Having beaten Silent Hill 2, and having enjoyed the game (enjoy seems like an upbeat way to describe a game like that, but oh well,) I've found myself in my usual internet deep-dive, looking it up on TV Tropes and YouTube, scratching away at the game's mysteries and interpretation.
The remake came out actually the year after Alan Wake II, and both adopted similar gameplay developments, moving toward a 3rd-person-shooter style popularized in the Survival Horror genre by Resident Evil 4 (Alan Wake's first game is also, arguably, a 3rd person shooter, but in a manner I feel is looser and more action-oriented, which makes sense as that game was more of a horror-themed action game than survival horror).
While RE4 inspired a lot of AWII's gameplay, I think it's pretty clear that Silent Hill's more psychological/surreal horror were a bigger inspiration for Alan Wake's story (though I think in both cases, works like Twin Peaks played a big role, though SH2's debts to the movie Jacob's Ladder are certainly front-and-center.)
While conceptualizing a potential Ravenloft campaign (one that's honestly probably many years away given that I want to return to my homebrew setting after running a Ravnica-set campaign for over five years) I hit upon the idea of doppelgangers.
I think the doppelganger is one of the most potent tropes in horror, especially in psychological horror (a genre that, itself, melds well with both Gothic and Cosmic horror, as well as surreal horror).
Jung's idea of the Shadow lingers over much of the horror genre - even outside of psychological horror, the primal fear inspired by monsters harkens back to a pre-civilization version of the human mind, in which we're always threatened by animal predators. The very act of engaging with fear as an emotion, something that we try to avoid in most contexts, is, I think, something that Jung's theory of psychology would find healthy: a confrontation with parts of ourselves we usually keep hidden.
Indeed, the very idea of drama often has some related element to horror: think about how potent the classical tragedy was - we witness characters like Oedipus discover utterly shocking and revolting truths about himself. We, as a form of entertainment (and also worship of Dionysus, which was how Greek theater was treated back then,) imagine a story in which the protagonist is tormented and destroyed by terrors (in Oedipus' case, the terror of realizing what he had done in his ignorance). Even in heroic tales, our great heroes fight monsters - from Pericles to Superman, we yearn to see a confrontation with terror and death. Genre dictates mainly what the outcome is, though there's plenty of horror in which our heroes do succeed and survive, and one is left to ask what, on a fundamental level, is so different between a horror story with a happy ending and a rollicking adventure.
The answer, I think, is mainly tone.
But lest I go spiraling off in a discussion about drama itself, let me bring things back to the doppelganger.
Gothic horror is funny, because I think I'd argue that it's defined more by aesthetics than dramatic mechanics. Born out of the 19th Century Romantic movement, it's rare that we see examples that stray out of an 18th/19th century time period (perhaps sometimes in the very early 20th Century). Classic monsters like vampires, werewolves, and ghosts are the great staples of the genre (reanimated corpse-constructs are also a staple, but the trope codifier there is so iconic that it's hard to escape Frankenstein's shadow.)
But I think that another key element to Gothic Horror, and here I mean beyond its aesthetics, is the idea of the monster within - again, one thing that unites vampires, werewolves, and ghosts is that all of them were once people. These are not dragons or trolls. These were once people like us. And that means that within their very existence is the proof that something could push us to become a monster just like them. Vampires and werewolves in particular are notable for their infectiousness, and I think a lot of ghost stories are also predicated on this idea in a certain way: the ghosts in a haunted house might kill people (or at least drive them to their deaths) and thus make restless spirits of their victims, adding to the power of the haunting, just as a vampire's brood or a werewolf's pack could grow with each victim.
The victim is a potential villain: as we see with Lucy Westenra, this innocent young woman who is preyed upon by Dracula, and in the heroes' failure to protect her, she becomes a monster herself, preying upon children she abducts. Lucy begins as a sympathetic figure, but you could imagine that, if not put down by her former suitors (not going to get into the sexual politics of that novel right now, other to say boy,) she might have become her own legendary monster and figure of terror if left to her vampiric devices (I'm honestly kind of shocked that I've never heard of a horror story with her as the primary monster.)
Humans are, you know, complex beings. We have admirable traits, traits that have allowed us to thrive as a species, like altruism, cooperation, love, and empathy, but we also have inverse impulses as well: selfishness, factionalism, hatred, and contempt. Most of us, I'd hope, would favor that first group of traits, but even if we do, there's an awareness of the presence of those other traits, whether conscious or not.
Again, though, I'm not here to talk about Gothic horror. I'm here to talk about psychological horror and the presence of the doppelganger.
See, the doppelganger, unlike the vampire or werewolf, whose beastliness, whose monstrousness, is self-evident in their form - claws, sharp teeth, animal-like fur (in Dracula's case, though the modern image of the vampire goes almost in the opposite direction by making them typically very smooth-shaven and pale, as if they're inhuman by means of not being animal-like enough,) the doppelganger naturally poses a question: Which of these is the real one, and which is the monster?
Psychological horror is built on the fallibility of perception. And perhaps no perception is more important to us than our sense of self.
Now, I will say, while Alan Wake II and Silent Hill 2 both deal with doppelgangers (fitting that these are both "2s" in their franchises - something I'm certain was intentional in the case of AWII but not so sure about with SH2,) they do so in very different ways, and from different perspectives.
Let's go to the spoiler cut, with spoilers for both games as well as the movie Jacob's Ladder.
On a literal level, Silent Hill 2 has a doppelganger in the form of Maria. James traverses the town of Silent Hill looking for his wife Mary, despite the impossibility of this task given that his wife is dead. But already, his perception of things is false: in his opening monologue, he claims that he lost his wife to her disease 3 years ago, and then he got a letter from her recently telling him to come to the town. But we find out later that it was 3 years ago that she got sick, and that she likely died far more recently, even possibly just days ago, when James smothered her with a pillow.
James doesn't remember doing this. He's suffered a psychotic break, and even by the end of the story, we're not sure if he did this out of hatred and resentment for the way she behaved suffering from her terminal disease, or if he feels so guilty about euthanizing her that he's convinced himself that it was an act of hatred, and then from there, repressing the memory. I don't think that latter interpretation is overly generous to him, as I think there's a lot in the story that suggests that he might be taking on more than his fair share of guilt. But also, you know, he did murder his wife, so maybe we don't need to go too far down the road of absolving him.
It's not our protagonist/player character who has a doppelganger in this story - though in Jungian terms, the game does ultimately build up to a confrontation with his Shadow: the truth about himself that he cannot incorporate into his sense of self. In that less metaphorical and more literal sense, James the devoted widower must incorporate the doppelganger that is James the wife-murderer, except that these two men were never in separate bodies.
No, the literal doppelganger is Maria, who looks like his late wife Mary, albeit with a different hair color and make-up, but beyond these superficial changes, they look identical.
It's honestly a little strange: James comes to the town looking for Mary, trying for the impossible, but when he meets the woman who most reasonably would be his wife, neither does he think she is nor does she try to convince him she is. She is a double, and her role in the story morphs from potential ally to the monster and, depending on the ending you get, the game's final boss (I believe this is true in most endings, while the actual Mary takes her place in one or two of them). Her agenda from the start is to distract and draw him away from his goal of finding Mary, which in fact, unbeknownst to him, is actually finding out the truth of what he did.
Maria is a manifestation of the town. I don't think that's a controversy. But while my initial interpretation of her, and one that I think most people seem to share, is that she's an evil manipulator, and that perhaps in contrast, Pyramid Head might ironically be a kind of spirit-guide bringing James closer to the truth (an interpretation that, in fairness, matches up with a major inspiration for the game, the film Jacob's Ladder, in which the figures he sees as horrifying demons are actually angelic guides trying to help him shed his attachments to his mortal life).
But I saw an interesting counter-argument by Youtuber FatBrett, saying that Maria may try to manipulate James into behaving in ways that prevent him from accepting the truth, but that her reasons for doing this might not be so selfish, and that perhaps we're too quick to assume the murderous, violent Pyramid Head is just an ironically misunderstood and ultimately benevolent force.
It's not an interpretation that I'm sure I agree with, though I think the presence of an expansion/prequel to the game that hasn't been released for the remake (at least yet) in which we play as Maria does lend some support to the idea that she at least has sympathetic motivations.
However, another point that he makes that is kind of fascinating is that, technically, we might actually encounter four separate Marias over the course of the game. The one we meet in the park dies when Pyramid Head stabs her at the hospital. The one in the jail cell in the labyrinth seems to waste away from the same disease that Mary had. The one we see before the dual Pyramid Head boss fight might only exist for minutes before they execute her. And the last one, the one that impersonates Mary most directly, may be ephemeral as well.
What does that actually mean?
James, at least if you get the Leave ending, fundamentally doesn't feel any obligations to her, even if he expresses sympathy and sorrow at turning her down after her final appeal to him. But I also think that her attempts to manipulate him wear on him - and especially after he's confronted the truth of what he did, the fantasy of returning to an idealized, pre-disease marriage, or some relationship that he can pretend is like that, is just not believable anymore.
There is an interpretation that I haven't seen presented, and while I think it's unlikely to be true, it could be a really fascinating one:
What if Maria is Mary?
After all, after defeating Maria in the final boss fight, we have a final meeting with Mary in some spiritual realm. A darker interpretation could be that this version of her is just as false as the doppelganger Maria, only this time giving him comfort and closure and forgiveness that the real one may never have been willing to grant.
But if we're considering the dissociation James has had with his murderous deed as creating almost two Jameses, could it be that a part of Mary's own psyche has manifested as Maria?
Again, unlikely and I'm not really making this argument, but I think it's an interesting one to toss out there. I think regardless of our ending, we fight either Mary or Maria, and I assume it's mechanically the same fight.
Metaphorically, doppelgangers can represent an aspect of ourselves we deny or are simply unaware of, which is another way of saying the Jungian Shadow. I think there are even some stories in which a ghost is not necessarily the entirety of a person, but a fragment of them. In some early models of the nature of reality, a person was thought of as being a combination of mind, body, and spirit. Now, the mind and soul were imagined to be the same thing - the conscious, thinking part of you. This might be surprising, as soul and spirit are often thought of interchangeably in modern parlance, but spirit in this case was more like an animating energy - a drive or force. In fact, in the Catholic idea of the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit might be thought to represent these three aspects: the Son is God incarnated in a physical body (so, Body,) the Father is the mind behind all of creation (Soul/Mind,) and the Holy Spirit is this vague thing a lot of people don't really understand, but can be said to enter into people and move them (and is often represented by a Dove, but only metaphorically).
In a sense, then, a repressed Shadow within our psychology (here the terminology gets complicated, because technically "psyche" is just the word for soul in Greek) could be thought of as a mysterious, animating spirit, driving us to certain behaviors, even if our mind/psyche is unaware of them.
We don't really know Mary well enough to speculate on what her Shadows might be, though we do get some sense of her struggling with her impending mortality. She's given a terminal diagnosis from the wasting disease that she suffers. And she's caught between the natural impulse to survive and the desire for the pain (physical, emotional, etc.) that she's suffering to end.
After defeating Maria, James is transported to a room where he can talk with Mary in the afterlife (maybe). In it, she forgives him for killing her. James insists on confessing that he did not do it for altruistic reasons, that he's a monstrous person who killed her because it was too painful for him to be the caregiver, suffering the (very natural and understandable) lashing out of a dying woman. There's a very clearly implied element to all of this that he's also sexually frustrated, unable to have sex with his weakened wife and perhaps even viscerally disgusted by the state of her body. Let's not forget that James is young. He's only 29.
Her reply to his confession of hatred and bitterness is to ask why, then, he feels so sad. And, maybe I'm being over-generous to the wife-murderer here, but I interpret this to mean that he feels so guilty over what he did that he's made himself out to be purely selfish in his motives, and that, ironically, one of his Shadows is that he did, actually, choose to do what he did out of a desire to end her pain, in an act of, admittedly fucked up, love. But his moral sense won't give himself the credit of having at least some admirable-from-a-certain-point-of-view motive in his crime, and it would be easier altogether to just fully repress the entire memory.
What Shadow, then, is Maria, for Mary, then? Even if she's not literally a fragment of Mary's spirit or consciousness and truly just a monster cooked up by the evil presence in Silent Hill, how might she be a metaphorical Shadow for Mary? Again, we get far more of Maria than we get of Mary, but I wonder if perhaps she's some part of Mary that was still clinging to life, still clinging to her marriage, to James.
While I've only seen the cutscene of the "Maria" ending, if James ultimately does choose to be with her in the end, the ending is not some monstrous reveal in which Maria's head splits open to reveal a giant toothy maw and swallows him or anything. Instead, the two just walk out of the town together, back to his car. The darkness of the ending is that Maria begins to cough, as if she has the disease that Mary had, and James comments coldly that she had better "do something about that cough," with a horrifying implication that she might ultimately wind up getting smothered to death as well.
My guess (and again, I haven't seen the other elements of this ending) is that while Maria is getting what she thinks she wants - to stay with James and have what Mary lost - that the James she's getting is one who hasn't successfully processed his guilt, and perhaps in too-easily absolving himself, has given in to the darkest parts of himself. If Maria is the part of Mary that just wants to reset things, she's ultimately just re-creating the circumstances that led to her death in the first place.
I think it's notable that Alan Wake II's approach to doppelgangers is a profoundly deceptive one.
When we finish the base version of the first Alan Wake, there's a staggeringly out-of-left-field reveal of Mr. Scratch, a sinister mirror of Alan's given no explanation and whom we're told specifically not to worry about.
Worry we do, but when the Signal and the Writer DLCs take place, the double who torments us throughout turns out not to be Mr. Scratch after all - that all this time we've actually been playing as one fragment of Alan's mind, pursuing and ultimately reincorporating with another part of his mind. There's even a sinister doppelganger of Barry Wheeler, Alan's best friend, who turns out to be more like a manifestation of all the bad things he might imagine his friend truly thinks about him.
Now, Scratch does truly seem to be the main bad guy of American Nightmare, an Xbox Arcade-exclusive game I haven't played and have heard was not good. But Scratch is also, ostensibly, the big bad of Alan Wake II.
And yet...
For much of Alan Wake II, we operate on the assumption that Mr. Scratch, or just Scratch as he's called for the most part, is walking around, a double of Alan but physically his own whole being. And Scratch stalks Alan in the Dark Place and seemingly escapes into the real world when Alan is summoned back on the shore of Cauldron Lake after Saga defeats the Taken Nightingale (interesting that both of these are set in towns with big lakes.)
And we do see multiple versions of Alan in the Dark Place, including one that kills another (and don't get me started on Tom Zane), which we assume to be Scratch. But Alan, and perhaps we, have forgotten, that in the many layers of reality within the Dark Place, existing in multiple places at once is not out of the question. Just as in the first game's DLCs, the truth is that all the Alans are Alan. His mind is at war with itself, different drafts of his autofictional narrative crashing into one another.
In Saga's story, we start to feel suspicious that the Alan we took from the lake might actually be Scratch, that the real Alan is trapped. The structure of the game reinforces this, with Saga having garbled conversations with him at the end of each of her chapters, and vice versa, with an assumption that the two halves of the game are simultaneous, which would mean that Alan couldn't be out of the Dark Place, and this other Alan must be the doppelganger.
But what the game ultimately reveals is that Scratch is Alan, only he's Alan with the Dark Presence driving him.
The Dark Presence, thus, is a spirit - an Unholy Spirit, as it were.
There's a genuine question in the second game, which is harder to support in the first game, that the very nature of the Dark Presence itself might be Alan's doing - that all the darkness, violence, and death is fundamentally coming from him, whether he likes it or not. Sure, it messes with the notion of causality, but if we also imagine that all the events of the story are actually Alan's writing, the causal contradictions can be explained the same way that you can explain an author changing a passage in the first chapter of their novel once they have written the sixteenth.
I went to college for screenwriting, and one of the most popular bits of writing advice was that there's nothing more satisfying than a good set-up/pay-off. Have a detail whose significance might not be obvious to begin with, but that becomes important later on. Audiences will recognize it and it just feels cool to see. But the dirty trick to Chekov's Gun is that, if you're writing your story and you need someone to find a gun in Act Three, you can just go back and add it into Act One now that you need it. From the audience's perspective, it's this brilliant subtle foreshadowing. For you, it's the cheapest of tricks. (This is also why movies that fail to set things up this way have no excuse.)
On one level of interpretation, you could argue that Scratch is Alan when he's being puppeteered by this malevolent force. What existed in a separate physical form in the Dark Place was never actually physically separate anyway, because what even is "physical" in the Dark Place anyway? Perhaps even Mr. Blonde-alike Mr. Scratch in American Nightmare was just another part of Alan's personality anyway, the source of the gritty, gruesome horrors of his hardboiled crime novels.
Indeed, I think there's a lot in both Alan Wake games that interrogates the role of an author in the bringer of torment to their characters. As I said before, we crave stories about suffering and terror to experience catharsis, but if you view reality as, potentially, infinite layers of authors and characters, does the imagined, fictional suffering of a character in a horror story actually mean that on some level of reality a conscious being is experiencing that suffering? In that conception of the cosmos, Alan's power is that he's become kind of out of sync with the reality that he's originally from. Or, that perhaps the Dark Place reveals some glitch that allows characters to become their own authors.
We view both of these stories as fiction, of course, and certainly my default belief is that, no, fictional characters aren't these sentient people who feel real pain when the author writes suffering into the plot. But perhaps Scratch is a necessary part of Alan that allows him to be an author - that the cruelty Scratch represents is necessary for him to write his fiction.
The shocking revelation at the end of Alan Wake II is that the dark plan Scratch has, the reality he wants to overwrite the world with, is one in which everyone basically worships Alan as a writer. Alan wants fame and adulation, to be some great master of his craft. It's a part of himself that he probably hasn't thought about at all in the thirteen years stuck in the Dark Place. It's a surprising Shadow, but it's a potent one. It's a recognition of himself that, all along, he desired little more than to have his ego stroked, to contradict the nightmarish figure from the first game's prologue tutorial who says "it's not like your books are any good."
Bizarrely, as petty and kind of innocuous as this Shadow is, that just makes it all the more elusive. Alan's insecurities about his art kicked all of this off. Why did he kill of Alex Casey? Did he think that he couldn't be respected as a writer for doing this hardboiled, warmed-over genre fiction? He wants to be known as the crafter of daring, innovative literature. And so, he writes and lives through one of the most complicated, convoluted stories imaginable.
Does this fit with a doppelganger? I don't know. We don't really meet the "complexity addiction" doppelganger.
Oh dear Lord.
Unless that's what Tom Zane is.
Thomas Zane in the first game is a poet - a kind of writer that is at the height of respectability, despite or perhaps even because it's a type of writing that is not very commercial. His reinvention as a filmmaker in the second game is a huge question, but as he presents himself, he's the kind of avant-garde, daring, sexily dangerous capital-A Artist that Alan really wants to be.
Tom Zane (and note that we're calling him Tom now instead of Thomas), notably, is also a freaking doppelganger that looks just like Alan. (Played by the same physical actor, though unlike Wake, who is voiced by Matthew Poretta, Tom Zane is fully performed by Ilkka Villi.)
The giant question mark that is Tom Zane is one that might never get a definitive answer, but on some level, maybe on a higher (or lower) level of the Dark Place (reminds me of Stephen King describing layers of reality as being on different levels of the Dark Tower,) Tom is that ideal that Alan aspires to - his own personal Tyler Durden.
Much as there's room to debate the relative benevolence and malevolence of Maria and Pyramid Head, it's very ambiguous whether Tom Zane is a beneficial or antagonistic force toward Alan, with theories about him ranging from being a monstrous parasite trying to take over Alan's identity like he already did with the real Thomas Zane, to being a future version of Alan from further up the spiral acting as mischievous mentor, to being the real artist that created Alan in the first place (maybe working with Dr. Casper Darling, portrayed in both body and voice by Matthew Poretta).
YouTuber Monty Zander expressed some dismay at the implication in the Night Springs DLC for Alan Wake II that Tom Zane and Mr. Scratch might be multiversal variants of Alan. I would also find this a bit of a disappointment, but mainly for the multiverse angle. I'm not crazy about having infinite universes with infinite versions of our characters, because it starts to make us question why we should care so much about this one. But I think there's at least some potency in the idea that Tom Zane is not a multiverse variant, but instead a fragment of Alan's psyche.
(Ultimately, like the nature of Half-Life's G-Man, this might be more interesting as an unanswered mystery than some grand reveal.)
As I try to bring this rambling post to a close (I've been writing this now for hours, I think) let me try to sum it up: Psychological horror is built on the interplay of the conscious and unconscious mind. Doppelgangers externalize the subconscious, which can be a tool that allows us to finally glimpse that part of ourselves that was previously hidden, but also potentially to enable our denial and compartmentalization. Their lack of obvious monstrous form (ok, sure, Mr. Scratch is often covered in blood, but he's still Alan-shaped) pushes their scariness from the primal, direct terror of a monster into the unsettling and uncanny.
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