Summarising thoughts on "Life is Strange: Double Exposure"

Spoilers for Life is Strange and Life is Strange: Double Exposure throughout

In retrospect, I understand what Deck Nine was going for with Double Exposure. It's intended to parallel and respond to the first game in a number of ways to give Max character growth and to open the series up to some new directions. How successful it was doing that, however, is a different matter, and largely comes down to what I said throughout my articles on the game's individual chapters. The game's main issue in fulfilling its goal as a story is that it's underwritten, suggestive of the idea that the narrative team at Deck Nine didn't have enough time or resources to put together a fully coherent and impactful story.

In my "pointless thoughts" post I speculated on how Chloe could have been incorporated into the game, but with the benefit of hindsight I can see how Chloe can't be in the game for the story Deck Nine were going for to work. This doesn't mean that the story they chose to go with was the right one or that breaking her and Max up was the best decision; it's just that I can recognise that with the story they wanted to tell, rightly or wrongly, Max has to be alone. She needs to feel isolated and to have to overcome her trauma by herself, without Chloe's support. Chloe would actually, by the same logic, have to do the same thing, but whether we'll ever see any representation of that in a game or other media is as yet unknowable. It's for these same reasons, notionally, that despite my complaints about Max having no one to talk to until Chapter 3, this may have also been intentional, because Max is supposed to feel alone: no one can save her but herself. She has to deal with her own problems.

Double Exposure is basically grounded in the idea that in the first game Max underwent a barrage of traumatic experiences: witnessing the murder of someone who turned out to be her former best friend, soon to once again be her best friend or even girlfriend; discovering she had incomprehensible abilities; accidentally rendering her friend paralysed; investigating a murder and uncovering the victim's body; being kidnapped and abused by a trusted and admired mentor figure; and finally having to choose whether to let her best friend die, or let almost everyone else she knew die instead. After all these awful experiences she ran, either with Chloe or alone, and spent years afflicted by everything she had undergone and endured.

It's unsurprising, then, that at Caledon she would so readily attach herself to Safi, an exciting woman with a big personality, much like Chloe. Then, after she finally has someone she feels close to and is starting to trust and open up to, she loses her too. With her powers restored it seems like she's going down a similar path, stuck in a loop in which she has to either give up the person she cares about the most or everyone else, but instead of running away she confronts her fears and trauma, overcomes them, and saves everybody. That, in principle, is what Double Exposure is trying to have Max do: find herself in a similar situation to what happened before, but this time to grow and deal with it in a healthier way.

The problem with all this, as I said over and over again in my individual posts, is that it's underwritten and depends on you agreeing with Deck Nine's interpretation of the first game, i.e. that Max made the wrong choice and could have saved everybody if she'd been more courageous and hadn't run away. However the first game implied that making that choice was Max facing reality; otherwise she would have just kept jumping back again and again into more and more photos trying to create the perfect life. As such, Double Exposure comes across as if either the writers at Deck Nine didn't understand the story and themes of the first game or deliberately misrepresented them in an effort to make their own story seem like it was offering some original commentary rather than rehashing what had been done before.

And in terms of under writing, the game doesn't focus on Max's trauma enough and doesn't spend nearly enough time on Safi for us to care about her or see her in any depth as an alternative take on what could happen to someone with powers. I've seen a couple of people (or maybe the one person in different guises) argue online that the game's story is good and that either players were too distracted by things like the Max and Chloe situation to appreciate it properly, or less charitably were simply too stupid to understand it. I can empathise with the feeling that something you like isn't getting the appreciation it deserves, but I think the fact that this game just didn't land with a lot of its audience ultimately comes down to how it was written and presented and not how that writing was received. If a writer intends to convey something to their audience and they fail to do so, the problem tends to more be that the writing didn't achieve its purpose than that the audience didn't understand it. Of course people misinterpret things in art all the time, and that is frustrating, but if something is received like Double Exposure was it seems like the writing needed to do more work than it did to tell a story that would actually resonate with people.

I think a few things could have been done to remedy this:

1. Safi

To me, Safi is is the game's biggest weakness. Max is very attached to Safi and cares about her a great deal; the game needs to show us why Safi is so great and so important to Max rather than just expecting us to draw the conclusion that Max is very lonely and attaches herself to someone (like Chloe) with a strong personality who wants to spend time with her. We also need to get to know her better so that we can better understand her own motivations and her feelings towards other characters, especially her mother, Lucas and Gwen. Olivia AbiAssi is excellent in the role, so it feels like such a waste that she didn't get a chance to properly tell Safi's story on screen. We need to see Safi's hatred of Lucas, not just have Moses tell us about it. We need to see her difficult relationship with Yasmin, not just have Yasmin tell us about it. Finally, we need to see how important she is to Max, not just have Max tell her. Safi's alive in one timeline and this is a big part of the game's hook; there should have been a couple of scenes in Chapters 2 and 3 each to let us get to know Safi better. I'm sure some people could come up with justifications for why she isn't in the game more, but I just can't help but feel that the reason is that it didn't cross the writers' minds because they were more focused on the mystery story and didn't have enough time or talent, or because recording more motion capture would have been too expensive.

The problem so many sequels and follow-ups to beloved properties have is that as much as they may look nice and have the trappings of the beloved thing that came before, the characters fail to connect with people, usually because they were underwritten or felt like substitutes for other, already popular characters. I think Safi is a perfect example of this; we're meant to love her, but the game just doesn't do enough to achieve that. People have not connected with this character; I've read and watched a huge number of responses to this game online and it seems like the new character people like the most isn't Safi; it's Moses. I'm not sure if the reason this game fails to make Safi work is because of inadequate direction on the part of Square Enix and Deck Nine, or if Deck Nine's writing team itself simply isn't good enough to have made it work. I understand that writing is hard, and don't claim to know much about how to write interesting characters, but Double Exposure is most significantly undermined by the fact that it's founded on a desire to make players care about Safi that the game itself doesn't achieve.

2. Max

As I discussed in my Chapter 5 post, the game brings the trauma of Chloe's murder and Max's kidnapping by Jefferson almost out of nowhere in the last part of the game. Max mentions these things a couple of times in dialogue (in Chloe's case) and also in her diary, but that's it. Maybe it would have been labouring the point, but there needed to be more showing how traumatised she is, through nightmares or flashbacks or something else, much earlier and throughout the game. Of course she would be traumatised, but we need to actually see these things properly earlier in the game before they're cursorily dealt with in the ending rather than having them abruptly shoved in front of us. We need to see what this trauma was and how it affects her, not just be told "she's been alone for a long time and hasn't gotten close to anyone in years." Telling us this is fine, but it's not enough on its own. This problem is also compounded by Chapter 2 not dwelling in any detail on how Max feels about using her powers or Safi being alive, and instead focusing on the comparatively banal "who vandalised Safi's car" mystery and only really returning to these two big issues at the end of Chapter 4 and in Chapter 5. In fact the game shows Max's use of her powers as relatively consequence-free apart from weirding Amanda out a bit, which undermines its representation of trauma, especially (as others have said online) if we interpret the powers as typically being metaphors for unhealthy coping mechanisms.

3. Chloe

Some people may hate her, but Chloe's a popular character and much of the game's existing audience was attached to her relationship with Max. It's pretty obvious that the glimpse we saw of the game's opening choice in the early marketing was an effort to create anxiety in the minds of potential customers to generate discourse about the game. People were teased in with the hope that she would appear. They were then outraged when the two were revealed to have broken up or to have gone their separate ways, with Chloe confusingly telling Max that she wants to move forward while Max is stuck in the past while Max is the one (in the romantic route) who wanted to progress their relationship by moving in together. The marketing was also extremely cagey in terms of almost never mentioning Chloe by name. As I've said above, I understand that the story they wanted to tell doesn't work if Chloe's in the game, but they needed to handle this differently if they didn't want to just annoy people and have them fixate on this rather than the rest of the story. I'm not sure how this could have been done off the top of my head, but I daresay there were ways to do it that wouldn't have pissed so many people off.

None of this is to say that the original Life is Strange doesn't have its own problems with plot holes or underwriting. But that being true doesn't excuse Double Exposure, and the original, regardless of its issues, was carried by the strength of its atmosphere and character development. People loved that game because of its lighting, music choices, visual direction, voice acting and so on, and the characterisation of Max and Chloe. That kind of thing can compensate for a lot of other issues with story and writing; they won't matter as much if people are attached to the characters and how the game makes them feel. Double Exposure hasn't managed this, and it seems to be a consistent problem with all of the games in the series that Deck Nine has made. Before the Storm, True Colors and Double Exposure all have good bits, but they all suffer from the same problems with pacing and where they focus their attention, namely on mysteries that aren't that interesting rather than fleshing out their characters sufficiently. It's hard to say whether this is a product of the company's management, the capabilities of its writing team, or both, but as much as I have, on some level or other, enjoyed each instalment they've made, they all have these same problems. I have a feeling that even beyond their internal issues, it's likely that Square Enix doesn't give them enough time, money or creative freedom to do everything their stories need. It's noteworthy how many people have been criticising Double Exposure for having too few locations and character interactions, and not enough fleshing out — I'm far from the only person who's said how weird it is that Max never teaches a class in the game, for instance — probably because with their time and money they focused mostly on visuals and particularly motion capture. This is probably also why the Entangle ability is only used twice in the entire game and why there is only one "stealth" section involving swapping timelines, as most likely there wasn't the time or money to figure out how to make them more consistent parts of the story and gameplay.

All in all, Double Exposure is representative of the pervasive issue with modern popular media in that they have become so labour-intensive and expensive to make, and with such restrictive deadlines, that they can never be finessed properly on an artistic level. I feel like this is a story which is trying to do something, but quite feebly and with a revisionist approach to the original game. It feels like it was made by people who were both under a lot of financial, managerial and time pressure, and who also didn't particularly like or didn't really understand the original game, or both, or were instructed to only approach it loosely. It feels like a very superficial and corporate sequel that offers some half-baked commentary on the original's story and characters without the necessary vision, direction or resources to properly realise it. It feels like we could have had a really good sequel about Max (and Chloe) if enough people in decision-making roles at Square Enix and Deck Nine had cared, but not enough did. I find myself in a position where I both think that this game is largely a soulless cash grab and yet also don't think that it's as bad as many of its critics have made it out to be. It's basically the first draft of what could have been a good game that needed much more time and money afforded to it to properly make it a worthy sequel to the original, and a lot more creative vision and direction, and far fewer corners cut in terms of production.

There definitely feels like there was a conflict between a vision of creating a "soft reboot" of the series to make it more about the powers, which also brought in existing players via Max, and a vision of creating a serious sequel to the original game, such that we end up with a muddy hybrid of both. It has great visuals, performance capture and acting, and some good individual moments, but too few environments and characters and an underwritten story. It feels rushed and compromised. This is not, I think, a game made by people who had a clear idea of what they were doing all the way through, and were not given enough time, money, or quality leadership to figure it out. But how likely was that at any point? We can't be surprised that all Square Enix cares about is its bottom line, and that it's prepared to push out a rushed product with the series's name and a popular character in it to make a buck. While the sales success remains to be seen, it would nonetheless seem to have backfired from a marketing and PR perspective. As I've said, and many others online have said as well, the upside to this whole situation has been the fact that Hannah Telle got to play Max again, and that the project was worth it for that reason if nothing else. Nonetheless, the only thing I can think that could possibly salvage Life is Strange at this point would be to bring back Chloe; I just can't see what else would get jaded fans to return to the series at this point.

"Lake Mungo"

Lake Mungo is one of many people's favourite "horror" films of the twenty first century, including me, but I've noticed that a lot of online commenters on it have missed the point. In this 2008 mockumentary, Australian teenager Alice Palmer drowns while swimming in a dam in her hometown of Ararat, Victoria. Later, her surviving family members notice inexplicable goings-on in their home, and son Matthew, Alice's brother, sets up video cameras around the house to try to find evidence of paranormal happenings. He does, but these turn out to have been faked by him in a misguided attempt to bring comfort to his grieving mother June. June, examining the doctored footage, discovers that the recordings had in truth observed an intruder having broken into their home, leading to the revelation that Alice had a secret life, being engaged in a hidden relationship with the couple next door. This leads to the recovery of a diary indicating that something strange happened when Alice went on a school trip to Lake Mungo in outback New South Wales. The Palmers find Alice's buried phone out on the dry lakebed, on which a video records an uncanny and disturbing encounter Alice had in the months before she died: an encounter with her own doppelganger, an apparition resembling her own drowned corpse from her forthcoming death. Upon returning to Ararat, the family feels that Alice's presence is now gone from the house, and they decide to get a fresh start by selling up and moving away. In the end, however, we see that while the Palmers have gone, Alice is still there, standing in the front window, watching her family leave her behind.

I've seen many commenters on this film online interpret the film as having an ultimately positive, if sad, ending, perhaps a bittersweet one. The Palmers go through the ups and downs of grief, such as denial and bargaining, but in the end they get closure and let Alice go so that they themselves can move on. But Lake Mungo isn't about that at all; in fact, that's almost the opposite of what it's about. The film doesn't have a remotely positive ending. The Palmers don't resolve their grief through healthy acceptance, but rather through projection and blame. Alice's greatest fear in the months before her death was the feeling that there was nothing her parents could do for her, that they didn't understand her and couldn't help, and so when they leave she's abandoned, stuck haunting her old house, perhaps forever.

Much of this seems a commentary on repression. The Palmers are a classic Anglo-Australian suburban family: mum, dad and two kids. We don't really see it on screen, but we learn that June and Alice had an uneasy relationship; it was hard for them to open up to one another. The same was true for June and her mother Iris, and Iris tells us that it was much the same between herself and her mother. But it's not just the women of the family who seem to struggle with sharing their feelings with others; Russell, the father, throws himself into his work, and Matthew, the son, uses music, photography, wearing his sister's jacket, faking her ghost, all sorts of things to try to cope with her death. One of the things we virtually never see is any of them talking to each other about her. It's true of Alice herself; she had family, friends and a boyfriend, but pursued a secret relationship with a married couple presumably because she couldn't find much in the way of intimacy in her own life. This isn't to say that what the neighbours, the Tooheys, did wasn't wrong, because ethically it probably was (if not legally), but the fact was that Alice was trying to find something she wasn't getting in her "normal" life.

Throughout the film, the characters often seem either unwilling or unable to wholly express their grief, relying on the Australian tradition, inherited from the British, of keeping a stiff upper lip; Russell is particularly indicative of this, the constant small brave smile on his lips suggestive of a man who couldn't possibly express his real feelings. Matthew, who is often wide-eyed and hesitant, seems lost, while June alternates between speaking baldly about behaviour such as entering people's houses, before breaking into demure, restrained tears. One performance that really stood out to be on a recent viewing is that of the actor who plays Jason, Alice's boyfriend, who always has a sardonic smile on his face; we of course eventually find out that he now knows that she was cheating on him with the neighbours, and it seems that he struggles to contain his bitterness.

The reason these performances are all so effective is because not only do they plausibly recreate what a real interview subject might say and do, but because they represent the discomfort of middle-class Anglo-Australians with their own feelings and emotions. The Palmers need anything they can to deal with the grief of losing Alice because heaven forfend they actually cry or wail or hold each other. There must, they think, be some other way.

Alice isn't haunting her family because she's trying to give them closure. She's not trying to lead them to Lake Mungo so that they can discover the truth and allow her, and themselves, to move on. As we see after the credits, she's still there at Lake Mungo, standing eternal vigil over the place where she came face to face with her own mortality. What she's trying to do is to reach out, to be noticed or heard, the way she never was when she was alive. But her parents and her brother don't notice. When both Alice and June have their final sessions with Ray the psychic, sessions that happen years apart but also at the same time, Alice can see her mother and wants her attention, but June doesn't see her daughter. She may be blind to Alice's presence, but Alice is still there.

The film is constructed so that we see Alice's story the same way her family saw it: with them in the middle and her on the periphery. But Alice was always there; we just didn't notice her, because that was what her life was like: there were things that were happening to her and things she was feeling, but she couldn't tell anyone, at least not the people to whom she was supposedly closest. For perhaps none of us really know each other, for what is it to "know" someone but to create an image of them based on what our own perceptions tell us? We can never really know what is going on inside anyone else's head. You can only ever hope that maybe the words you're reading right now have the same meaning to you as they did when I was writing them. What is it to grieve except to do what your body tells you to do until the pain of another person's permanent absence no longer preoccupies you? And what is it to die but to become a memory of who other people thought you were, that only lasts until anyone who knew you forgets, or is gone themselves?

So that's Lake Mungo. It's not sad because Alice's family struggled with losing her. It's sad because they didn't really known or understand her when she was still alive, and they never really will. Those ghosts we see in the photo are, both literally and figuratively, the projection of her own feelings of helplessness and distance, both from the past and within her own mind. And that is the film, and film in general, itself: a projection of things we can merely perceive and pretend are real until they're over.

"Lost Highway"

It's a common occurrence in discussions of David Lynch films that their bizarre and inexplicable elements are interpreted as dreams or delusions on the part of one of the characters. In Mulholland Drive, Diane Selwyn fantasises that she's Betty Elms; in Inland Empire Nikki Grace gets lost in the fictional world of the film she is preparing to star in; perhaps all of Twin Peaks is a dream of Laura Palmer's, or Dale Cooper's, or someone. While these interpretations are, I would say, entirely valid, I've always found them a bit boring.

The same is true of his 1997 film Lost Highway, which as of time of writing I recently rewatched at a local retro cinema. The film, this interpretation goes, is a delusion or a coping mechanism on the part of death row inmate Fred Madison, who murders his wife out of suspicion that she's being unfaithful, and then reimagines himself as young mechanic Pete Dayton, his wife as a mobster's femme fatale mistress, and his fate not the consequences of his own misdeeds but the result of a criminal conspiracy beyond his control. This narrative is perhaps all being played out during his own demise in the electric chair.

Perhaps the best or at least the most useful analysis of Lynch I've ever encountered was at an academic conference in 2018 at which a speaker opined that Lynch's films are, at least as far as their relationship with their creator goes, all surface. This is to say that what you see is what you get in Lynch films; he isn't hiding something from the viewer and expecting them to decipher it. Rather, what occurs onscreen, no matter how bizarre or inexplicable, is precisely what happens in the story. David Roche argues that Lynch's films "frustrate the spectator’s need for a rational diegesis by playing on the spectator’s mistake that narration is synonymous with diegesis [...] narration prevails over diegesis, the order of events in chronological time". Thus the film's interior world is only ever want the film presents it as being, regardless of whether those things relate to each other in a wholly rational fashion. This is not really surprising even if unconventional; the film's diegetic world does not really exist and what we are shown in the film is all that it really is. There is no particular reason that things in the film are obliged to follow the same logic as the "real" world.

Roche presents the "bliss" of Lynch films then as being that the role of "detective", of mystery-solver, is devolved upon the audience, who can and over the years have derived much from wrestling with the inexplicable elements of his films and trying to make sense of them. Hence the interpretation that most of the film is Fred Madison's delusion, which explains away anything which is otherwise impossible to explain. But the surface reading takes a different approach by proposing, again with reference to this relationship between narration and diegesis, that what we see in the film is exactly what happens, and yet this also closely relates to the concept of dreaming.

At least one neuroscientific explanation for dreaming, as far as I'm aware, holds that during sleep the often unrelated or at least unrealistic images that emerge in our minds are given the illusion of narrative logic by the hippocampus, the part of the brain which allows us to interpret our experiences in a cause-and-effect manner. This explains the phenomenon that dreams so often make perfect sense to our sleeping minds but are quickly identified as absurd once we wake. Lynch is a master of conveying this experience through the art of cinema, by having enough connections between things that on one level we interpret them as making sense, but also enough inconsistencies that on another we perceive them as incoherent and illogical. The tension between these two opposed elements is why Lynch films are so effective at simulating the experience of having a dream, as they create the feeling that things make sense when they actually don't, at least not fully. And just as so much of dreaming seems to be made up of semi-random combinations of emotion, memory and imagination given the illusion of narrative, without the kinds of hidden meanings that mysticist dream analysis likes to assert, the bizarre and inexplicable events in Lynch's films are not necessarily as rife with hidden mystery as many viewers might wish them to be, but rather semi-random inclusions that Lynch thought were powerful, interesting or amusing without needing to have some obscured significance that he has deliberately hidden from his audience. The title itself is that: a phrase Lynch read in one of co-writer Barry Gifford's novels and simply liked the sound of.

Both times I have watched Lost Highway I found myself much more inclined towards this what-you-see-is-what-you-get reading of the film. I interpreted it quite straightforwardly as a film about a man who turns into another man while in a prison cell, lives that man's life for a time while having a relationship with a doppelgänger of the first man's wife, and then transforms back into the first man at the end. Why do any of these things happen? Not for any particular reason; they simply do. None of this is to say that the film isn't about jealousy, or violence, or the cruelty, futility and self-destructiveness of possessive and insecure men's efforts to control or dominate women, or about the seedy goings-on behind closed doors among the rich and powerful of Los Angeles, or how guilty people rationalise their crimes and construct false identities, because of course it's still about any and all of these things. It just doesn't have to be Fred Madison's dream. Again, that doesn't mean that it isn't like a dream, because I would argue that a consistent theme of many of Lynch's films is that waking life and having a dream aren't always that different.

This comes with a host of other impressions I have received both times I've watched the film that differ a bit from a conventional reading. For instance, in both of my viewings I got the feeling that Renee's murder never actually happened: that it was staged, or took place in some other "reality", or whatever, and the fact that we cut from Fred viewing the tape of the murder (who was filming it?) to his interrogation to his incarceration suggests him being swallowed up into whatever story the maker of the video tapes was trying to impose upon him or, more generally, the narrative trajectory the film had decided to take him on. Note that we only see a few frames of footage depicting the crime scene outside of the tape. Fred sees a video of himself having murdered his wife and then, suddenly, he's in jail for his wife's murder. It is very difficult to draw a line between Fred's life, his memories, the story being created by the video tapes, and the story of the film itself.

Similarly, it always seemed that Pete Dayton had a bizarre kind of binary existence, namely that he himself and his world (his house, his job, his parents, his friends, Sheila, and so on) all already existed and that yet somehow they were dreamed into existence the instant he swapped places with Fred, or Fred became him, or whatever, at the same time. Where does Fred go when he either becomes Pete or Pete takes his place? The police very much seem to view them as distinct people; we can boringly explain this as Fred's delusion, or accept that there are things going on that do not follow the rules of reason, logic or causality and thus cannot be explained. Note that this does not mean that they are "supernatural" in the traditional sense. They are simply inexplicable; fiction allows that. We never find out what happened the night Pete took Fred's place in the prison; whatever it was, Pete's father refuses to say. Seemingly it was too horrible or insane to tell. Does Pete not remember what happened that night, or does he not remember his life at all because he didn't exist until the moment he took Fred's place, or both? Where does Pete go when he turns back into Fred, or Fred takes his place, or whatever happens? And was Pete just some poor unfortunate whose fate became tied to Fred's by sheer random bad luck, or because of his and Fred's respective connections to Mr Eddy and Dick Laurent, who may or may not be the same person? Or is he just the person Fred wishes he was, until his insecurities about his wife reassert themselves? I find myself preferring an explanation in which he is all of these things at once.

Finally, there's the Mystery Man, who obviously occupies a similar space in Lynch's oeuvre to the various Lodge entities from Twin Peaks, the Man Behind Winkies and the Cowboy from Mulholland Drive and the Phantom from Inland Empire. I can accept that he's a manifestation of Fred's insecurities while also being prepared to believe that he's some kind of teleporting bilocating enforcer for Eddy/Laurent who later betrays him, and maybe he's also Alice, who is sort of also Renee while sort of also not. Eddy/Laurent may also be two different people, or one man going by two names, or a person who Fred only knows as a name for whom he concocts a character in his delusion. I think I always sort of thought that the Pete part of the story took part in a different "world" to the Fred part, divided by age and class and the structure of the story itself, and that "Mr Eddy" was the Pete version of Laurent, while also known as Laurent to the detectives, who seem to exist in both Fred's world and Pete's. More accurately, Fred's world and Pete's world are two different worlds which are also the same world at the same time, and the Mystery Man is in both of them.

Maybe it all comes down to Renee and Alice, who, as I said above, are sort of the same person while also sort of not. We can interpret Alice as the manifestation of Fred's insecurities about his wife, but she's also the figure whose power lies in the fact that Fred can't control her, as much as he wants to; he may kill her (or just fantasise about doing it; who knows) but he can never "have" her. She is her own person and no amount of jealousy, suspicion, insecurity or abuse will ever change that. Because Fred's problems lie within himself, nothing he does to or with Renee can ever change them or make them go away. As Pete becomes infected with Fred's insecurities in the course of his relationship with Alice, Alice changes. She may have been performing the whole time, or she may have become distant and mocking because that is what she becomes in intermixing with Fred's/Pete's insecurities. All Fred can do is take out his anger on Eddy/Laurent; Alice vanishes and/or is subsumed back into the character of Renee, who is in fact still alive and leaves the movie after being with Laurent. I see Pete almost as a victim of Fred's failings as time passes and he falls more and more under Fred's shadow until Fred returns to take his place.

As such I would argue that interpretations of Lost Highway that see it just as Fred's dream have missed the point a bit. It's not that it is a dream, it's that it's like a dream. Reality itself does not follow the kind of diegesis that a piece of fiction does, and much of Lynch's work has brought this into focus. It's the experience that matters, the sense of things that have significance regardless of whether they follow the cause-and-effect logic of a traditional narrative. For our minds interpret these things as connected regardless of whether they are in a manner which makes sense in waking life. A film does not need to present things in this manner to have impact; indeed not doing so may be more powerful, with the right approach.

Thoughts on "Life is Strange: Double Exposure" Chapter 5 — "Decoherence"

Spoilers for Life is Strange: Double Exposure and the original Life is Strange

The opening of this chapter seems to suggest that there's a time loop: Safi was shot, Max did her investigation in the two different worlds, Safi's powers created the storm in the "living" timeline, and Max used the owl photo she took on the first night to jump both herself and Safi into the past, at which point she shot Safi and then the timeline split, past Max did her investigation, wound up back with Safi in the past again, but this time chooses to take herself and Safi into the storm rather than shooting Safi. For some reason the storm comes with them, as does Lucas's gun, even though all previous uses of this ability have shown that the user quantum-leaps into their own body in the past but doesn't bring anything with them, in complete contrast to how rewind normally worked. Try as I might, I just don't see how this works. I'm fine with there being an ontological paradox, but where did the first Max who shot Safi, and the gun, go? Why is the storm there in this "new" version of the past when it wasn't there originally? Maybe I'm overthinking it, but the original Life is Strange was pretty internally consistent when it came to its own rules, with a few exceptions admittedly. There's no explanation for how the gun gets into the past or why Max acted differently in this loop (i.e. not shooting Safi) than in the previous loop, unless it's meant to be a result of jumping into the photo in Chapter 3, but does that mean Max didn't jump into the photo in Chapter 3 on the previous loop? I must just be overthinking it.

Having played through "Decoherence" a couple of times now, I get what it was trying to do, namely have Max confront and overcome the trauma of the first game and her past generally: Chloe's murder (whether it actually happened or not), her kidnapping by Jefferson (which by the end of the first game never actually happened regardless of whether she saved Chloe or the town), and the exhausting drudgery of her life afterwards. This is coupled with her saving Safi's victims: Moses, Lucas, Gwen and, ultimately, herself. Why Moses is one of the people possessed by Safi, and Yasmin her mother isn't, I don't understand.

My biggest problem, however, with this is that even if I take this ending on its own terms, in good faith, with the benefit of the doubt that someone at Deck Nine created it in a well-intentioned way, it just comes across as so shamelessly derivative of the ending of the original game that I can't afford it much respect. I'm not against the idea of Double Exposure saying that Max has to stop running from her problems and hiding them from people, but even if I accept that as a logical continuation of the events of the first game the way it's presented here simply lacks the originality necessary to come across as sufficiently impactful. I feel like I keep saying that things in this game lack impact, but that's because they do. Elements that are supposed to be important either aren't given enough time and development, like Safi, or feel like they're just riding the coattails of better and more original ones had by Dontnod way back in 2015. At worst, Double Exposure feels like it is presumptuously implying that Life is Strange the original ended the wrong way, and that they're giving it a do-over as a result, which seems to miss the point of the original and suggest that the final dilemma of the first game was not an inevitable choice for Max but rather a shortcoming with the way the game was written. Most of all it seems to have the writing problem of modern Doctor Who in which the power of belief is more important than character or even plot driven causality: things seem to happen just because the game wants to string superficially cod-profound moments together, rather than because there's anything to actually say.

Now I'm perfectly prepared to accept that the nightmare sequence at the end of the original Life is Strange was something Dontnod did to extend the final episode's run time without having to come up with very many (if any) additional new assets for the episode, but what it achieved was threefold: firstly, it represents Max's feelings about the pushy and in some cases outright abusive men in her life who have, at times, made her feel pressured, weak and helpless. Secondly, it reminds her of what the cost is of Arcadia Bay being destroyed: her other friends, her classmates, Chloe's family, and countless strangers besides. Finally, it reminds her of her relationship with Chloe, and what the two of them mean to each other. This sets the player up for the final choice, the one Max will have to live with for the rest of her life: does she let Chloe die, but spare the lives of innumerable other people, or let most of the town perish but let Chloe live?

It's an impossible choice, no matter what anyone says. Chloe doesn't deserve to die. She may be selfish and at times manipulative, but by the end of the game she herself has recognised that and is in a place to either grow beyond that or sacrifice herself for the sake of others. It's got nothing to do with whether Max gets to "keep" her. It's not about Max being selfish. At the same time, it's not fair on the residents of Arcadia Bay and Blackwell either. None of them asked for any of this to happen. Neither did Max. Are the lives of Joyce, Kate, Warren and everyone else worth less? Of course not. On what basis can Max decide? There's no universally acceptable metric; it's up to the individual player to decide what they can live with more.

The emphasis of "Decoherence" is Max "taking a third option": rather than either killing Safi or letting the storm destroy Caledon, she (somehow) enters the Storm with Safi and works through both her own and Safi's problems. Following this, she reveals the truth to her friends and allies from the game: Moses, Diamond, Amanda, Vinh, and optionally Reggie and Gwen. The idea notionally is that after the events of the first game she ran from her problems and trauma, and here she's facing them head on. For this to work we have to accept that that's what actually happened after the first game: that Max never really dealt with what happened. I suppose that's arguably valid because in one course of events the only person she could have spoken to about it was Chloe and in the other version she wouldn't have anyone at all. No one else would have believed her, although the texts from her parents in this game suggest that they on some level realise that she's traumatised.

In concept the idea of Max dealing with this stuff is fine. In execution, however, it leaves something to be desired. The two events from the first game dealt with via the nightmare/storm sequence here, namely Chloe's murder (whether it actually happened) and Max's kidnapping by Jefferson, are only raised very cursorily earlier in the game, through Max's diary and a couple of lines of dialogue. If Max had had persistent nightmares or flashbacks throughout the game to these events, they would have felt much less out of place. It's not helped by the fact the game has to fudge these events via some re recorded dialogue and characters from this game standing in for those from the first, probably to save time and money on motion capture work, and possibly to avoid some issues with union agreements and/or royalties; Nathan and Chloe in the bathroom are replaced by Max and Safi, and Jefferson only appears via a highly distorted voiceover which is (I think) re recorded by Lucas's actor.

Naturally, Double Exposure was marketed as a standalone title that you wouldn't have needed to have played the original Life is Strange in order to understand, because there was no way that Deck Nine and Square Enix were going to say otherwise and risk people not buying it because they hadn't played the first. Yet I can only imagine that a player coming to the series here would be utterly baffled by these sequences, which come practically out of nowhere beyond the very limited references I mentioned above. I have to imagine that the reason these things aren't set up more is because the game was originally designed to be much more standalone, and that as development progressed towards the ending of the game these elements were squeezed in via text and so on because the first few chapters were already pretty much in the can and they couldn't go back and do more to set them up. As such these sequences don't feel like a satisfying payoff for people who have played the first game either; they just seem half-arsed.

Probably the only really interesting bit is the motel sequence in which Max explores a series of repeating, nondescript motel rooms to represent her time on the road between the first game and this, either with Chloe or alone. It is, admittedly, nice to get this tiny glimpse into Max's life between these events: how exhausted she felt, how lonely she was (in the "Sacrifice Chloe" version of events at the very least), how much she was weighed down by guilt, and how her and Chloe's relationship (in the "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" version of events) eventually became awkward and distant because neither of them had properly dealt with their feelings about what had happened.

This sequence is also refreshing because, however limited it may be, we're finally in a new environment, the motel room, which isn't just an existing space or a reused asset like the Blackwell bathroom. However, I feel that there are a couple of shortcomings nonetheless. The first is the whole idea of "Max on the road" as what happened in both versions of events. In a "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" timeline I feel that this makes sense, at least as long as Max and Chloe were a couple; if they were just friends I find it hard to believe, no matter how close the two of them were, that they would road trip around the country for years and years. Nonetheless, there's an obvious missed opportunity here for Chloe to appear, but she probably doesn't because it would have required too much additional writing, recording and motion capture work, as well as creating a unique character model for a one-off character, something the Deck Nine games in particular have really skimped on over the years. On the other hand, I just don't believe Max going on the road in the aftermath of "Sacrifice Chloe"; maybe she would have quit Blackwell and moved back to Seattle or something, but I just don't see her life going in such a similar direction in this version of events. Especially given that this game shows people's lives going in radically different directions due to one change (whether Safi is alive or not), I just can't believe that Max's life would have been so similar regardless of the outcome of the first game. Further, as irksome as this game's handling of Max and Chloe's breakup (as a couple or as friends) is, I honestly find the idea of Max touring around the country for ten years completely on her own even more pathetic than the handling of her relationship with Chloe. We get no evidence whatsoever that Max made any friends or had any relationships between leaving Arcadia Bay and arriving at Caledon in this version of events, and as much as I can understand that her losing Chloe would have been absolutely heartbreaking, it stretches plausibility past its breaking point that she spent ten years alone on the road. She had other friends at Blackwell and even in Seattle; she isn't in touch with any of them? She never went to college? Maybe I'm being too harsh but it just seems like too much, and to be honest as much as this game feels like it was designed to initially only fit with "Sacrifice Chloe", this motel sequence feels like it was ported over from a story that only makes sense for "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay". I don't think it would have been impossible to have given Max two different sequences here depending on your choice, but as always I assume that would have required too much time, energy and money relative to what Deck Nine was prepared to do or Square Enix was prepared to pay for.

Eventually, after dealing with Max's trauma through these truncated sequences, and freeing people from Safi's influence, including Max herself, we're back to where Chapter 4 ended, on the overlook, with Yasmin having been shot, although the game never makes too much of this, bizarrely. Safi tells us that she wants a "clean break" from her life at Caledon and that she's going to go and find other people with "powers" like herself and Max. She then asks if Max will wait for her, and our final decision is to either accept or refuse this request. I initially refused and was surprised that so many people accepted, but having read online it seems like a lot of people, myself included, didn't really understand what Safi was even asking; if you refuse, Moses applauds you for standing up to her, but Safi feels betrayed. If you accept, Safi appreciates your support, but Moses accuses you of giving her tacit permission to do whatever she wants. Safi asks if what Max tells her about how important she is to her and so on is true or not, but it comes across as extremely manipulative; it's possible for Max to want Safi to be happy and safe without agreeing that she should use her powers without regard for any considerations but her own. The game seems to be setting Safi up for a future encounter, either as an antagonist or an ally, but as with so much else in the game it's all very hazy and underwritten, like someone on the Deck Nine writing team thought that the audience would be mind readers.

Obviously numerous comparisons have been made at this point to this ending seeming to be like something from a Marvel movie or X-Men, the implication being that Square Enix seemingly wants to turn the series into some kind of crossover-driven "superhero franchise" rather than, as Dontnod used to put it, "relatable characters facing real world issues, but always with 'a twist of the strange'". Who knows if that will actually be the case, but for me the idea of making the series about the powers is an obvious mistake and seems to come almost out of nowhere. Further, by having Max save both Safi and Caledon, the game seems designed to subtly condone the idea, for the sake of sequels, that actually using the powers, i.e. the "fun" fantasy part of the games, is okay and can be relatively consequence-free, thus opening the door for a big dumb sequel in which Max can use her powers however she likes.

Returning to Safi, however, what does she even think she's going to achieve? I have no idea. I understand that she feels betrayed by everyone, but I don't understand how this would lead to things like shooting her own mother. She seems to express remorse for what happened to the people she affected during the storm, but doesn't seem to learn. I think she's meant to be set up as some sort of counterpoint to Max, feeling that the suffering she causes is unavoidable and that she should use her powers regardless, but after her and Max's conversation shortly before they end the storm it feels jarring. Further, I don't understand how Moses fits into all of this: Safi will tell you that she would never shapeshift into Moses, but she still infected him during the storm, and she doesn't seem to care that she's abandoning him at the end, even though he's her best friend and he never did anything to betray her, unlike her mother, Gwen or Lucas.

Ultimately I think Safi is the game's biggest weakness. Before they escape the storm, Max tells Safi "you're so important to me", but this is just another case of outright telling rather than showing. We never see enough of Max and Safi's relationship. We never get to know Safi enough to care about her or how she feels, or at least I didn't. Further, the way she treated Lucas and Gwen, while perhaps understandable, is extremely cruel and vindictive, particularly given how hard we hear Gwen had to fight to be accepted and how much Safi makes Lucas's son Robbie, an innocent child, suffer for Lucas's crimes. What happens to Maya is awful, Yasmin is an overprotective control freak, Lucas is a scumbag and Gwen is a hypocrite, but I don't feel much greater sympathy for Safi because her quest for vengeance, or justice as she puts it, to me makes her seem equally unlikeable, and I don't know why Max would want to have anything to do with her. Chloe's selfish and manipulative actions are incomparable in how mild they are, and she expresses remorse for them in the end. Safi just doesn't land for me as a character, and I have to wonder whether this is all because the story and script was stitched together from discordant elements as a result of a troubled production.

That being said, I will say this about "Decoherence": on a certain level, mostly on the surface, if I'm extremely generous to it, I think it technically holds together as a finale, putting aside certain plot points that I don't think really make sense, although I'm open to an explanation for these. As a character drama with any power behind it, however, I found it to be entirely too underwritten to leave me with anything more than a feeling of bemusement. Like so much modern media, it feels like it was written by people who didn't have the time, inclination, opportunity or skill, or some combination of these, to make it actually work on an emotional or dramatic level. Its biggest failing is that it didn't make me care about any of the new characters, only Max. I kind of like Moses and Amanda, but we just don't get enough time with either of them. The only way I can see the series continuing successfully at this point, at least from an artistic standpoint, is for Deck Nine to sort their shit out on the management side of things and actually let a creative team with clear direction and a solid vision come up with a coherent, well-paced and emotionally resonant story. From a business perspective, they'll probably bring Max back again, as this game's silly "Max Caulfield will return" teaser suggests, and they really ought to bring Chloe back too if they want to convince people to stay with the series, or perhaps trick them into doing it. And as I've said over and over again, Hannah Telle got to play Max again, which is the most worthwhile outcome from this entire project. What I wouldn't give at this point to have a game about Max and Chloe (preferably played by Ashly Burch) reconciling their differences and moving through their issues together, but honestly I doubt that's going to happen. What I suspect we'll get is another clunky stitched-together mess with Max solving a poorly-written mystery and the series turning more and more into a hybrid of the Avengers and Scooby Doo. The first game never needed a sequel. But it's frustrating to think that, if there really are infinite parallel universes, somewhere out there there are infinite worlds where we actually got a good one, and to not get to live in that world is still pretty frustrating.