Alan Wake, Stephen King, and The Great American Video Game

Look, I’m a big successful YouTuber now: Obnoxious dipshits make responses to my work; I can pay my rent, so now people on twitter accuse me of being a rich American; and probably best of all, they let me use the secret Google they only let rich people use where it's easy to get all the clothes you want but can never find. So, it’s time that I did a big serious game analysis.

As we all know, video games were first invented in 322 BC by the greek philosopher Nintendos who predicted that theatre, painting, poetry and music would one day converge into a form of entertainment where people watch a moving image of a fat plumber jumping on mushrooms. His apprentice and student Dreamcasthenes also predicted that one day video games would be considered high art, and they would let players blast big men with a shotgun. Aristotle, outraged by this, declared “if video games are art, then I’m a persian!” before dropping dead of the common cold.

After a lot of other history that we don’t learn about because there was too much gay sex in it, society invented something called “America”, and within the art community quests began to create uniquely American art. However, while people sought to write songs that captured a pure american slice of life, paint paintings that reflected the spirit of America and discover the “Great American Novel”, nobody has yet conclusively discovered the Great American Video Game.

Let’s talk about Alan Wake.

Alan Wake was developed by Remedy Entertainment, responsible for the very popular Max Payne series, the astonishingly good, critically acclaimed and thoughtful supernatural FBI game Control, and the crime against fun that was Quantum Break. Remedy have worked with Microsoft and now have a deal with Epic, and they’ve produced some really great stuff, but they’re not that big and not generally considered a triple A studio so maybe even they don’t treat their developers like characters in a Saw movie. Maybe.

Sam Lake was the head writer across Remedy’s games and even acted as the face model for the eponymous hero Max Payne, as well as sort of being the face of the company. I’m sure that’s the last time that’s going to come up, don’t worry about it.

Alan is a writer who has a successful series of crime novels with a detective called Alex Casey - get it? Casey? Because he solves cases? Look it’s no MAX PAYNE but it’s still pretty on the nose. I guess an important thing to remember which will be more apparent as time goes on is that this kind of very on-the-nose symbolism and naming is something Sam Lake likes to do a lot, and while it can come across as edgy and a bit shallow, I honestly think subtlety is overrated, and lord knows there are enough people out here lacking Basic Media Literacy that there’s really nothing wrong with just setting up a big flashing sign that says “THEMES THIS WAY”. It establishes a very campy, consistently meta style that I personally really enjoy.

Despite long having been self-evidently capable of producing thoughtful, moving, meaningful works, video games as a medium are still struggling to be acknowledged as an art form, because gamers live outside of God's sight and by consequence outside of his love. But maybe, just maybe, we can put the ancient question of “are games art” to bed if we appeal to the only artistic standard that truly, really matters: American cultural hegemony.

This is Alan Wake: The Great American Video Game.

This is a video game analysis I’ve wanted to make for a long time, about a game I find personally resonant, beautifully crafted, prescient and deep. It’s taken me a really long time to get around to writing about it and even longer to actually finish the script, but now we’re finally here, to have a great fun time talking about themes of creative block, exploiting artistic talent to survive, and the horrifying ordeal of being known. Yay...

Plot Summary

Alan Wake begins with music that reminds you of the intro to Evanescence’s Wake Me Up Inside. The jokes write themselves.

Alan Wake begins with the titular Alan having a nightmare (Alan Can’t Wake Up) about a tutorial mission where the player learns how all the mechanics work. Actually they use this sequence to introduce a few significant elements besides: Alan narrating his own actions; Spooky hallucinations on the TV; nonspecific generic darkness baddie chasing you; a second, mysterious narrator who sometimes speaks in poems helping Alan from behind the scenes; oh, and uh, Alan’s kind of a asshole? Like, he kinda sucks. “This dream was wild and dark and weird even by my standards” shut up Alan you fucking reddit guy. The narration is honestly a really fun way that the game establishes that Alan is both a pretentious dickhead and actually not a very good writer.

Alan Waking up from his nightmare, Alan arrives in a small Washington State logging and deer-hunting town called Bright Falls and there is already a lot going on. Alan’s agent Barry is nagging him to check whether he’s been writing his new novel; Alice, Alan’s wife, has brought him to Bright Falls to take him to a therapist and help him with his creative block (although she doesn’t admit that yet); ordinary folks out and about in the world are asking Alan for selfies with him and for him to come on their twitch stream and debate about whether the holocaust happened - normal modern celebrity stuff. Alan has to pick up the keys for his AirBnB from Carl  in the “Oh Deer Diner”, which is staffed by a woman who is such a huge Alan Wake fan she’s brought a life-sized cardboard cutout of him to the diner where she works. There are also some old biker dudes there, and a lamp lady who is obviously an homage to log lady from twin peaks. Carl is in the bathroom and because Alan has no sense of personal boundaries he goes to get the keys from him while he’s peeing, but an old woman wearing a funeral veil who is obviously an evil ghost gives him some keys and Alan just takes everything on face value and accepts them.

Alice and Alan get in a fight at the cabin, and when Alan storms out, Alice gets snatched by the funeral ghost and Alan dives in after her.

Snapping forward a week, Alan wakes up - that one wasn’t a pun, hang on… Alan Alan Wakes up having crashed his car and apparently having written a new book. A man claims to have kidnapped Alice and wants Alan’s manuscript in exchange for her safe return. Because he can’t catch an Alan Break, Alan also discovers that the town is slowly filling up with shadow people and that the cabin his wife disappeared from hasn’t existed for years ooooooooo spooooooky…

The player is starting to catch on by now that Alan narrating his life isn’t just a game element, but rather Alan is a character in a story that Alan is somehow also writing - put a huge pin in that, it won’t make total sense for a while. In that vein, because this is all a story, the kidnapper turns out to be a red herring - like, he’s never explained, he’s just a red herring.

Alan finds himself having lost time again, now trapped in the resort of the therapist that his wife was tricking him into seeing. The old guys from the diner who used to be a famous rock duo are there because Hartman specialises in treating artists, and they’re going senile and have episodes where they believe they’re Thor and Odin, and Alan is starting to really doubt himself because of his growing suspicion that he’s in a story he’s writing, but then Barry turns up to help him Alan Escape - okay that one could have been better - and it becomes clear that Hartman the psychologist is a really sinister dude.

Alan and Barry go to the old rockers’ barn where you get to play an incredible Heavy Rock Stage sequence fighting shadow people, and then learn about a poet called Thomas Zane and someone called The Lady of the Light who players once again figure out much faster than Alan does is probably the weird lamp lady from the diner.

Finally getting to the bottom of the situation, Alan realises that if he’s in a story that he’s writing, he can Alan Make (bit better, still bad) up a magical weapon to solve his problems, which is exactly what he does, defeating the dark presence and freeing Alice but ultimately leaving himself trapped, and replacing himself with someone who looks just like him but isn’t him, a dark facsimile, a character to play him in his story. An… Alan… Fake NAILED IT.

Part ONE: Alan Wake’s American Dream (Salem’s Lot)

Get it? It’s like a joke about the sequel, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, which is a play on the idiom The American Dream…

So let’s explore what was going on a bit more. There’s some sort of unknown entity in Cauldron Lake, which can feed creative talents, but also draws from them and wants to consume them. Thomas Zane was a poet who was engaged to a woman called Barbara Jagger. The entity inhabited Barbara to try to ensnare Zane, and ultimately he used the power that the entity granted his writing to sink the cabin, trapping himself in the lake just like Alan eventually would, in an attempt to defeat the entity. Cynthia Weaver, the lamp lady or Lady of the Light, was in love with Zane and has been studying and preparing against the entity for decades ever since his disappearance.

As an aside, I want to say again how great the names are in this game - not all of them are as on the nose as others, but Barbara Jagger is such a spiky aggressive sounding name for the character possessed by a demon, and this ethereal poet who exists outside of time because he used poetry to wipe himself from reality is such a whimsical character that calling him Thomas Zane just fits so nicely.

The Anderson brothers, likely inspired by real-world canadian rocker Jon Mikl Thor, are two old rockers who used to have a band called The Old Gods of Asgard. They changed their names to Odin and Tor and just like Jon Mikl Thor their stage personas are inseparable from the ancient norse gods. They moved into a farm near Cauldron Lake at some point to harness the creative power of the entity, and at some also unknown point, they had a direct confrontation with it, where it tried to consume them, and although they survived, it left them mentally unwell.

My fraternal twin brother made a video on this channel about Control, the most recent game by the same studio, and how it, and the broader “New Weird” genre owes a lot to HP Lovecraft, and while Stephen King is the biggest presence looming over Alan Wake, Lovecraft’s fingerprints are all over it too. After all, King himself attributes a lot of his original inspiration to HP Lovecraft, and to some degree american horror simply can’t exist without him. Even if Lovecraft wasn’t a direct inspiration here (which I would argue he clearly is), he’s too deeply embedded in American horror not to be there. There is something large and unseen going on in Bright Falls and while we get to the bottom of a lot of it, there’s a lot more that we’ll never understand. They even wind up just calling the antagonist of the game the Dark Presence, and coming into contact with the Dark Presence leaves characters psychologically unstable because of its extra-terrestrial incomprehensibility - there’s a bit of The Colour Out of Space in there, and more than a little of The Dream Cycle too, but we’ll get back to Lovecraft.

Another clear inspiration for Alan Wake, as I already mentioned, is Stephen King, but I’m deliberately edging the audience by not talking about King yet, so let’s talk about Twin Peaks instead. The entire setting of Alan Wake is brimming with obvious homage to Twin Peaks from the physical location, to the characters, to the aesthetic of the town, but beyond any superficial similarities, the town has a lot of the same character.

David Lynch’s work has a prominent focus on americana, in particular on a recurring sense that beneath the surface of the American Dream there is something - or many many things - extremely dangerous and sinister, lurking. In Twin Peaks, his most famous work, this is the basic thrust of the plot, with innocent, popular, beloved, high achieving, prom queen Laura Palmer washing up dead, and the investigation by the main characters slowly uncovering that everyone in the small town has dark, and even quite disturbing secrets, leading all the way to eventually uncovering a mystical conspiracy of supernatural beings from a hell dimension, and throughout Alan Wake we see a lot of the same ideas and elements pop up in Bright Falls, except in Alan Wake they never get a white woman to dress up in yellow-face drag as a japanese businessman.

And since we’re talking about Bright Falls, I feel like we should acknowledge … uh … Bright Falls, the prequel miniseries of the same name that Remedy created in 2010. It’s up on youtube, and back to back it’s about half an hour to watch, and viewed like this it is probably the best video game movie ever made. Sorry Super Mario Brothers.

It tells the story of a journalist coming to interview the sinister therapist Emil Hartman, and slowly unraveling as whatever Hartman’s influence has done to him takes hold. The miniseries ends with the journalist getting in a car accident as he tries to escape whatever the fuck is going on in Bright Falls, and then Alan and Alice Wake driving by the scene of the crash as they arrive for their holiday. It’s short and spooky, and it really helps to build up the sense of the inescapable horror of the physical location that Alan Wake is set in.

Watching Bright Falls, with the hugely obvious influence that Twin Peaks had on it, it feels like  Twin Peaks with more modern technology and techniques, and they did such a good job it plays like half an hour of Twin Peaks season 3. I am aware of how high a compliment this is, and I mean it when I say it. I would go further - if someone told me David Lynch had seen Bright Falls and it had in turn influenced Twin Peaks season 3, I’d buy it. Bright Falls is really cool, and maybe if we show it at Remedy’s trial, the jury will vote to forget all about Quantum Break.

Okay look: I liked and admired what Quantum Break was going for, I just couldn’t get over how fundamentally un-fun it was. It’s just not a fun game, and even if I think that some kind of integrated choose-your-own-adventure TV series video game is a really cool idea (which I do) in practice sitting and watching a bunch of episodes where it’s really obvious that they couldn’t afford Aiden Gillen, or Dominic Monaghan, or Lance Reddick or Shawn Ashmore to stay for the whole of filming, and you can’t skip them because you won’t know what’s going in the game if you do, and there’s like half an hour of video to every couple of hours of gameplay, that’s just… not a fun time. I think it could be done well, and I admire Remedy for trying it, but they didn’t do a good job. And the colour grading is raw piss.

Let’s talk about Stephen King.

Stephen “big boy” King has written over 200 short stories and over 60 novels, and is known to some as “America's writer”. When we talk about americana in horror, Stephen King is a juggernaut, a goliath, a titan. Also JK Rowling blocked him on twitter because he said trans women are women so I guess he’s not a king in name only… please don’t let me down here Steve.

Perhaps the most straightforward comparison between Alan Wake and any of King’s stories can be found with Salem’s Lot. In Salem’s Lot, a writer returning to his home town slowly figures out that a spooky house he had a supernatural experience in as a child has been inhabited by a vampire who is preying on and enthralling the inhabitants of the town. Superficially, a lot of the elements are there: The small town, a magic house, the dark presence turning the townspeople evil, the writer having to step into the role of action hero.

A lot of what drives the story is the same too: small town americana with something dark under the surface, which is why Alan Wake is so comparable to Lynch, King, and Lovecraft. Lynch’s portrayal of americana as something sickly saccharine built on top of abuse and exploitation that we choose to turn and look away from is absolutely there. King’s stories of childhood innocence lost to a larger world that is full of terror and hurt, with picturesque americana as the blissful ignorance of childhood is there too. Lovecraft, for his part, was a horrific racist, so the dark side to his america is a bit more literal, but his stories were often driven by people discovering ancient histories of conquest and genocide that ultimately came to nothing, as his picture of an indifferently deadly universe of futility fed into so much of his work.

All of these ideas make up central pillars of American horror, and Alan Wake draws heavily from all of them to build its world and to pull off its quintessentially American story. It’s worth talking about the history of racism and colonialism very directly here, not just because of the prevalence of it in Lovecraft’s work, but because of the basic idea of Great American Art. Stephen King, as “America’s writer” has tried to interrogate it in a few places across his work, often clumsily. The so-called “Indian burial ground” trope in which land is cursed and haunted because it’s a sacred Native American site finds its most famous example in King’s book Pet Sematary, and the film adaptation of The Shining even throws “indian burial ground” into the mix of reasons that the Overlook hotel is cursed. In Salem’s Lot specifically, the town of Jerusalem’s Lot is cursed land because it was originally founded by an inbreeding sex cult of schismatic puritans.

David Lynch synthesises indigenous culture in Twin Peaks, in similarly seeking to explain the ancient evil of the town, and this is usually considered less insensitive because the colonial oppression of native culture is the reason that the people don’t know about the evil lurking there, but really this is the same point that King is trying to make. The real reason it gets given more of a pass than King’s work is likely that Lynch is more of a critical darling.

Be it evil settlers or indigenous genocide, these stories try to give the sense that the land itself contains a sort of Original Sin, and Alan Wake does this too with its Dark Presence. The actual logics of the story are the same, and they expose the fundamental limitation of the way that American art can discuss this topic.

Ultimately, these stories that lean so heavily on americana must accept America as a legitimate institution, and this, too, takes us to the real reason for the search for something like the Great American Novel - not to represent the essential reality of America, but just to show that America can produce great works of art.

Ironically, of course, Alan Wake actually comes from a Finnish studio. Despite drawing on so much americana, it comes from a somewhat external perspective. This is an interesting situation for a lot of the games industry - big money, in this case Microsoft, pays companies outside America to make games in English, about american characters, for a primarily american audience. These are cultural products of American Imperialism, and because this is very much America’s world and we’re just living in it, I don’t think that Alan Wake has any less credibility as The Great American Video Game.

This Original Sin of the Land trope that pops up across these works is trying to talk about society as it currently exists and has existed for a long time, but the issue that stories encounter when they try to tie this in with America’s history, is that this seems to lead the audience towards questioning the legitimacy of America, which is actually not the intention of the story at all. The metaphor of the cursed land draws on the surreal fact of America’s existence - that people walk around on stolen land that was taken through horrific violence and centuries of genocide and just have to get on living their lives as if this is normal and acceptable. This element winds up being offensive because it feels like it will suggest a change but ultimately just wants to acknowledge this horror as something that people usually ignore, but at the same time itself ignores the real life current day suffering of indigenous people due to generations of cultural erasure, discrimination, violence and poverty.

The smart move on the part of Alan Wake is to make the Dark Presence’s origins ambiguous - this isn’t necessarily better but it avoids the murky conversation this game is ill-equipped to have. The Dark Presence may be inspired by things like the “indian burial ground” trope, but this is a significant difference, because Alan Wake is trying to do something else...

Part TWO: Darkness (The Shining)

Since early human culture, creatures that live in the dark have been a staple of myth and folklore. I have, um, a couple of thoughts on this - I’ve only been researching my vampires video for like, 9 months now (sigh for comic effect) - but to try and be concise, darkness often comes to represent the things we don’t think about enough, the parts of life that are hard to visualise in our mind’s eye. This is why so many ancient monsters that live in darkness either die when exposed to sunlight or, perhaps scarier, become more aggressive and attack.

In The Shining, for example, darkness is a prominent recurring motif. The Shining is about a man, Jack, struggling with alcoholism and anger issues. Jack used to work as a teacher at a prestigious private school where he and another teacher were getting outrageously drunk every day, until they had a spooky experience (they hit a child’s bicycle while drunk driving, but couldn’t tell if they’d hit an actual kid). Jack and his friend got sober, but then Jack got fired for hitting one of the students. His friend was able to get him a job at the Overlook Hotel, acting as it’s caretaker through the winter, so Jack, his wife and his son move into the hotel, and from there the rest of the story is about all the spooky ghosts who live in the hotel, and Jack’s slow descent into violent madness.

So in the story, as Jack Torrance descends into madness, he is overtaken by a “darkness”. The book describes him becoming unrecognisable to his family as he changes. At first he is him, and then he is something else, then they realise that the hotel is just “wearing him” the way it uses its ghosts as disguises. As the story progresses, the darkness overtakes him completely.

So what is the darkness here?

In The Shining, the darkness is abuse, in its many forms. The most foregrounded instance is the way that Jack abuses his family, and of course the same way that Jack’s father abused him. But there’s also the substance abuse of Jack’s alcoholism, the racial abuse that Dick the chef experiences, the inherent violence of people having to work to survive, the ways that Jack’s relationship with his friend become strained because of the abusive nature of class: when Jack starts to struggle at the hotel caretaker job, his friend begins to look down on him, even though the basis of their friendship was their mutual problem with alcohol.

King’s counterpoint to the darkness is of course “the shining”, a magical ability that gives people a sixth sense and a propensity for telepathic communication. Dick explains that all mothers shine at least a little, at least for a little while when their kids are young, which makes clear what the shining is supposed to be - an awareness and protectiveness, and a willingness to confront the “darker” things that we usually look away from.

So in this section it’s worth talking about Alan’s mental health. We’re going to get to the bottom of why Alan is such a stinky terrible boy. Of course Alan goes through the classic schlocky mental health twist - you were in an institution all along and it was all a paranoid delusion - but the presence of psychiatry and the game’s approach to mental health are distinct things, even if they’re interlinked. We’ll get back to the therapist.

So there’s a reading of this game that we’ve been grappling with so far, where the real world is real and Alan at his typewriter at the bottom of the lake is able to affect reality, and we’ll be talking about the game through that lens a lot more, but to talk about the darkness effectively we need to consider another reading: that Alan at his typewriter at the bottom of the lake is real, and everything that happens in the reality that he describes on paper is fiction.

In this reading, the shadow people aren’t literal but instead a way of understanding how Alan feels about other people. He sees others, in particular the other people of this town, as sinister. He can’t recognise them. They look like blurry dark silhouettes, just as Jack Torrance begins to appear in The Shining, and when they speak all they ever say are idioms, small-talk and advertising slogans, but with the emphasis on all the wrong parts of the sentence so that it sounds aggressive, jarring, and unnatural.

This is an interesting way to understand how Alan sees other people - as never saying anything really, just repeating phrases and slogans, and not driven by an internal life or set of motivations, but possessed by one Dark Entity. The way Alan Wake sees other people, it seems like he is dissociating, which makes sense, because the story is very clear about Alan being extremely depressed.

So in this reading of Alan Wake, what does the darkness represent?

Perhaps it isn’t as clear cut as it is in The Shining, but going back to the general way we use darkness in stories culturally, I think it’s fair to say “the darkness” obscures people and things from Alan’s understanding. They are figuratively and literally “in the dark”.

It was of course our boy Hit Points Lovecraft who said “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”, and perhaps this is the best way to understand Alan’s relationship to the darkness. He’s afraid of the things that are unknown to him, but more specifically he’s afraid of more and more of the world becoming unknown to him - he’s afraid of becoming out of touch.

At one point in the story, Alan decides that to get Alice back he’ll have to just sit down and write a book right now. He sits with his pen and journal and stares at the empty space, and the bright white of a blank page starts to aggravate his eyes, and he smacks the empty book across the room. While this happens, Alan narrates “The supernatural was nothing more to me than a metaphor for the human psyche, but now it was happening for real” I… this game is good, subtext is for cowards.

Something is clearly developing throughout the story that has to do with Alan’s creative abilities, and how his inability to write fills him with a kind of darkness. He’s afraid that he’s going to become unknown to himself, or to put it another way for no particular reason, he’s afraid of alienation. Alan is afraid that he’s becoming alienated from ordinary people, alienated from his ability to write, even alienated from himself, and as far as the story goes, it seems like he probably is.

This is made all the more blatant by the observable fact that Alan isn’t a very good writer. If you stop to actually read the manuscript pages as he collects them, they’re really fucking bad. And not just bad like the pulpier, sillier elements of Stephen King’s stories, but bad in a way that can only be deliberate. When you get to read the stories that the writers in Stephen King’s books have written, it’s that kind of bad. It’s a common thing in this kind of self-portrait to show a little humility, but here I think it feeds into the idea that if Alan doesn’t possess the god-given talent that made him famous, he’ll be filled with darkness, and have no way to relate to the world. At once he is afraid of not being able to relate to anyone else, and terrified of being just like them.

It is significant, and should be remarked on, that Alan’s wife has a fear of the dark, and multiple scenes, as well as the ongoing conflict of the story, revolve around Alice being plunged into darkness and calling out to Alan. Alice & Alan’s marriage is in crisis, because she is at constant risk of being plunged into darkness and becoming unknown to him.

To bring us back to Lovecraft, one story we might consider is The Shadow Over Innsmouth - New England fishing village turns out to be worshipping the eldritch sea god Dagon - ironically, the shadow turns out not to be over Innsmouth at all, but beneath the surface of the ocean, and the horror of the story comes from a creeping fear as the protagonist realises he’s afflicted by the same condition as the villagers and that his family actually comes from Innsmouth, and he’s starting to become one of the fish-people too.

In much the same way, in our story about a horror beneath the surface that is affecting the small, unusual town, Alan’s greatest fear is that he is like the people of Bright Falls. He’s built up this idea that he is special and that this Dark Presence is coming after him as a complex projection of his fear of being like the people of the town. Alan is clearly operating on an assumption that other people envy him in some way: coming after him because of some special magical thing that he contains - remember this all is a story that he’s writing, his persecution is actually at his own hand.

It shouldn’t go unsaid either, Alan is very wealthy - as was already commented, Hartman represents a fear of being trapped into a situation where his artistic talent is milked for profit. Alan is afraid of having his labour exploited for someone else’s profit against his will, and he’s rich enough to avoid that most of the time

Alan is a wealthy, out of touch author terrified of the working class (and he should be: oink oink Alan time to get in the pie). It’s no coincidence that so many of the game’s stock enemies are big men dressed in flannel shirts or tracksuits, wielding tools like axes or chainsaws or… is that a sickle? Okay that’s a bit on-the-nose isn’t it?

Even the equipment comes to life to try and attack the player. The literal machinery of industry hurls itself at Alan as he tries to progress through the levels, like the world around him, he feels like the world that he draws from to make his art is rejecting him, and maybe on some level it is, because if he really sees himself as so much better than everyone else to the point where he can’t write because he fears and loathes the real world so much, isn’t that a kind of rejection? Isn’t Alan Wake kind of incompatible with the world around him? And in that sense, doesn’t that make him the ultimate horror game protagonist?

Big questions here, time for a break to take some milf pills and have a glass of water.

Part THREE: The Beginning and The End (Misery)

Alan Wake is a story you think about when you’re up at 3am transferring files or waiting for a video export to finish. Alan Wake, in particular the ending of Alan Wake, is one of those stories you think about when you're watching Evangelion in the middle of the night so baked you're hyper aware of your own skin and wondering if you can see your breasts growing but you know estrogen doesn’t work that fast and then bam whoops uh oh you’re in the Alan Wake dimension again.

Alan Wake has a really chilling ending.

Alan has freed his wife, and restored all of the taken. Bright Falls is saved and the world is a perfect, peaceful place - one that he can never be a part of. Alan rewrote reality to save everyone, but trapped himself in the cabin at the bottom of the lake, and wrote a dark copy of himself into the world to take his place.

Obviously, all of this ending feels incredibly reminiscent of the end of Twin Peaks season 2 - at the time the last of the series that had come out - where the seemingly happy ending is subverted when Cooper is revealed to have been replaced. An ending that I had no idea was coming, and watched as a child alone in my mum’s house in the middle of the night. Years of therapy.

One way to analyse a story can be to take a big step back and look at just the beginning and the end. It doesn’t always tell you much, but it can sometimes give you an interesting place to start to understand the story better, and then you dive into the middle to see how the rest of it fits together. For example, a film’s first and last shots can sometimes provide you with iconography or a framing device that helps you to process what the film is about, if the filmmakers are into that sort of thing.

So let’s get to it: At the start of our story, Alan is a famous author struggling with writer’s block, and facing pressure from all sides to write his next book. At the end, he’s trapped in a parallel darkness dimension controlling reality with a magic typewriter. See, that made everything much clearer!

Okay, let’s take another pass at it. If the challenge that Alan Wake sets out to overcome in his story is his writer’s block, and the solution that he finds at the very end is to create a hollow character of himself so that he can separate the part of himself that does the writing from the part of himself that interacts with the rest of world, and since it’s a horror story this “solution” is pretty fucking scary.

Maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense yet, but hopefully by taking a closer look we can understand what Alan’s problem is to begin with, and how he winds up where he does in the end.

It’s pretty obvious that Alan is a self-insert for the author, and not a generous one - I’ve tried to be unambiguous about this: Alan Wake is a fucking bellend. He treats everyone around him like shit, he views ordinary hard-working people as at least beneath him and at most frustrating obstacles. His outfit of choice throughout the game is an overcoat with a hoodie underneath, because Alan is a 14 year old boy who hasn’t realised he’s a transgender lesbian yet.

Alan can’t run very fast, or scale cliff faces, or punch bad guys into chunky salsa. It’s one of the first times that I felt like I was playing as Victor Frankenstein rather than his monster. His weapon for the majority of the game is just a torch, and when he dodges people swinging axes at him or throwing axes at him or his wife’s questions about his alcoholism, he does it like a normal human being. He looks like a guy trying not to get hit by an axe, instead of Neo dodging metaphors for transphobia. He’s a writer, not an action hero, and that’s good.

Having a flimsy protagonist is a staple of horror gaming, of course, but I think there’s something interesting going on here, and to examine it we need to talk about gamers again. The critical and audience reception of both Alan Wake and the sequel, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, are really positive - and that’s fair, that makes sense right? Except, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare isn’t anything like Alan Wake.

The first game is slow, and can be really fucking hard, and the protagonist is this dweeby little author thrust into an overwhelming chaotic story that he isn’t prepared for and doesn’t deserve to be the hero of. You move through levels in one direction trying to put as much ground as possible between you and the bigger, stronger men trying to kill you. When the game gives you ammunition for your guns or batteries for your torch it does it in such a way that you understand your best bet is not going to be to stand your ground.

The second game is a straight-up action shooter with Alan Wake aesthetics slapped on. I’m not calling the second game bad, it’s its own thing - but it is it’s own thing. Sam Lake has said in interviews that he spent six years writing the story of Alan Wake, and American Nightmare came out 2 years after it. There just fundamentally isn’t the same kind of personal, emotional, care put into American Nightmare, and you can tell.

And if that wasn’t enough, Remedy are working on an “Alan Wake 2” right now. Okay, so that’s not necessarily the official release name, but it’s pretty telling that the gaming community at large doesn’t consider American Nightmare to be “Alan Wake 2”, because it just isn’t. As fun as it can be, and as graphically pretty as it is Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is not the true sequel to Alan Wake and everyone knows it. It feels like a game that Alan was forced to write trapped down in the cabin. It feels like just more content.

Look at the covers of the two games: For the first, Alan is holding his flashlight, which in the combat of the game you use to slow enemies down and weaken them enough to be shot, often to buy time for you to escape. For the second, Alan is holding a smoking nailgun like Dirty Harry while a meteor hurtles into the desert.

Why am I going after Alan Wake’s American Nightmare so hard, especially if, like I say, I’m not actually calling it a bad game? Well, I just think it’s really interesting that, as wikipedia put it (please don’t judge me for quoting wikipedia):

“Critics praised the change of style and tone from the earlier themes of isolation, light versus darkness, and melancholy, utilizing psychological horror tropes, found in Alan Wake to the madcap, Pulp-influenced themes in Alan Wake's American Nightmare.”

Like… nobody was bothered that it was such a complete and utter departure? Nobody cared that Alan Wake was a deeply personal reflection about the horribly isolating experience of producing art under capitalism to survive and the way that successful art isolates you even further, and that the second game was a first person shooter where you bullseye oil-zombies with a nail gun? It feels like people didn’t want to think too hard about this change because in the first game you play as an unlikeable scrawny dickhead, and in the second you play as typical videogame hero Texas Beefgun. The first Alan Wake has all the aesthetics of being some kind of very smart artsy game, and gamers felt smart enough for understanding the plot, and then when the series made Alan a knucklehead gunslinger they were more relieved than they were interested in interrogating what had been lost.

Okay, let’s talk about Sam Lake, the lead writer of Alan Wake. In the world of the game, Alan is famous for writing a series of crime novels about a rough, gruff action hero called Alex Casey, and when you get a chance to read some of these books, they’re read by James McCaffrey, the voice actor who played Max Payne in the Max Payne series, so it works as a nice little parallel, that the character Alan built up his reputation and fortune writing is a lot like the character that Sam Lake became famous writing too.

It goes deeper than that though: when Remedy were making Max Payne, they didn’t have the budget for a whole cast of actors, so the staff acted as face models for all the characters and faces you see in the game - like Sam Lake got his mum to be the face model of the game’s main antagonist. Most crucially though, Lake was the face model for Max Payne, the protagonist of the game, and because of that, he became the public face of the company.

Do you think that a story that ends with a writer trapped in a dark sunken place from which he writes, while a hollow, dark character of himself that has his face but isn’t him - do you think that story might, maybe have something to do with how Sam Lake feels about his own career and work?

I don’t want to just point out a lot of allusions to themes as if I’m a buzzfeed listicle of video game easter eggs so let’s talk about it explicitly:

When Alan wakes up after having lost time in the first episode, he’s crashed his car, a plot element that feels like a really conscious allusion to one of Stephen King’s self-insert author novels, Misery.

In Misery, writer Paul Sheldon, famous for a series of corset-ripper novels he hates, is kidnapped by an obsessive fan who keeps him prisoner, tortures him, and mutilates him in attempts to force him to write a new instalment in the series. Notably, the first appearance of Annie Wilkes his kidnapper in the book is her giving Paul the kiss of life, but Paul, who finds her physically repulsive, describes it as a violation (he actually uses the word “rape”, but in an effort to avoid a metaphor some people may find tasteless I’m going to use different language here). Annie is a character who exists to brutally force Paul to write against his will, against his consent, denying him his agency.

Throughout Alan Wake, Alan is beset on all sides by forces conspiring to try to force him to write: his wife; his agent; his fans; Hartman; the Dark Presence. At the same time, his basic ability to write must come from some kind of interaction with the world, and as the world becomes more and more inaccessible to him, writing becomes more and more impossible. The ending of Alan Wake isn’t just a dramatic, scary note to leave on, and it’s more than just the author’s anxiety too. I think it speaks to a very true part of the human experience, or at least the human experience under capitalism.

We all have to separate ourselves from our labour in order to maintain the dissonance between being a complete and complex human being and being required to exist in one solitary capacity for work. I believe it was K-Mark and his wingman Freddy Angels who said that “human beings should get to paint in the morning, write in the afternoon and play video games in the evening without ever becoming an artist, a writer, or a gamer”. Karl Marx famously wanted to abolish gamers by making gaming a basic human right.

This is why Alan Wake clearly takes from all over Stephen King’s work, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, yes, but more than anything else: Misery.

There is another element we should consider of course: pair of social relationships. Parasocial relationships, if you’ve never heard of them before, are relationships that people have to fictional people, like how you feel about your favourite VTuber, or how the men in my twitter DMs asking to “see the whole deal” seem to feel about me.

When you exist in the public eye, there’s a second version of you besides yourself, and to greater or lesser degree, it isn’t totally under your control. People imagine that they know who you are, how you feel about things, how much money they could send you to get pictures of your feet - and it’s at best only loosely based on the things you actually choose to put out into the world.

I find it interesting to think about this in relation to Sam Lake. “Lake” isn’t actually Sam’s original last name - his name in finnish, Järvi, means Lake, and “Sam Lake” is his publicity name; his artist name. Sam Lake is a character he created, and it feels hard not to imagine that this has a lot to do with the ending of Alan Wake.

The expectations that grew out of the success of Max Payne, especially for the man who is the face of the brand, are tied into a parasocial relationship that fans of the games have with Remedy. When you’re well known for something, and your livelihood depends on the support of people who like it, the biggest problem is going to be making more stuff that will continue to succeed, but there are other knock-on effects too. What else do Max Payne fans like? What do they hate? What politics do they have? What might you say or do or - and this is the real crux of the matter - appear to be saying or doing in the mind of someone who’s very invested in a parasocial illusion of you, that might turn away your audience and make that success disappear? Would it be a shock to anyone for me to point out that gamers can be… easily  offended?

I think you’re getting the idea.

Now: I’ve put a lot of focus onto Sam Lake, and I really want to take a moment, especially after saying talking about how parasocial relationships and celebrity warp people’s realities, and contribute to this horror, and point out that, y’know: video games are made by a lot of people. Sam Lake didn’t make this game, the whole of Remedy did. This story about making Max Payne and gaining notoriety and with it, expectations for the future, isn’t just his story, it’s the story for the whole team, In fact, in an interview where he lays pretty bare what the game is about, and where the idea came from, Lake describes the plot of Alan Wake as a metaphor “for the whole team’s struggle, to find what this game needs to be”.

This is a place where I’ve messed up before and I would go back and change if I could, so I wanted to acknowledge it now. It’s important to remember that art, culture, and history, are all products of many many people interacting, not the actions of singular great men, and when I continue to talk about Sam Lake in this video, I’ll be using him as a proxy for the whole of Remedy, because I’m really lazy. Okay, no that’s not really the reason - I’m doing it for the same reason that they did it: it makes a nice simple story that people can understand more easily and relate to better.

And when I say that that’s what they did, I don’t just mean because Alan Wake is about one singular person Alan, but because of how much the story is built specifically around Alan being a fictional version of Sam Lake.

After all, it’s his face out in the world, being the character that people interact with, his namesake, a lake, that Alan is trapped in throughout the game, and with that, the final line of the game even uses the lake to suggest that the isolation and darkness is greater than we ever previously understood:

“It’s not a Lake, it’s an ocean.”

Part FOUR: The Writer (On Writing)

This is all a constructed image. I’m not really here chatting to you about video games, I had to sit down and work really hard for literal months to write this script, and then I had to perform it to a camera and edit the footage together to make the video that I wanted. Every part of this is constructed. You might think that you can tell the difference between the faked image and the real thing, but you can’t, and not because of skillful deception, but because of framing itself. When you’re asking yourself what is the image and what is authentic, the framing is the deception - everything is image, so everything is constructed.

Because everything in art is constructed, within that world, the artist becomes a sort of all-powerful creator.

It would feel odd to talk about Alan Wake without talking about In The Mouth of Madness, the eerily similar John Carpenter film. In The Mouth Of Madness is a movie about an insurance investigator who goes looking for a missing author and that missing author’s missing manuscript, only to wind up in a strange town filled with people becoming more and more overtly bizarre, and then eventually realising that he is a character in the book that he is looking for. The missing author’s previous work has been controversial for what may be a corrupting effect that it has on “less stable” readers, causing degradation of mental health, paranoia and violence. As the movie concludes, and the protagonist realises that he is a fictional character, the book has been adapted into a film - which is of course the film we are watching - and the mass media delivery of cinema has accelerated the spread of the story’s evil resulting in the collapse of society.

It’s a fantastic film that deserves it’s own thorough analysis, but today I’m going to talk about it in a way that serves our purposes in understanding Alan Wake.

In The Mouth Of Madness sounds a lot like the title HP Lovecraft’s classic At The Mountains Of Madness, and this means nothing and is what writers call “a coincidence”.

You can make a comparison between Alan Wake and In The Mouth Of Madness because superficially they’re very similar stories that incorporate a lot of the exact same elements, but at the end of the day the two stories are about different things. In The Mouth Of Madness is most directly about Cultivation Theory - it’s about the way that fiction media affects human behaviour.

It’s a movie by John fucking Carpenter, the director who made They Live, The Thing, and Halloween. It’s safe to say that this story about an evil story that makes people hyper-violent coming from this director has something to say about how art affects audiences. Alan Wake, by contrast, doesn’t really have much to say about how Alan’s books affect his readers. There’s a bit of that, and we’ll get to it, but the really good reason to keep In The Mouth of Madness in mind is that it uses a lot of the same devices and metaphors to say what it’s saying.

It’s like two architects building a prison and a school, they’re for different purposes but you can absolutely compare notes and some of those notes might even have to do with the inherent criminalisation of the working class from the moment they’re born and the fact that crime itself as a notion is just a record of wrongs that poor people have done to one another as if they couldn’t govern themselves without an upper class oppressing them. I may have lost my metaphor there…

The ending of In The Mouth of Madness sees the main character laughing and crying at the revelation that he is a character in a story. The horror of the situation is almost presented in a flippant way - Carpenter invites us to understand that if his films really inspire violent behaviour, then he is just as trapped as anyone else, because he isn’t going to stop making his films, and people aren’t going to stop watching them. This is why the film positions us within the perspective of a character in the fictional story, rather than with the author. Carpenter is situating us in the world that conservative pearl-clutchers imagine when they claim that his horror movies encourage violence, a world where books and stories hold such sway in people’s lives that one author’s book can bring America to its knees.

In Alan Wake by contrast, Alan’s magical typewriter dictates reality because as a professional author it does actually dictate his reality, because it’s the tool he uses to perform his labour. On the other hand, when Alan interacts with fans, as we’ve discussed before, he clearly dislikes them and looks down on them. When Alan comes to talk to Rose, the waitress from the “Oh, Deer!” Diner, we see that she lives in a mobile home in a trailer park outside Bright Falls. The game doesn’t care much for how Alan’s novels affect Rose as a reader, but it’s pretty striking that we see inside only a few people’s homes in the game - Alan’s, the Anderson Brothers, and Rose - and while the Anderson Brothers used their rock money to buy a whole farm, and Alan’s apartment is massive, Rose lives in a trailer park. This scene could have been at the diner, but they wanted to show you how Alan’s biggest fan lives.

There’s something fantastically flexible in the aquatic metaphors that Alan Wake returns to constantly. Just as the difference between a lake and an ocean can be the difference between how someone like Sam Lake wants to see himself and the fathomless depths of the parasocial personas that fans might imagine for him, it could also be the difference between being able to swim to shore, and just treading water until you eventually succumb. For Alan maybe it’s the difference between himself and the people he can avoid in his high-rise apartment but has to look in the eye here in Bright Falls. One way or another, all that water contains a lot of darkness - a whole lot of unknown.

King fans that they are, the Remedy team have definitely read his memoir and advice guide for aspiring writers, On Writing. It works well as the part-memoir-part-guide that it is because some parts of King’s life are very relevant to the work. In particular, he writes at length about his vices: alcohol and cocaine, and how he developed a dependency leaning on them to help him keep producing more work.
On alcoholism and writing in On Writing: “I spent the first twelve years or so of my married life assuring myself that I ‘just liked to drink.’ I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense… [which] goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can.”

Eventually, he describes, his alcoholism became utterly frightening to him - not out of control but rather a thing that he refused to look at for fear of having to confront that it really had control over him and not the other way around, or as he puts it in the book:

“If I fucked up - rolled my car over on a back road some night, or blew an interview on live TV - someone would tell me I ought to get control of my drinking and telling an alcoholic to control his drinking is like telling a guy suffering from the world’s most cataclysmic case of diarrhea to control his shitting.”
King concludes his section about alcoholism with a really striking revelation

“What finally decided me was Annie Wilkes, the psycho nurse in Misery. Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer.”
This is at once tragic and really striking. King says that he doesn’t write stories with intended themes, but rather looks for ways that themes could fit in after the fact, and I believe him, but it’s really noticeable how well this fits. However, the reason I’ve brought it up here is to offer an alternative interpretation that’s more applicable to Alan Wake, and maybe just to writers and writing in general.

The Dark Presence that drives Alan’s writing, that keeps him trapped and forces him to write like Annie Wilkes from Misery, isn’t cocaine; it isn’t alcohol. It’s “the muse”. The entire conflict of Alan Wake is a battle between Alan and the basic drive to write things for any reason whatsoever. Alan isn’t just being held prisoner until he writes his next book, he actually feels held hostage by the requirement to write, itself.

As I already said, Alan Wake is a story where the protagonist is beset on all sides by parties trying to force him to write, and having been there myself, it’s actually not hard at all to relate, when you feel like writing is a thing can only happen when you have “the inspiration” to do it, but that same inspiration is notoriously fickle...

Fuck. Look. I’ve wanted to write about this game for forever, and I just haven’t been able to. I’ve been wanting to reflect on this thing that is deeply truly important in how we engage with both the explicit fiction of storytelling and the implicit fiction of celebrity and personalities in the public eye, and swinging wildly between desperately wanting to talk about this stuff and feeling like I’m no good to anyone unless I’m talking politics, so I end up with so many shelved scripts about purely political topics because my brain can only handle working on things that satisfy both needs at once like talking about the philosophy and politics in the Matrix Trilogy.

It’s really hard to make things you find creatively satisfying and feel artistically proud of and then publish them onto a platform that holds them up directly next to Steven Crowder and Cinema Sins and tells viewers these things are the same.

If I’m being honest a lot of my trouble writing right now isn’t because of struggling it’s because I’m much happier than I was before and I want to spend all my time seeing friends and being in the sunshine and trying things that I didn’t want to try before because I felt uncomfortable in myself all the time. There’s that, and then at the same time transitioning has filled me with so much positive energy that I have twenty thousand different things I feel excited about and want to do now and there just literally aren’t enough hours in the day.

I’m doing this tabletop podcast Rolling With Rainbows, I’m interviewing activists, I’m trying to seriously start working on a game. I have scripts half finished about eco-fascism, eugenics, TERFs… I want to make another video poem, about being trans and gay and truly deeply happy for the first time in my life, and this tension just stops me from making these things that I feel would be helpful to people because I want to do creatively satisfying projects, and it also stops me from doing creatively satisfying projects because I think I have to be more useful to people, it sucks I hate it here. Anyway I’m working on a manifesto. I’m going to do a manifesto, and I’m going to use my platform to be more politically thoughtful and actively point people towards real change they can do in the world. What were we talking about? Video games or something? Fuck, man.

I decided to write this script as a challenge to myself, because Alan Wake is a game that I’ve loved for a long time, but for whatever reason I’ve never been pumped to write about it the way I’ve felt about Witcher, or Resident Evil or Cyberpunk. That spark that drives enthusiastic, passionate writing wasn’t there, but it’s important to me to know that I can still write something that I really like and am proud of even when that fickle spark isn’t there.

It’s important to me to be able to treat writing as the same as any other kind of work and sit down, roll up my sleeves and just get that work done, and the reason that that’s important to me, is honestly because I love Alan Wake so much. The reason I have so much trouble writing about it might come from exactly the same place, if we’re being really sincere.

Alan Wake is, at its heart, a story about how when you view creative work as special, mystical work driven by divine inspiration, you trap yourself in a dark sunken place, making it both harder for you to just do what you’re good at, and for you to relate to other people. Alan Wake is a game about the horror of writing, and that’s why I set myself this challenge - to beat the enemy that Alan couldn’t, and if you’re watching me saying these words now, then I succeeded. I’m the hero of Alan Wake, because I wrote myself into my script to beat the bad guy. Hooray for me.

Stephen King, of course, master of the craft and absurdly prolific fiction writer, has a fantastic quote about perseverance in On Writing: “Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position”
Jokes abound about Stephen King advising people to just write as much as possible even if it’s total shit, but this advice is absolutely correct. It also taps into something uncomfortable about my job that I didn’t want to look at - something I’d rather just keep in the dark. Writing is really fucking hard work, but it is work, and if you don’t treat it like work you’ll find yourself trapped, in a dark place where your writing can happen, while a hollow version of you interacts with the world. This is because writing is deeply personal, utterly internal, and also just as much of a skill you can practice and strengthen as anything else.
Alan never learned this lesson. Alan is trapped because he thinks that writing is more than just a job: he sees it as a mystical power that he needs access to divine intervention to be able to do.
But what is writing? Besides being work, and a skill, I mean. Okay, let’s consult my favourite piece of writing that Stephen King has ever done, to find out. In this passage from On Writing, King describes writing as a form of telepathy:
“But right now, all that stuff is up top. I’m in another place. A basement place where there are lots of bright lights and clear images. This is a place I’ve built for myself over the years. It’s a far-seeing place. I know it’s a bit of a contradiction, that a far-seeing place should also be a basement place, but that’s how it is with me. If you construct your own far-seeing place you might put it in a treetop or on the roof of the world trade centre, or on the edge of the Grand Canyon. [...] This book is scheduled to be published in the late summer or early fall of 2000. If that’s how things work out then you are somewhere downstream on the timeline from me, but you are quite likely in your own far-seeing place. The one where you go to receive telepathic messages.”
Maybe this quote makes me smile so much because I just find it charming, but I find it relevant that Stephen King writes so many of his protagonists as writers, and Danny, the boy from The Shining who has the ability he calls “the shining” can use it to call to other people who “shine” across great distances. Forgive me for stepping into metaphors here, but: There’s darkness all around, great unknowns alienating us from one another, but if shining a light in the dark can help, and the ultimate form of shining is telepathy, then yeah, writing is a form of telepathy, and a writer’s job is to shine.