Alan Wake 2’s The Lake House is a dark, brilliant parable on the devaluation of art and artists
Francis Baconnaise
There must be hundreds of typewriters in the hall, their collective clacks a tidal wave of soulless automation, rising up to greet agent Kiran Estevez as she enters, pistol and flashlight in hands. Exploring rooms to the side, Alan Wake 2: The Lake House’s star finds whiteboards and documents revealing the typewriter’s purpose: to mimic Wake’s writing. Pages are graded along criteria such as ‘style’, ‘tone’, and ‘content’, then “fed into the algorithm” as references until “near-identical stories” to Wake’s can be produced.
“If Jules could simply cut the painter open and pull the painting out of him, he would,” reads one of the real Alan’s typewritten pages. That’s Jules Marmont, the obsessive head of the titular FBC centre. The Marmonts - Jules and his wife Diana - are running experiments to forcibly and synthetically create works of art, aiming to mimic creative passion convincingly enough for the paranatural entity inside Cauldron Lake to respond, as it has in the past.
It’s not subtle, and it doesn’t need to be. Instead, it’s a loud and clear middle finger to a culture industry that has all but declared - with the uncritical embrace of generative AI just the latest step - that its historical, systematic devaluation and exploitation of artists was not a bug, but a feature all along. It’s a game about a games industry being eaten alive. A reminder, were one needed, that the executive class don’t want artists, they just want something that resembles art enough to convince the gaping, empty presence inside them.
If this feels too much like sermonistic back patting, it’s worth pointing out that Alan Wake 2 isn’t an uncritical celebration of art and artists either. Alan’s solipsism and selfishness come under the microscope, and The Lake House itself takes a few pops at the fetishisation of art and its aesthetic symbols filling in for love of the creative act itself. A note that mentions trying to track down Wake’s preferred brands of typewriter and ink calls to mind blog posts about famous writer’s daily routines, and a little of the shallowness touched upon in Bukowski’s Air And Light And Time And Space: the idea that creating good art is just a case of recreating the circumstances in which it’s produced.
Wake himself, with his elbow patches and alcoholic brooding, clearly either viewed himself as a temporarily inconvenienced literary icon pre-fame, or started embracing the role after the fact. Even Sam Lake’s many appearances feel, in part, like satirical jabs at ego and overly precious auteurs with more respect for their visions and public personas than the people who help realise those visions. Not every creative act is pure and noble just by virtue of it being purposeful. Art can propagandise, advertise, and caricature. But the alternative - shallow mimicry of self expression, then used to justify the destroying the careers of the very people that made that mimicry possible - is one I see as far uglier.
The automatic typewriters call to mind Roald Dahl’s The Great Automatic Grammatizator, the story that Ted Chiang recently drew parallels between and generative AI in a piece for the New Yorker. “Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination?”, Chiang asks, rhetorically. For Chiang, it comes down to decision making, to effort on the part of the creator, and to intention to communicate.
“ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing," he writes, "and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words 'I’m happy to see you' a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.”
One of the documents you’ll find in The Lake House reveals experiments performed on a painter’s work. The experimenter theorises that the threshold’s reality-altering effects are drawn to “pieces of art that contain significant levels of 'Emotion'...if we can identify and quantify the Emotion of an art piece, our work will speed up considerably”. Notice the capitalisation and quotation on “Emotion”, like some alien entity caught in a containment tube. Chiang covers what we might call the more practical, less traditionally creative uses for generative AI, but I’d argue that in terms of art, emotion itself remains the driving factor. Emotions drive creative intention, communication, and ultimately provide the beacon for any decisions made. It can’t be quantified, but if your only interest in art is its utility as a product and its resemblance to other successful products, then it can be reverse engineered out of the equation.
A “catalyst and an accelerant” is how Netflix new head of generative AI for games refers to the plagiaristic slop machine. “We're back to those days of seemingly unlimited potential,” he smugs, with plastic wide-eyed enthusiasm, accompanied by a deeply ironic image of a hideous industrial metropolis uglying up the skyline of natural landscape. The language of empowerment and freedom is used, as it always is. Hey, I can’t argue. There’s nothing that shouts “you are free” louder than laying off your game studios.
I feel, sometimes, that the on-the-nose commentary of speculative sci-fi like They Live and our subsequent post-ironic, “I know writers who use subtext, they’re all cowards” sophistication makes me reticent to use the sort of uncomplicated disgust and rhetoric the executives making these destructive decisions deserve, for fear of sounding naive. But, hey, they do see people as numbers, and they do see rising stock prices as unassailable virtues. They act with as much empathy and soul as The Lake House’s automatic typing devices. They are destroying careers and lives from a position where they have power over the things that make life worth living, and they have no respect for either it or the people who make it. If they could simply cut you open and pull the painting right out of you, they would.
So when I play something like The Lake House - beautifully constructed, effective and fun horror as it is - I don’t need it to be subtle to feel vital and worthwhile. Alan Wake 2 is a complicated game, dense with themes. How classic narrative structure like the hero’s journey endure through the ways they map on to our lives. Fatalism and meta-narratives. Not allowing creative ambition to blind you to the people you care about. But to me, the game is really a whole-cloth celebration of art: about all the different ways you can convey emotions, and tell a story.
Across Alan Wake 2’s runtime, a dozen different mediums reveal its world to us. Film. Music. Dance. Design. Art. Spoken Word. Writing. Choreography. Pastiches of late night talks shows, adverts, and TV serials. It’s not just a multimedia piece, but a celebration of how each constituent part of any given piece of media all have their own unique ways of conveying ideas. If any game harboured disgust towards the generative AI situation we’ve found ourselves, it makes sense that this would be the one. The Lake House channels that disgust into, well, great art.