Last time I talked about Silent Hill 2, we took a brief look at the critters infesting James’s nightmare world. This week, I thought I’d take a look at some of the other stories and items that influenced the game. Particularly, I’m going to be looking at Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1866 novel Crime and Punishment, as well as David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway.

I’m going to start with the earlier work, Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment follows Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a young former student who’s seen better days. He’s poor, his family is poor, and to get out of that poverty his mother is planning to marry his sister off to some dude named Luzhin. Luzhin, it should be noted, is not a particularly good dude. So Raskolnikov starts to come up with a plan to get some money so his sister doesn’t have to marry that guy.

See, there’s this old moneylender who lives nearby named Aliona Ivanovna, and she’s also not a particularly nice person. She’s so very not-nice, in fact, that Raskolnikov thinks that maybe no one will miss her. So the plan is to kill her and steal all of her money.

One night, he takes an axe and kills Aliona with it, but things go horribly wrong when her sister, Lizaveta, walks in on him. So, in a panic, he kills her too. Also, in his panic, the robbery part of the plan kind of goes out the window.

After this, the guilt starts to eat away at him, causing him to start developing physical symptoms, such as fevers, and mental ones, like hallucinations and paranoid delusions. In one fairly graphic scene, he thinks he hears his landlady being viciously beaten, only to find that she’s fine and he imagined the whole thing.

Eventually unable to take the guilt and at the urging of Sonia, a young woman he’s fallen in love with, Raskolnikov turns himself in. Due to this, he’s actually given a reduced sentence, and is sent to a labor camp in Siberia for eight years.

Now, as I’m sure you can see, there are similarities between Raskolnikov and James. Both of them committed murder (though for different reasons) and both end up punishing themselves subconsciously for it. Both of them end up suffering from delusions, and the hallucinations that Raskolnikov experiences aren’t all that dissimilar from the things James sees in Silent Hill. They do meet different ends, however: while James can have multiple fates based on the player’s decisions, none of them imply that he ever goes to prison for his crime.

Another interesting link between the two has to do with their names. “Raskolnikov” comes from the Russian raskolnik, meaning “schism” or “divide.” This is very, very similar to the meaning of the “sunder” part of “Sunderland”: to divide or separate. Raskolnikov and James are both men divied against themselves.

Lost Highway is about a musician named Fred Madison, who starts receiving strange VHS tapes of the house he shares with his wife, Renee. The invasiveness of the tapes increases until Renee dies and, wouldn’t you know, there’s a tape of Fred standing over her corpse.

So this leads to Fred being arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death for her murder. Except, one day, the guads go to his cell and find that Fred isn’t Fred anymore. Instead he’s now a completely different person, a mechanic named Pete Dayton. They let Pete out, but keep him under surveillance.

It should be noted that, throughout the film, Fred/Pete are being stalked by a creey dude only credited as the Mystery Man.

Sometime later, Pete encounters a mob boss/porn producer named Mr. Eddy, and his mistress, a woman named Alice. Now, it should be noted, both Renee and Alice are almost identical except for style and personality, and are both played by Patricia Arquette. You can probably see what I’m getting at here.

Alice and Pete become sexually involved, and Aice convinces him to rob some dude so they can use the money to run away together. He does, but in the process accidentally kills the man. The two go on the run, then wind up at a cabin in the desert, where they bang. Afterwards, Pete becomes Fred again, and is chased out by the Mystery Man who is weilding a camera.

Fred manages to get away, then finds Mr. Eddy having sex with Renee, who is somehow not dead. Fred and the Mystery Man kill Mr. Eddy, then Fred is chased off by the detectives who were tailing him as Pete.

He gets into a high speed chase with the detectives, then begins to scream and convulse in pain as he drives on. And that’s how the movie ends. Like a lot of Lynch’s works, it’s kind of bizarre and very open to interpretation. I’m not going to spend too much time belaboring that, however, since my aim here is to point out parallels between it and Silent Hill 2.

One of the more obvious parallels can be seen with the women. Renee and Alice seem to have given the developers the idea behind Mary and Maria: two women who think and dress differently from each other, but are otherwise physically identical.

James and Fred have parallels as well: both are men who murdered their wives, and both seem to have repressed or declined to face that fact. Both also seem to be dealing with sexual repression; James because of his wife’s illness and Fred out of boredom with Renee.

The Mystery Man and Pyramid Head also seem to take on similar roles in each story; that role being to try and get the protagonists to face the truth behind their actions.

While those are the big two influences, there are also some smaller ones as well. James and Mary’s appearances, for example. James’s outfit is almost identical to the one worn by the protagonist of the film Jacob’s Ladder. Maria, meanwhile, wears an outfit that’s very similar to one that singer Christina Aguilera wore to an awards ceremony in 1999.

It wa never confirmed one way or the other whether Aguilera’s outfit influenced Maria’s, but if it didn’t that’s one hell of a coincidence.t

Team Silent also snuck a few references in the character’s first names. James and Mary are names that are tied to the Whitechapel Murders: there were several men name James who were suspected of being Jack the Ripper, and Mary Kelly was one his most well-known victims. Maria, of course, is the Latin form of Mary.

The other characters are also named for other people, fictional or otherwise. Angela was named for the protagonist of The Net, a technoloical thiller starring Sandra Bullock. Eddie, who was originally intended to be a much more comedic character, was named for Eddie Murphy. Laura was named for the subject of a non-fictionn book No Language But A Cry by Richard d’Ambrosio, about a young girl trying to recover from a lifetime of horrific abuse.

So those are the things that influenced the story, as well as some of the references contained in the game. Next time, I’m going to do some general review-style critique as well as talk about the game’s various versions.

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