
But it's more complicated than that because Alex Casey, as we discover, is actually a real person. Alan seems to be able to reach out into the real world and affect the lives of existing people through his writing. He does that with Saga, and he likely does that with Jesse Faden in Control's AWE expansion. And the real Alex Casey has a more nuanced story, but it's possible that the hardships he's encountered in his life have been due to Alan's writing of those novels.
I'm even of the interpretation that the Noirish Alex Casey we meet in the Dark Place is actually the real Alex Casey after he's dragged into the Dark Place while possessed by Scratch. Alex Casey as the actor Aleksi Kesä, could actually be that same person as well, warped in the Dark Place to appear in a film he never remembers shooting, just as Alan doesn't remember doing all those dance numbers in the Herald of Darkness performance.
When Casey dies the first of many times in the Dark Place, Alan notes that when he picks up his gun and flashlight, it feels as if he is taking on the role of the Detective.
In the movie, "Alen," played by Tom Zane (who of course looks identical other than the lack of beard to our Alan) has evidently set up this ritual sacrifice to engineer his escape from the Dark Place.
In a certain way, Alan's guilty of this too - by writing narratives that include the deaths and corruption of others in his efforts to get out of the Dark Place, he's sort of trading fates with others. Surely Cynthia Weaver did not deserve to become Taken, but Alan's narrative let it happen.
On the other hand, there's a deeper and weirder possibility.
We meet Tom Zane a couple times, and Alan is mightily put off by the fact that they look just like one another. In the first face-to-face meeting, Zane claims that they've been working together on a collaborative project to escape the Dark Place - Alan's Return and Zane making a "companion film." Is this that film? That seems possible, even if the narrative suggests that it was made prior to Zane's 1970 disappearance. But then again: is Tom the filmmaker actually real?
See, from multiple angles, we're told that Tom Zane the Poet was just a character Tom Zane the Filmmaker played in his most popular film. But frankly, Tom being a filmmaker does not really add up. How does Emile Hartman and his endeavors work in connection to Cauldron Lake in that case? Why do known parautilitarians Alan Wake and Jesse Faden remember him as a poet instead of a filmmaker (given that Saga Anderson is unaffected by the attempt to cast her as a tragic hero who grew up in Watery, there's an implication that parautilitarians might generally have Ripple Effect-Proof Memories. I'm inclined to think that the "real" Tom Zane was the poet, and that the false narrative has attempted to fool us into thinking it's the other way around by incorporating the real Tom into the metafictional Tom the Poet movie.
If supplementary materials are to be believed, the real Tom and Barbara were able to escape the Dark Place into their own pocket universe and are happy. If that's the case, what is Tom Zane here?
We find out later that Zane started collaborating with Mr. Scratch after Alan chose to stop writing.
Perhaps the explanation for why Zane looks just like Alan is that this is just another splinter of his mind - much as the "insane Alan" from the Writher and Signal DLCs in the first game was a part of Alan, perhaps Zane is a projection of himself.
Naturally, the Koskela brothers seem like a parallel to the horror story from Water's past involving the Huotaris. But as far as we can tell, Ilmo and Jaako are never anything other than loving brothers. Jaako's death comes not at the hands of Ilmo, but of Mr. Scratch. It's instead Deputies Thornton and Mulligan who unwittingly recreate the events of that murder.
I think it's also curious that Nightless Night ends with the same words that end Alan Wake II: It's not a Loop, it's a Spiral. But while this is enigmatically terrifying in the film, it's actually a source of hope for Alan as the message hits home - what he thought was a Sisyphean hell that would never end is actually slowly making progress toward... well, we're not sure if it's anything good, but it's at least progress.
Spirals are, of course, disorienting and often associated symbolically with madness, but we do see a few ways in which seeming loops do actually lead somewhere, such as when Saga has her confrontations with the three main boss fights, in which she first has to go through a looping (or actually spiraling) Overlap.
There's a good chance that there are elements here that are setting things up that won't be paid off for a while. Ahti's mention of the FBC is curious, as people at the FBC claim that he's always worked at the Oldest House. Did he actually show up there first in the 1960s? (That would be around the time that the FBC moved into it.)
My general impression is that Ahti is always a benevolent presence, though, so does his appearance in this movie suggest that its effect and intent are good? Perhaps I'm making too much of an assumption about Ahti, but we shall see.
Tom Zane remains the biggest enigma in an already mysterious game. There's obvious parallels here with the events in Bright Falls and Watery, but it's all very open to interpretation.
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