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I've added a few more ideas, marked with "ETA," but the short version is, I think the rain (including this scene) might consistently represent guilt. After months of puzzling over this, it's the best I've come up with.

As an aside, I saw an unrelated post this morning where the notes ended up roasting a popular gaming YouTuber who made his name with theories that might not have been... properly researched. Or sensical. And I sat there and thought, at least I tell y'all when I'm talking wild nonsense.

The sad window (Maria spoilers)

Adapted from the upcoming sixth commentary, because I need to be able to talk about some big spoilers off the main writeup:

James walks out into the hall on the second floor and sees a broken window. He gazes at it with some inscrutable expression. The window is surrounded by vines outside; night has fallen, and it starts to rain. He looks around, and Maria is leaning against a wall, looking sick. She staggers into a nearby room.

So let's talk about this mysterious window.

@idoherty451 and I have no idea what to make of this. I haven't seen anyone else explain it, either. (For the record, broken glass is lying on the floor, meaning that someone didn't break it outwards, say, to escape, so that's one interpretation ruled out. It has more of a "storm damage" vibe.) In our email chain, we eventually decided that rain could mean emotion of any kind for James that he's not expressing (which would be most of them), since you see rain in moments as disparate as 1) running from Pyramid Head, 2) staring out this random window, 3) walking through the dark and stormy night in grief, 4) having a pleasant, "romantic" stroll, and 5) James sitting in his car in a very dark moment. So I finally just said, what if it's "emotion," period? It starts raining here after he starts gazing at this window, so it makes sense that the rain is an unexpressed reaction of some kind. But... what reaction? We're not given any referent here as to what this window might make James think of--like moths or flowers that have already represented Mary, for example. Just a broken window, the night outside, some vines around the edge, and a dead plant in a nearby corner. 

This is why I started pointing out the same vine downstairs and saying that it didn't look like Hedera helix, common ivy.

Because if it was, I might have an explanation for all of this. See, there's a gardener's workroom at the Lakeview Hotel that we'll see many hours from now, and it has a chalkboard with the memo, 

HEDERA HELIX SEEMS TO HAVE SOME KIND OF PEST.  SEPARATE FROM THE REST OF THE PLANTS  OR THEY'LL ALL DIE.

Again: Hedera helix is just common/English/European ivy. It's all over my backyard. I'm sitting next to a pot of a different variant of ivy right now, so "ivy" doesn't have to look like that, but if we're going by the text, we're going by the text. (The species might have been chosen because a "helix" is a spiral, a shape that repeats.) And so I'm a little frustrated, because if you could tell me, "Yes, the devs meant to refer to the same type of plant that's growing outside the hospital window," I could then turn and show you this:

Or they'll all die.

What if this dead plant represents Maria? I don't have enough symbolic context to explain why this scene is happening, but the Maria plant being near the Mary vine may have killed the Maria plant, and Maria seeing this has made her fall ill? 

And the thing is, that note on the chalkboard has no other payoff in the entire game that I'm aware of. It's not a clue to anything else, we don't see any ivy near any other particularly dead plants (unless I missed something--entirely possible), it's just there. The sequence of the window, the vine, the dead plant, the rain, and Maria getting sick makes so much sense to me, except for how it totally does not. I desperately want someone to tell me what the fuck James is supposed to be thinking about right here--

--because I am really, really good with microexpressions, but I can't make out this one at all. Is the rain supposed to foreshadow--

And this is the point where I broke off in the main writeup draft. I'm giving away most spoilers that aren't the Big One, but I've kind of wanted to keep this one under my hat as well for the shock value: Maria dies. Maria dies multiple times. The next time we see rain, James is going to be trudging out of the hospital into the dark wet night thinking that she's gone for good. Is this window an indication or foreshadowing that James will grieve when something happens to Maria?

(I will say that functionally, this scene may have been cooked up because the game needs to sideline Maria before the nurses show up. Why? Because with the wingspan on those nurses, especially the ones wielding those long pipes, they have got to get Maria out of our way.)

As I write this up, the only other thing I can think of is that rain represents some moment that brings James closer to the concept of death, because that "romantic" stroll with Maria does happen somewhat shortly before (a time) she dies. In which case, the thing about plants dying if they're near ivy is incredibly abstract, but James approaching this tableau in the hall is "getting closer to the concept of death."

ETA: I just had the shower thought (fitting, I guess) that maybe rain represents James' feelings of guilt that 1) he is or will be responsible for Mary and/or Maria's deaths and 2) he should be punished for that (Pyramid Head). Again, that "romantic" walk in the rain happens shortly before one of her deaths; maybe that death happens because he feels guilty that he's "moving on" (see Heaven's Night: "Let me know when you're ready to move on") from his wife.

Side note: However this shakes out, I feel very strongly that the "pest" is James. (ETA: If you really want to go out on a limb, that "pest"-infested vine is very close to Laura's big bad wolf, as if to conflate the two as a threat. The butterfly and the flower potentially invoking both Mary and Maria would say that he's a threat to both.) Any time something happens to Maria, the implication is that it happened, directly or indirectly, because of James. Also, the "Maria" ending implies that Maria is about to go down the exact same road of illness and death as Mary, and all I can say is, what these two women have in common is James. Ultimately, the message of the rainy window would be, "Any woman who gets close to James will die."

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The sad window (Maria spoilers)

Adapted from the upcoming sixth commentary, because I need to be able to talk about some big spoilers off the main writeup:

James walks out into the hall on the second floor and sees a broken window. He gazes at it with some inscrutable expression. The window is surrounded by vines outside; night has fallen, and it starts to rain. He looks around, and Maria is leaning against a wall, looking sick. She staggers into a nearby room.

So let's talk about this mysterious window.

@idoherty451 and I have no idea what to make of this. I haven't seen anyone else explain it, either. (For the record, broken glass is lying on the floor, meaning that someone didn't break it outwards, say, to escape, so that's one interpretation ruled out. It has more of a "storm damage" vibe.) In our email chain, we eventually decided that rain could mean emotion of any kind for James that he's not expressing (which would be most of them), since you see rain in moments as disparate as 1) running from Pyramid Head, 2) staring out this random window, 3) walking through the dark and stormy night in grief, 4) having a pleasant, "romantic" stroll, and 5) James sitting in his car in a very dark moment. So I finally just said, what if it's "emotion," period? It starts raining here after he starts gazing at this window, so it makes sense that the rain is an unexpressed reaction of some kind. But... what reaction? We're not given any referent here as to what this window might make James think of--like moths or flowers that have already represented Mary, for example. Just a broken window, the night outside, some vines around the edge, and a dead plant in a nearby corner. 

This is why I started pointing out the same vine downstairs and saying that it didn't look like Hedera helix, common ivy.

Because if it was, I might have an explanation for all of this. See, there's a gardener's workroom at the Lakeview Hotel that we'll see many hours from now, and it has a chalkboard with the memo, 

HEDERA HELIX SEEMS TO HAVE SOME KIND OF PEST.  SEPARATE FROM THE REST OF THE PLANTS  OR THEY'LL ALL DIE.

Again: Hedera helix is just common/English/European ivy. It's all over my backyard. I'm sitting next to a pot of a different variant of ivy right now, so "ivy" doesn't have to look like that, but if we're going by the text, we're going by the text. (The species might have been chosen because a "helix" is a spiral, a shape that repeats.) And so I'm a little frustrated, because if you could tell me, "Yes, the devs meant to refer to the same type of plant that's growing outside the hospital window," I could then turn and show you this:

Or they'll all die.

What if this dead plant represents Maria? I don't have enough symbolic context to explain why this scene is happening, but the Maria plant being near the Mary vine may have killed the Maria plant, and Maria seeing this has made her fall ill? 

And the thing is, that note on the chalkboard has no other payoff in the entire game that I'm aware of. It's not a clue to anything else, we don't see any ivy near any other particularly dead plants (unless I missed something--entirely possible), it's just there. The sequence of the window, the vine, the dead plant, the rain, and Maria getting sick makes so much sense to me, except for how it totally does not. I desperately want someone to tell me what the fuck James is supposed to be thinking about right here--

--because I am really, really good with microexpressions, but I can't make out this one at all. Is the rain supposed to foreshadow--

And this is the point where I broke off in the main writeup draft. I'm giving away most spoilers that aren't the Big One, but I've kind of wanted to keep this one under my hat as well for the shock value: Maria dies. Maria dies multiple times. The next time we see rain, James is going to be trudging out of the hospital into the dark wet night thinking that she's gone for good. Is this window an indication or foreshadowing that James will grieve when something happens to Maria?

(I will say that functionally, this scene may have been cooked up because the game needs to sideline Maria before the nurses show up. Why? Because with the wingspan on those nurses, especially the ones wielding those long pipes, they have got to get Maria out of our way.)

As I write this up, the only other thing I can think of is that rain represents some moment that brings James closer to the concept of death, because that "romantic" stroll with Maria does happen somewhat shortly before (a time) she dies. In which case, the thing about plants dying if they're near ivy is incredibly abstract, but James approaching this tableau in the hall is "getting closer to the concept of death."

ETA: I just had the shower thought (fitting, I guess) that maybe rain represents James' feelings of guilt that 1) he is or will be responsible for Mary and/or Maria's deaths and 2) he should be punished for that (Pyramid Head). Again, that "romantic" walk in the rain happens shortly before one of her deaths; maybe that death happens because he feels guilty that he's "moving on" (see Heaven's Night: "Let me know when you're ready to move on") from his wife.

Side note: However this shakes out, I feel very strongly that the "pest" is James. (ETA: If you really want to go out on a limb, that "pest"-infested vine is very close to Laura's big bad wolf, as if to conflate the two as a threat. The butterfly and the flower potentially invoking both Mary and Maria would say that he's a threat to both.) Any time something happens to Maria, the implication is that it happened, directly or indirectly, because of James. Also, the "Maria" ending implies that Maria is about to go down the exact same road of illness and death as Mary, and all I can say is, what these two women have in common is James. Ultimately, the message of the rainy window would be, "Any woman who gets close to James will die."

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Great moments in monsters: Commentary 6

The end of this video is actually not outtakes, but rather snippets from the finalized version of commentary 6. It involves Maria getting in the way more egregiously than ever, directly in the line of fire twice. The very end of the video has a really cool mannequin flip, though.

What didn't make it into the edit was this moment (since Maria didn't get in the way) of a mannequin tiptoeing past James, and I just happened to hear the squelching. I love when they do that.

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silent hill 1 remake must include this iconic moment:

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Worthlessness, comma

To take a bit of weight off the recap:

I do have us stop by bulletin boards full of posters about alcohol shattering your life, two anxiety medications, the poster I swore had to do with anger, and a really notable one that you can interact with. "REMEMBER," it says, "if you experience" a number of symptoms, "contact your healthcare provider immediately!" And this poster uses the "Read" function in a really interesting way: if you read the poster as it is on the wall, it says, "feelings of worthlessness and guilt." If you interact and "Read" it, as if James were reading it, it only says "feelings of worthlessness," comma, completely omitting "guilt." James apparently can't even admit that he sees that word. (Well, we did have that It Doesn't See poster.) 

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This is the edited down version.

You may remember how trouble with OBS meant that I kept ending up with crashes and jumpiness and unusable recordings. Well, I decided to do something fun with the scrapped commentaries. There's bloody combat and acid vomit monsters and too many legs, but honestly, for Silent Hill, it's pretty mild; it's mostly just my beloved Maria being the least helpful being on earth for five and a half minutes.

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What James can't remember in the Reverie Theater

It's so brief that it's easy to miss it entirely--it triggers once you walk past a screen in an empty theater auditorium, and you'll need to be sure you have James pointed at it. And even when you see it, you won't understand what you're seeing if you don't already know. Screenshot from a different angle under the read more:

This is from the videotape that'll show James what he can't remember. Looking at the picture now--it's interesting how, in black and white, this looks like a dark-haired man in a much darker jacket, but it is, in fact, James exactly as we see him now. There might be something to be said for this being James' "shadow side," an aspect that his psyche has rejected in a Jungian sense.

And the thing is, a blurry closeup from that video is actually the background of your inventory screen. It's been under your nose, just out of reach, the whole time.

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Outtakes (SPOILERS): "I need you to like James"

I don't give away The One Big Thing here, but I do talk around it very closely. And the reason I try not to spoil The One Big Thing--the thing that James can't remember that he did--despite alluding to "things he feels guilty about" or "things he did wrong," is because I feel like the end of the game will lay you out if you like him right now, as he is, at face value. Because James as he currently is--he's kind, helpful, patient, polite.

I don't say this in the video, but what I ended up saying to Ian later was that I feel like James is experiencing Silent Hill as the best version of himself to pay for the worst version of himself: the self that is most able to regret what he did. It's not that I want to make excuses for James; it's that I think him being a genuinely good person during his time with us makes the rest of the game hit so damn hard. And it also presents James as someone we would like to be, not someone "othered" the way I feel Eddie is--we hold Eddie at a remove because obviously he's a "psycho." I feel like Silent Hill 2 presents the question, are you really better than James? How much would it take--what circumstances could turn you into the worst version of yourself? I don't think a game that so delights in ambiguity wants to present any kind of moral, but it's made me think a lot about low mental health points in my life--I never did anything terrible, but how much lower could I have gone? What would it take to break my moral compass? And is it possible that I could live a better life going forward for having considered this?

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someone ANSWER her

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Great moments in monsters: Commentary 5

To spare people who didn't want to see body-horror leg and vomit monsters on main:

The mannequin by Octantis Fuels on a practice run: "It was trying to hide behind a stop sign, and that was pretty funny"

Octantis Fuels on a practice run: "You get jumped. Literally"

Octantis Fuels, an early practice run, after I lost control of the mouse: "One of them got Maria" (pictured before vomit shower)

Octantis Fuels, different run, chasing creeper insects around: "JAMES!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!"

Returning to the motel area: "There was one mannequin that sneaked up behind me"

Chaos in the backyards of South Vale on the way to Heaven's Night, chasing lying figures who refuse to get killed: "WHERE ARE YOU?! COME BACK!!"

A worse day in the backyards, where Maria gets caught by a lying figure again. I continue to be a terrible person who fights Every Monster rather than just get us out of there. The mannequins are fun, though.

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For you, @idoherty451:

While the tritone was rarely used in rock music before Black Sabbath – with the notable exception of the opening chords of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” – many classical composers relied on the flatted fifth many years before Holst, who died in 1934. Beethoven’s 1805 opera Fidelio is flush with triads, as is Richard Wagner’s 1848 composition "Gotterdammerung." In addition, artists who put together spooky movie soundtracks and relied on creepy sounds used tritones years before Black Sabbath wrote their signature tune. Less predictably, Leonard Bernstein used a triad in “Maria” from West Side Story in the simple vocal chorus line “Ma-ri-a” and Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz integrated the devil’s interval into their hit “The Girl From Ipanema.”

(See Ian talk about tritones here.)

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The jack garage

Not to be confused with Jacks Inn, which it is directly across, and which is the place Maria actually wants you to go.

On the recording I'm keeping (long story), I forgot to swing by the secret garage and I'm mad about it. I then started off the next commentary with the garage. I then had to scrap that. So, until I get Real True Commentary 6 sorted, here's a jumpy clip with commentary:

Here's what I point out in the garage:

There's a newspaper with the headline "Mass Layoffs at Brookhaven Hospital Threaten the Institution's Future," complete with a partial article transcription.

MASS LAYOFFS AT BROOKHAVEN HOSPITAL THREATEN THE INSTITUTION'S FUTURE The layoffs we reported on last month are continuing. Over ten people have been let go, which has reduced the hospital's staff by more than half. If the situation does not improve, staff shortages will put patients at risk. Brookhaven is a hospital with a long history. It was established in 1810 when a deadly epidemic swept through the Silent Hill area. Ever since, it has incessantly brought help to the residents of the town. However, more and more have made their voices heard of how the presence of a psychiatric hospital in the middle of the town has a negative impact on the local community. Residents fear that an incident from two years ago might repeat itself.

I'm going to be honest with you, it's only been six months since the game's release, and already Staff Firings May Fuck Up Entire Town hits different in April 2025. Like Ian, though, I'm not sure what the "incident of two years ago" refers to; incidents we'll read about in Brookhaven Hospital itself happened inside the hospital, not out in town.

A Strange Photo: "Made it!" written under a... radiator? That's my guess? (It doesn't look like the radiators we're about to see at Jacks Inn.) I don't think it's an image we've seen in the game so far; I'll keep an eye out for something like that as we go. 

Various health and ammo items, including a health drink hidden in a corner sink. 

An interesting tableau of a few items here:

I am really pretty sure that the large poster is meant to be Maria--or perhaps, rather, the woman who this Maria has been patterned after. She was "born from a wish" earlier today, after all, so Maria may have the appearance of a woman James saw (such as the lookalike in the Heaven's Night posters), but now with Mary's face. And that's why the face in the poster is obscured--partly to leave you unsure of who you're looking at, but also, because Maria may not have this woman's face. However, I think the short hairstyle and the fact that the underwear is the same color as Maria's jacket means that this is meant to represent Maria on some level.

Beside that poster is a smaller "Workout" pinup that we saw at the repair shop where the mannequin jumped us, with the top half of the woman obscured--James' fixation on legs. Below that is a very small pinup photo of a brunette. If you really, really want to get into the weeds, you might say that it's significant that the Maria poster is so much larger than the brunette, as if to say that Maria is currently eclipsing Mary in James' mind.

There's also a larger version of the brunette poster in a dark corner--by a sink with a broken mirror, not unlike the setup at the very beginning of the game, with James staring at himself. But like I keep pointing out: ever since, James hasn't been able to see himself in any other mirror (with one notable exception). It's possible that the moment where James was looking into the mirror in the bathroom was the moment his mind decided to reject what he did (I won't say), forget what really happened, and tell himself a story about looking for Mary. The fact that a brunette is here, right beside a mirror that no longer shows James himself (i.e., the truth), may genuinely be to evoke Mary. But this is also really, really granular speculation. Sometimes the curtains are just blue, I don't know.

Speaking of blue, maybe, there's also one of those turquoise oscillating fans that we see everywhere, which I think represent cycles. And if you buy into time loop theory for this game, James has been going through this cycle--losing Mary, finding Maria--many, many times.

(SH2R commentary master post)

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The billboards on Nathan Avenue

I walk past all of these in the fifth commentary video. Listen, it's not really that deep, but we have to talk about this Neighborhood Cafe business:

1:06:30: Neighborhood cafe [sic]: There's, uh, a lot going on here. This is a location you can't enter back in Eastern South Vale, but I remember pointing it out. The most prominent line reads, "Rich Fragrance ESPRESSO Fascinates You!," with the word "ESPRESSO" in weirdly tall, thin rainbow letters. Like, Happy Pride at the Neighborhood Cafe to all who celebrate, I guess? The tiny line of text below that reads, "Come to the cafe and taste the heaven." And that's very weird phrasing on the face of it, but the word "heaven" may relate to the fact that, after the original game's DLC was released, the main game was referred to as "A Letter from Silent Heaven," where Mary presumably is now.

1:07:34: Silent Hill Historical Society: We pass this a few minutes later. It's currently locked, but James will get the key much later in the game, and the building then serves as an entrance to Toluca Prison.

Pictured in the screenshot at the top, right across from the Historical Society ad: a split billboard for the Pet Center (location of the top half of the Dog Key and a note about a monstrous pet of some kind) and T's Italian Restaurant (boxes for the pizza Eddie likes).

1:10:20: Lakeside Amusement Park: "Come on! Funny Shinny Night Party!" Well, sure. A location from Silent Hill 3; we'll see stickers of one of those horses at Heaven's Night later in this video.

1:14:33: Giga Computer: A store we saw earlier, referencing a Giga Store in the original game.

1:14:40: Baby and Kids Super Store: An ad for one of two baby goods stores in Eastern South Vale. See my discussion of the context that James and Mary wanted to have children.

1:16:25: Silent Hill Fresh Meats: The location of your first Strange Photo.

1:37:25: Dry Cleaners: There's a closed dry cleaner that I passed in Eastern South Vale or, potentially, this might be the laundromat labeled "dry cleaner" that I went through.

1:39:50: The Dance Company: Back in the second commentary, I parked in front of this location to talk about how the mannequins' bare feet have wrappings like ballet dancers'.

On a different recording, I noticed a Lakeview Hotel billboard early on, and I don't know that I catch it on this video; I'll add it if I can find it. The hotel is our ultimate destination.

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Corrections and additions for Commentary 3

Things I either left out or got desperately incorrect for Commentary 3:

00:00 We're gonna take a field trip!

01:53 Eddie, visible breath, and "coldness"

08:00 Apartment 213 ("208") as a crime scene

23:00 Strange Photos credit to DaleRobinson on Reddit

24:30 The Blue Velvet homage in Apartment 201

26:00 I said something incredibly weird and here’s what I was actually thinking 

34:30 A wild lying figure appears: "Now how do you feel about that after the discussion we just had?"

36:35 Pole dancing?

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Posters and decor at Heaven's Night

I have not personally been in a strip club so I can't say for sure, but the Heaven's Night decor seems both very suggestive and relatively tasteful to me. But also, whatever passage of time left everything so decrepit has made some of the posters so confusing that they go beyond erotic suggestion into "I have no idea what that is."

Lips

Everyone points out that the Flesh Lip in Brookhaven Hospital is the first monster we see that has a visible mouth, and they all have mouths after that. What I've never seen anyone point out is that we get those after meeting Maria and seeing all the Heaven's Night posters. Notably, those monster mouths? Are beautiful lips, not toothy or gaping maws. Yes, even the mouths on the mandarins' hands.

For what it's worth, there seems to be only one poster of a blonde in the club, and it's specifically associated with Maria; any other women featured seem to be vaguely brunette. I think this is mostly a design choice, as in the second poster above, where the dark hair also looks like darkness generally. (It reminds me of Italian movie posters from the '60s, although I couldn't tell you which ones or why I think that. Big Edwige Fenech energy.) That being said, there are posters of a brunette in the jack garage alongside that pinup poster of (maybe) Maria. (See the brunette's photo next to the coffee poster in the lower left, below.)

A woman's mouth and the top of her dress

And I mention that brunette because this one also has some kind of writing or graffiti on her chest. It's hard to orient your eye with this poster, but it seems like the plunging V-shaped neckline of a dress, and a woman's collarbones, shoulders, chin, and (of course) lips. The dark blotch over her sternum is partly why it's hard to figure out what you're looking at initially; I don't know if it's there to suggest a wound of some sort--or even a pendant, like a locket.

A leg in front of... something?

Knowing this place, probably two abstract mouths, but who knows. At one point in one of my practice runs, I muttered, "I'm surprised we didn't get a fishnet monster."

"Heaven's Night Party"

I had never stopped to figure out what I was looking at here until the recording I scrapped last week. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's a woman’s hands (upper half) unfastening her garter belt, and the lower half of the poster is the suspenders, leg, and stocking. JAMES GIVE IT A REST.

Maria?

Here's the most important poster: it triggers a dialogue where James asks, "Is that you?"

Maria purrs, "Would you like it to be?"

As Ian points out, this may be a genuine question, though. Maria has spent her entire screentime so far trying various tactics to see which ones might appeal to James: forward and handsy, serious and sympathetic, flirtatious, taunting, suggestive, tender. Would he like Maria the headlining performer? "I'm here for you, James," she'll tell him later in the game. You may even get one of the endings where Maria tries the ultimate ploy: disguising herself as Mary.

"Wild Wednesday"

I'm not sure what's happening in this poster. There is at least one leg and maybe a shoulder, and I can't make any promises about the rest. But I will point out two things: the "WISH" graffiti (upper right corner of the poster) that you also see in the tunnel leading to Rosewater Park, i.e., Maria being "Born from a Wish"; and to the right, the "Don't let alcohol shatter your life" poster we've seen throughout town. Now go back and watch the way James fights himself to walk away from that drink.

ETA: In the video, I struggle to read the "All private dances" line. It doesn't say "30 minutes" (I thought that sounded excessive); it says "30% [off the price]." I don't know why Value Night at the Strip Club is sending me, but it is.

I won't point out every single graphical image in Heaven's Night, but there are a few more that stand out:

Stickers on the mirror behind the bar

Robbie the Rabbit from the "shinny" amusement park in SH3; "Three Peaks Tours," referencing Twin Peaks; and a pair of lips, continuing the mouth theme we see throughout the rest of the game.

Stickers on the front of the bar

Speaking of Twin Peaks, there's a very Red Room-esque sticker on the front of the bar. I think the animal sticker below and to the left of it is from the amusement park billboard as well.

A deer, for some reason

Just to cap things off: a taxidermy stag head. This could be at the Wilmington, NC, bar the Blue Velvet bar (which inspired Heaven's Night) was based on; I don't know. It's worth nothing that there are paintings of female deer in apartments associated with Mary and with Angela. In my opinion, they represent vulnerability or victimhood--prey--meaning that a stag's head could have been put here specifically to represent masculinity or male sexuality. In which case, it's interesting that you might not even look up far enough to notice it--I didn't until this last run. For all these pictures of women's body parts, the reason they're being objectified is high up in the club’s "headspace," if you will, looking down, hidden, as if not wanting to admit that all of these things might not just exist on their own; they're all here because one particular man wants them to be.

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Backstage at Heaven's Night

There are more details (and speculation on my part) than really need to go into the main writeup, so: from the fifth commentary:

I love the slow reveal of where Maria's brought James. She sylphs on further into the building and locks the next door behind herself, while James bumbles around and calls out "Maria…?" Oh, we're in a small restaurant kitchen? No, there's a hole we can look through; seems like we're at a bar. A cheap one, with stacks of red Solo cups, no less. Wait, now we're backstage somewhere? There's clothes hanging around, and a mirrored makeup counter for… actresses? And… pinup beefcake photos? And then the game hits us with the Strange Photo:

Strange Photo: "Ready to kill it!"

Yeah: Maria has brought us to a strip club. Also: holy shit, this is a grim caption in light of the "Maria" ending, which implies that the cycle of Mary's death might repeat with her double.

But let's rewind a bit through that slow reveal (again, in more detail than we really need for the main recap).

The red robe

Very simply, Maria is associated with the color red: her jacket, her butterfly tattoo, the red door of the club, a ripe apple, a scarlet egg, "a scarlet woman."

The next Strange Photo: "The best flavour!"

You'll find this a few rows behind Eddie in the Reverie Theater (that'll be later in this commentary), but I'm pretty sure these two lipsticks are on the counter. They're very similar--only with the colors swapped in the cases so that the gold-toned tube has a red or coral lipstick; the pink lipstick is now worn down and a grayer, more livid tone. I'd say these represent Maria and Mary respectively, and the caption is in favor of Maria.

While flavored lip glosses and balms were a big thing in the '80s--I remember one ad to the effect of, "I save my strawberry kisses for so-and-so," and other flavors for other boys--these two lipsticks look more like the classic, waxy, powdery rose-iris scent. Clearly, "flavor" does not refer to the product. I'm offended on Mary's behalf, honestly.

The flowered hat

This sunhat with large fabric roses is not really a strip-club aesthetic--but I think it would be Mary's style, given her flowered dress, and we see hats like this in the shops in Eastern South Vale, a place James and Mary probably walked through on their vacation. There's also a box right under it with the word FRAGILE (you can see it more fully if you're actually moving the camera around), which sounds like it could fit a woman in poor health. Further, both these items are half-hidden behind curtains, as if James was trying to put Mary out of his thoughts either here in this actual moment with Maria, or (I infer) when he went to whichever bars and clubs to drink. (There's also yet another clock with her time of death on the other side of the room.)

The broken TV

Eventually, James is going to sit down with one of these and find out what memory he's been repressing. You see TV sets, broken and unbroken, thoughout the game--notably in Wood Side apartment 213, where a man is sitting in an armchair in front of one exactly as James will be near the end of the game.

(For that matter, I'm not sure, but if you look at the picture of the hat--I think the box below FRAGILE may be labeled "[vi]deos]." And in that armchair, James will be watching one.)

The broken lights and broken mirrors

In the "Null Moon" scene on the pier, some of the lightbulbs strung up around the gazebo are broken, as some of the bulbs on the makeup mirrors are here. I have my whole thing about Mary being the Lady of the Light, the sun, a "guiding light" that Maria tries to block.

I also go on constantly about how James can't see himself in almost all of the mirrors in Silent Hill, either because he "can't look himself in the eye" after the very first scene, or because Silent Hill is "fake" and can't reflect James, a real person, back to himself.

The photos on the mirrors (see above)

There are children's drawings and photos of kids, families, and pets tucked around the dancers' makeup mirrors, which is a nice, humanizing touch. In fact, if James is busy objectifying women's legs, you wouldn't think his subconscious would consider the women themselves--except that he and Mary had wanted to have kids, but couldn't. Maybe the idea of mothers ("I love you Mom" on one of the drawings) and families are also taking up space in his head. There's something that Maria may say at the very end of the game (in some endings): "I can give you what she never could." I hadn't thought Maria, a psychical construct, might mean "a baby" until I saw these pictures.

There's also male pinup photos. More on those:

The beefcake photography

It's also interesting to me that James would (accurately) imagine that the women working at Heaven's Night would have their own pinup posters objectifying men. Again, I wonder if he was ever backstage at a place like this--or is the real Heaven's Night bleeding in past his psyche's interior decorating? But I also think James has a particular ideal of masculinity that he himself doesn't live up to--and it's the reason he would imagine a "dream girl" who would call him "big guy" and "big man." (Note, also, that one variant of the photos has a woman's hands all over the guy in question--much the way Maria immediately started touching James the first time they met.) I've pulled this idea out as its own post, but the bottom line is, I think so due to the awed look he's giving Pyramid Head during the latter's hero shot at the end of the Blue Creek boss fight, because that sure was not the look on my face after barely keeping James alive for two minutes.

God is in TV

I mean, yes, there is also a very leggy Heaven's Night poster worthy of note, but "God is in TV" is a very loaded statement in a game where the main character finds out what wrongdoing he won't let himself remember from a TV set. (For the record, I believe this was also the title of a Marilyn Manson album/tour.)

The oscillating fans

You know me and the fans--cycles, repetition, a color associated with James, etc. There's multiple oscillating fans backstage, suggesting that he's been to clubs like this before, he's going to keep going to this club in his Silent Hill time loops, or even that he'll repeat his cycle with Mary in the "Maria" ending.

In the scrapped version of the fifth commentary, there's a moment where I'm talking about the fans, and Maria decides to make a statement.

The arcade games

The games here stuck out so much to me that I went down a minor Wikipedia rabbit hole. "Defenders of [the? for?] Horizon" could be a reference to "Defender," and "Trample" might be a reference to Konami's own "Scramble"—because Konami as a company started out with jukeboxes and then arcade games.

The red stage lighting

On his stream, @idoherty451 referenced the Police song "Roxanne"--"You don't have to turn on the red light," referring to sex work and "red light districts." Red is, again, a color associated with Maria generally.

The (high-heeled) mannequins

Again, did James ever go backstage at a club like this? Is this where the mannequin imagery in his subconscious came from?

I have never seen mannequins that came with built-in high heels. You know, in my vast knowledge and experience of clothing display.

James, do you even try to think about something besides legs?

From there, we leave the backstage area. But as a bonus:

The front desk as you leave

A greatest hits compilation of the rest of the decor: a turquoise oscillating fan, a pair of high-heeled shoes, a clock with Mary's time of death, and a poster tube leaning at a suggestive angle. I'm just saying.