Literally just after writing that post about the eventual Max Payne remake, I found a YouTube video of all of the Address Unknown shows from Max Payne II. And... boy howdy, if you've played Alan Wake II, buckle up.
Released almost exactly 20 years before Alan Wake II, Max Payne II (dear god I feel so old that things that happened when I was a teenager happened 20 years ago. I suspect I'll have this feeling every decade - already I have clear memories of things that happened 30 years ago) has a few television shows that you can find, similar to how you find episodes of Night Springs in the original Alan Wake (or, kind of, Threshold Kids in Control). One of these shows is Address Unknown.
Given the limitations of the time, the "shows" are just slide shows of still images found on the TVs. Address Unknown is presented as a cult hit from the 90s (which, given this game came out in 2003, was not terribly long ago,) and very clearly takes inspiration from Twin Peaks (much as Alan Wake would in numerous ways, not the least of which is that the Oh Deer Diner is nearly identical in layout and general character to the Double R in Twin Peaks). Indeed, the first episode you can find shows the narrator walking between red curtains, just like Twin Peaks' iconic "Red Room."
As an aside:
If you haven't ever seen Twin Peaks, let me give a quick rundown. The show first aired in the Spring of 1990. It takes place in the eponymous town, a small burgh in eastern Washington state, near both the Idaho and Canadian borders. This seemingly idyllic town is shaken to its core when Laura Palmer, the popular and beloved prom queen at the local high school, is found murdered. When a survivor of the same terrible night is found crossing a bridge over state borders, the FBI is called in to investigate. But a few things make this show very different from your typical police procedural. For one thing, the show peels back the layers of the community to reveal some genuinely bizarre and shockingly dark secrets. But beyond that, there is a growing understanding that something deeply weird and supernatural is at work in this town. Even then, I feel I'm not quite getting across how weird the secrets of Twin Peaks are - our heroic FBI investigator, Dale Cooper, uses a number of mystical techniques (some of which come off as utterly absurd) and has prophetic dreams that guide him in his investigation. It's implied that a couple of people in the town are actually magical spirits. And nothing really neatly fits into conventional mythological structures to allow this to be read as true fantasy - there's a question of whether it's all a kind of meta-narrative. Man, it's hard to sum this show up. On one level it's a soap opera (or a satire of 1980s soap operas) and on another level it's one of the biggest mindfucks out there (oh, did I mention it was co-created by David Lynch?)
Anyway, this Red Room imagery and the backwards-talking of a Flamingo in Address Unknown are clear references to Twin Peaks (in Twin Peaks, people in the Red Room speak backwards - the actors read out their lines, had the audio reversed so that they could then mimic the backwards recording, and then when they shot the scene, acted backwards and then in editing the footage and audio was reversed again. See the results for yourself.
But, parallels to Twin Peaks aside, I think what's fascinating here is the connections that this show-within-a-game has to Alan Wake II, which came out twenty years later.
Given that Alan Wake II is still a recent game, I'll put this behind a spoiler cut.
Spoilers ahead for Alan Wake II and the show-within-a-game Address Unknown from Max Payne II.
Our narrator is trapped within Noir York City. He can't seem to navigate through it by conventional means, and has to intuit his way around.
Here, there's a parallel with Alan in his Dark Place New York. Like "John," Alan sometimes needs to descend stairs to end up on a nearby rooftop, or go into the bathroom of a hotel room on the first floor to walk out into a room on the second floor.
John is pursued and tormented by John Mirra, his double, whom he claims mocks him when he looks in the mirror.
Alan, likewise, spends his time in the Dark Place trying to outmaneuver Mr. Scratch, his own evil double.
John finds himself tracing the path of John Mirra from murder site to murder site.
Alan finds himself needing to discover murder sites in the Dark Place to find the inspiration to write Initiation.
John eventually becomes John Mirra, perhaps realizing he was John Mirra all along.
And of course, as we learn in Alan Wake II, Mr. Scratch is just Alan with the Dark Presence inside of him - a Dark Presence that may, depending on how you interpret the closing monologue of the game, was birthed from him in the first place.
John gets phone calls on payphones from John Mirra.
Alan gets phone calls on the same payphone from Tom Zane, and eventually himself (for now we're operating under the assumption that Tom Zane isn't him, of course.)
When John fully embraces his transformation into John Mirra, he gets a call from... John Mirra, who welcomes him to "the next level."
Alan's last call on the payphone is from a version of him seemingly from the future, who has wisdom that the receiving Alan does not yet have, suggesting that this might be the "ascended" Alan following the ending of the Final Draft NG+. It's not quite the same, but could be a comparable conversation.
In his last episode, John refers to a poet named Poole, and quotes a verse.
This is a more tenuous connection, but Alan has a similar memory of the poet Thomas Zane (who of course doesn't match up with the Tom Zane he meets).
To be fair, there are plenty of elements here that don't have parallels. While the pink flamingo altered item does appear in Control, I don't know that there's any clear connection to this weird entity that seems somehow aligned with John Mirra. And there's an extensive segment of Address Unknown in which John is taken to a mental asylum and goes on a violent rampage to escape after the doctors there attempt to perform a lobotomy.
Still, the parallels here cannot be accidental.
But is this just a story form that has been rattling around in Sam Lake's head for 20 years that he wanted to revisit, or is this an implied connection?
Works of art within these works of art (as in, the games) have a special power. Naturally that's truest in the Alan Wake games, where art shapes reality. I think it's also possible that the show's role in Max Payne was more to suggest that Max's own story is one of self-delusion, and that perhaps the traumatic loss of his family was his own doing, and that he's projected it onto this grand conspiracy to alleviate his guilt.
One thing I do find kind of fascinating is the echo in esseJ and the mirror altered item in Control.
Control suggests such a massive world, but because of the game's format and structure, needs to keep things pretty much focused on the Hiss as antagonists. But there's an optional side area in which you can enter a mirror and face off against Jesse's mirror-world doppelganger. Why she's hostile is a big question mark, and there are even some meta-references in there (like one of her backwards lines playing back as "I'm much wilder than you," which is likely a nod to Jesse actress Courtney Hope's role as Beth Wilder in Quantum Break). But Jesse has, in effect, faced her own "Mirra," only in this case it really is a different person... maybe.
Anyway, the fact that there are such strong parallels found in these games that came out twenty years apart from one another really has me wondering how many other things one could discover by poring over these games with a fine-tooth comb.
No comments:
Post a Comment