Silent Hill 2 is a game that has lingered with me since I beat it a couple weeks ago. I know that players of the original version have talked about it for over two decades now, and so there's a degree to which I know that my contributions to the discourse are kind of late. Even the remake is now about a year old, so I'm somewhat of a latecomer to it as well.
But I think there's a good reason why a story like this merited a remake, and one that has received broad acclaim.
There's a ton to discuss about the player character, James, and especially how the game's big act three reveal forces us to reassess him as a person. But I wanted to set that aside to look instead at two other characters who travel to Silent Hill around the same time as James, Angela and Eddie.
To discuss any of this will naturally involve spoilers, so here's a spoiler cut.
Silent Hill 2 has multiple endings, and thus, there are plenty of scenarios in which the town's dark power fully gets to James. In multiple (if similar) endings, James drives his car into the lake and drowns, his suicide either an act of atonement for killing Mary or perhaps just an inability to face the fact that he is a murderer, or even a mad, desperate ploy to be reunited with her in death. Others see him fall for Maria's seduction and leave with her, with an implication that doing so has allowed him to compartmentalize all his guilt and actually if anything become a colder, crueler person who very well might wind up murdering Maria as well. There's one in which he finds the possibly magical drug White Claudia and descends into a delusion that Mary never died and he goes on to live in that fantasy, or another in which he discovers the town's occult rituals and attempts to use them to resurrect his wife.
However, the ending I got, and one that I believe is the most common ending, is the relatively happy ending: James faces up to his guilt and responsibility and decides to move on, finding a new purpose in ensuring that Laura is able to leave and have a home to grow up in. (I will say, I'm a little skeptical that "James gets over murdering his wife by becoming an adoptive father to a girl he just met" is actually such a happy ending, but if it's more that he just ensures she gets out of the town and that she finds a home to live in before he goes off to change his identity and start a new life or something, that might work better).
In other words, the Leave ending means that, ultimately, James survives Silent Hill and moves on with his life, presumably, hopefully, without ever facing the bizarre supernatural terrors (though if you're on the "James is irredeemable" side of things, you might consider this to be a bad ending, actually).
However, Eddie and Angela do not have a chance for any such happy ending.
Other than monsters, and I guess that bizarre voice in the elevator in the hospital, there are only a few characters in the game that we see directly. There's James, Angela, Laura, Eddie, Maria (who is, arguably, technically a monster) and visions of Mary. (Actually, part of me feels a certain conspiracy theory that Laura also might not be any more real than Maria, but we'll set that aside). Of these, Eddie and Angela are the two people whose presence in Silent Hill is most similar to James.
Like James, they've come here after an act of deadly violence. As far as we know, Eddie hasn't killed another human when he gets to town, but he did kill a dog and seriously injure a man. Angela has killed a human - two, actually, I think, and even possibly three.
We meet each of these characters a few times over the course of the game. While each has a climactic moment associated with them, the nature of our interactions is quite different.
Eddie seems very sympathetic at first, though while James and I, the player, felt inclined to believe him when he claimed that the dead body slammed into the refrigerator near where Eddie is puking into a toilet truly was not his victim, future interactions imply otherwise.
Multiple times, we find Eddie near a corpse. In fact, I think the only time we find him not near a corpse is in the movie theater (or the bowling alley in the original game, but I never played that, so we'll go by the remake). In each case, it seems very likely that Eddie was the one to kill this person, whom we always see not as a monster, but just as a human man (in fact, a human man dressed very much like James).
Like Angela (whom we'll get to,) Eddie's violent outbursts are born out of trauma. It doesn't seem to be anything particularly specific - he's an overweight, not very handsome, not very smart guy. He's kind of filthy, and strikes you as the kind of guy who never really learned to take such social graces as good hygiene very seriously because no one was treating him with any dignity anyway. It's a kind of low-grade tragedy, where there's not any real acute trauma that he's endured to make him this way, but you get the sense that this is a guy who just never had any friends, and his inferiority complex probably made him lash out at people, assuming the worst of them (as he very much does toward James).
When James comments on how absurd it could be that he's eating in a town full of monsters, Eddie takes this very personally, like its a cruel crack about his weight. James presumably doesn't mean it that way - for one thing, he doesn't know that the monsters he's been seeing aren't necessarily the ones that Eddie has been seeing (after all, he's been with Maria, who does see those monsters because she's as much a part of his mental torment as they are,) but he also probably doesn't overeat as a stress response. Eddie very much might be just as anxious and panicked as James, and the eating might be to calm himself. And, let's be honest: maybe there is a subconscious fatphobia that James is unwittingly expressing when he makes this comment. I mean, we know for a fact that James has plenty of subconscious attitudes and drives that direct his behavior.
It would be kind of fascinating to get some kind of spin-off or DLC to play as both of these characters and see what Silent Hill looks like to them. I get the impression that Eddie only encounters a single monster - this "bully" of his, and Eddie is convinced that if he doesn't kill the bully first, he'll be the one to die. Does Eddie always see them as James, or is that something that slowly starts to happen to him the longer he's in town?
I remember a kid in high school whom Eddie reminds me a bit of. Luckily, this kid never had a violent outburst that I was aware of, but I remember he was kind of socially awkward and was kind of excluded from some social circles. The problem was that when we tried to make an effort to include him, he started to act like an absolute asshole. It was basically this binary: sad sack you'd feel sorry for excluding or douchebag you'd feel sorry for including.
And I don't know exactly what was going on with him that made him like that, but I think that somewhere he internalized this notion that socializing was all about asserting a hierarchy - that there was some kind of ranking of who was cool, and as soon as you were allowed into that hierarchy, to climb it you'd need to put others down. I imagine there was also a lot of projection, assuming that people that didn't like him only didn't like him because they were assholes, and that he wished to turn those tables on them.
Eddie clearly resents James in many ways: after all, James is a conventionally attractive, fit man, and James' calm, steady demeanor is something Eddie probably reads as yet another way in which James is projecting superiority (when in fact, James is just so profoundly depressed that he's kind of indifferent as to whether the town kills him or not).
One is left to wonder if Eddie's history of bullying is even real, or just a projection. Like every fucking character in this game, what he really needed was therapy.
Still, I think that the Eddie we meet in Woodside Apartments is not beyond saving. However, by our third meeting with him in the prison, I think it would have taken a miracle to turn him from his path, and of course by the time we get to him at the end of the labyrinth, it's too late for him. The town has brought out the worst, most paranoid and vengeful side of him.
We know, then, his fate: James is forced to kill him in self defense, in what was maybe the hardest boss fight in the game (for me, at least. "Her" is also in the running, which is fitting as a final boss). The town devoured what might have been saved within him, and then lets the guilt of his damnation fall upon James (the general fan consensus is that the second Pyramid Head in the penultimate boss fight was spawned by James' killing of Eddie, as the first was created when he killed Mary).
Thus, Eddie is a character whom I would like to sympathize with, and in fairness, he had a malevolent supernatural presence working hard on his mind to corrupt him, but ultimately, I think Eddie is at fault for failing to earn his redemption.
Angela, on the other hand, is a character I find far more sympathetic.
The experience in the sort of intro to the Labyrinth after passing through the prison is a harrowing one: we see what truly feels like a labyrinth that is built from the memories of Angela's childhood home. From stained newspaper clippings, we learn of Angela's father's death, evidently stabbed several times, with a note that no money was taken from the scene of the crime, so this was not a robbery.
The game is not explicit about it, but it does not take much to conclude that Angela's father sexually abused her. There are few crimes as horrific to our culture as incestuous rape of a minor, and from the evidence, it appears Angela was likely quite young when she was subjected to this horror.
Angela is actually the first person we meet as we go into town, in the graveyard. She is searching for her "mama," a fairly infantile way for a young adult to refer to her mother, but then, this sort of infantilization is a symptom of PTSD, especially related to sexual abuse experienced in childhood, which can cause stunted emotional development.
I don't recall if there's evidence that her brother also participated in this abuse, but Angela is searching only for her "mama."
Angela always seems on the cusp of suicide, especially in our second meeting with her in the Blue Creek Apartments (interestingly, this is in the Otherworld, though in the original game it wasn't, as you didn't go to the Otherworld until the hospital). James takes Angela's knife from her, and tries as best he can to tell someone who is basically a stranger that there's another way.
Tragically, Angela is also, presumably, devoured by the town. We don't give her the knife back in the end, but she does seem to have given up.
Angela did almost certainly kill her father. Hell, the knife she carries might have been the weapon she used for it. Periodically, when we see her, she absurdly mistakes James for her mother, only to come to realize she's mistaken. It's not clear what she really is seeing, though in our last scene with her, we do see at least the environment in which she finds herself - a hellish inferno, where everything is always hot and on fire.
There's a neat little dichotomy here: it's subtle, but Eddie always has a little fog breath when we see him, and when we finally fight him, it's in a frigid meat locker. One imagines that the world around him is always profoundly cold, mirroring the bitter loneliness that he's felt throughout his life.
Angela's world is one of blistering heat. Heat, to me, is associated with being trapped. When we fight Abstract Daddy, the monster from her Otherworld that represents her monstrous father, the thing chases us through labyrinthine corridors, and we often find ourselves in dead ends. Not to get too visceral here, but the feeling of being physically restrained by her father when he did his unspeakable acts was probably one that felt physically hot.
When I was a little kid, I stuck a bit of styrofoam in my ears after seeing an episode of Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers in which the characters used ear plugs. One of the styrofoam fragments wouldn't come out, and I was taken to Boston's Children's Hospital. I was wearing a scratchy wool knit sweater. I was only like 5 or 6 (maybe even 4) and the doctors had a little metallic vacuum pump that they were sticking in my ear to get the styrofoam out with. It was uncomfortable, even painful when it knocked against the walls of my inner ear, and I was so panicked and upset that I couldn't calmly explain my discomfort. Instead, I thrashed around, screaming and crying, making it far harder for the doctors to work. Part of the discomfort was being in that scratchy, warm sweater. Multiple doctors and nurses were holding me down as I thrashed around.
So, they put me in a straight jacket. Over the hot, scratch sweater. My arms were restrained, and it was even hotter.
When I imagine what hell would be like, that's how I imagine it. I've hated wearing knit sweaters ever since.
So, Angela, having experienced a far worse trauma than mine, is caught in this constant inferno, trapped and burning. Angela is trapped in a burning nightmare, whereas Eddie is caught out in a lifeless, cold wilderness.
In our last meeting with Angela (not sure why she crossed the lake, but then again, maybe she came there via another passage, like our subterranean journey to the prison) she says that she had found her father and her brother, and that if she could find her mama, maybe this would all be over.
And I think that might give away what actually happened:
Within her family, Angela has clung to this idea that her mother was the only one who truly loved her. I think it's fair to assume that her mother did not sexually abuse her the way that her father and possibly brother did. But she reveals to us in that meeting that "Mama" did not respond to her acts with love or acceptance. It's not clear if Angela's mother refused to believe her about the abuse she suffered (something that is not unheard of - that accepting that truth would mean accepting that she was married to a monster) or if her rejection of Angela was an inability to forgive her for killing her father.
And I almost wonder if Angela's search for her mother was not because she expected to be taken care of, but rather that she intended to kill her too. It's clear that her mother was an enabler of Angela's abuse, even if only through denial.
The thing is, just as James comes to Silent Hill impossibly trying to find his dead wife, Angela has come to the town looking for her mother. Might she and James actually share a subconscious secret as well? Did Angela kill her mother and block out the memory?
Possibly the most gut-wrenching part of the game is when James tries, one last time, to convince her not to go through with her suicide (or submission to the town's nightmares, which functionally is a similar idea). The thing is, James is basically a stranger, a passing acquaintance at best. She asks if he's really going to be able to love and support her, to empower her and protect her, to be all those things that her mother failed to be for her. And James cannot bring himself to say that he would be. After all, he's just discovered at this point that the last time he tried to care for a woman in serious need, he snapped and fucking murdered her. Even if James didn't have such a crime hanging over his head, the truth is that there isn't anyone who can be that person for Angela in this moment, certainly not him. In better circumstances, not in some haunted nightmare town, Angela could be taken into protective psychiatric custody and in an ideal world, get the extensive therapy she needs. I daresay that she might even be found not guilty of her crimes based on extenuating circumstances, or at least get a far reduced sentence (likely sentenced to psychological counseling). While I think Angela has probably killed more people than James did, she's the kind of person I think the legal system could be far more lenient to. (James, on the other hand, would at best be able to claim he was dissociating when he killed Mary, which is actually accurate as far as we know, but very difficult to prove.)
In other words, if anyone actually deserves a cathartic Leave ending, it's Angela. But she doesn't get it. She ascends that fiery staircase and that's the last we see of her. While she doesn't have the knife that James imagined she'd use to harm herself with, one way or another, she's given up on resisting the town. She's doomed just as Eddie was.
Of course, depending on the ending, James might be doomed as well. The fates of Eddie and Angela may not be really any worse than what's in store for him. But I think, dramatically, I like the Leave ending, because Angela and Eddie both demonstrate to him just how narrow and perilous his path is.
It also demonstrates that this town is not singling James out for his torment. It draws people to it. His survival of the harrowing horror in the fog is the exception, not the rule. Does he deserve to be the one to make it out? Certainly a lot of people would say he doesn't (though I think, sadly, a lot of internet discourse gets polarized into opposed binaries, where you have camps that think that James is a blameless hero who did Mary a favor by ending her suffering or he's an irredeemable monster who's just a sociopathic misogynist, when I think the truth is that it's all more complicated than that - that we don't need to excuse his crime to recognize his humanity).
But if it's just kind of luck that determines who can make it out of that town, it does kind of reinforce the cosmic horror of it all.
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