Sam Barlow’s Immortality Was Interesting Until It Told Me What It Was
So, pictured above is, for me, the moment where I truly believed Immortality was speaking to me. For context, the two figures are John Durick, director. And Marissa Marcel, his ex-lover, ex?-muse, and lead actress of two of his movies. The first of which was never aired because Marissa accidentally shot her co-star. With a gun. She disappeared from public life only to resurface some 20 years later seemingly having aged all of 5 minutes to star in another Durick film. Which was also abruptly brought to a close. And as it turns out, her first film, where she met Durick working as a cinematographer, also never saw the silver screen.
Immortality presents itself as a film archive of the lost work of the late, great, mysterious, Marissa Marcel. Immortality presents itself as the raw footage of three movies chopped up into 1–5 minute clips and then strung together by a hidden objects mechanic. Immortality presents itself as a mystery game where the goal is to answer the question: What happened to Marissa Marcel?
Well, I’ll tell you what happened to her. She didn’t exist. That isn’t her in the picture. And it isn’t John Durick either.
WARNING: I’m gonna spoil every damn thing about this game. Do what you will.
The Life and Times of Marissa Marcel
Three films. Let me briefly recount them, but if you want a full play-by-play, you might wanna look it up on youtube.
Ambrosio: a raunchy 60s religious fall-from-grace film where the titular character, a monk, is knocked off his pedestal by a virginal looking temptress, played of course by Marissa Marcel. Directed by Arthur Fischer, a balding, fat Alfred Hitchcock analogue with a preoccupation with “molding” his actresses.
Minsky: a 70s noir sex-murder whodunnit, about a noble cop who is “ruined by a woman” to paraphrase the game’s own words. Long story short, he puts the cuffs on the wrong girl, because the one who did the crime is the one he’s in love with. Leading actress Marissa Marcel. Leading actor Carl Greenwood, who is shot in the filming. Directed by John Durick.
2 Of Everything: Which the game thankfully gives the neat acronym 2OE. Again, murder, revenge, less raunch but still has a fully exposed titty. A late 90s story about Britney-esque pop celebrity Maria, and her eerily identical body double Heather who meets an unfortunate end at the hands of evil billionaires whilst pretending to be the former. Both main roles played by Marissa Marcel. Directed by John Durick.
What I think is important for me to convey to make the point that I want to make is the characteristics of the stories that the game uses, and the characteristics of the person who is the central feature of all of them. Marissa Marcel.
These are… feminist films. Or, if that’s too broad and blasé a label, I could say there are certain topics that reoccur in all three films like: the power dynamics between men and women, the nature of the imagery of bodies (in particular women’s bodies), the iconography of women in art, sexual liberation and sexual violence, and they throw in a little bit a crossdressing and queerness here and there too. And because these films are presented as raw footage, often times it’s not just the fiction within the fiction that is touching on these themes. The actors and directors, the one producer who has a name, pretty much every character who gets a speaking role beyond “rehearsal for scene 51” and “tailslate scene 6 apples” will say something that points toward these particular topics of inquiry.
Often times, again due to the clips presenting a simulation of raw unedited footage, we see scenes that are not just verbal commentary but which explore realities of these topics in a more physical sense.
So this is very intentional. The game is not shy about it, and neither is Marissa.
Marissa Marcel says she was born in France but doesn’t have a French accent. She mentions her age twice in two separate interviews in the archive. The numbers don’t match up. She is cast as an ingenue, but never expresses any qualms about sex scenes or full frontal nudity. She is enamored by the movies, and the power of art.
You don’t have to watch Marissa Marcel that long before you get an understanding of the appeal of her character. She is an endlessly charismatic young woman with an unspoken air of mystery. A magnetic personality who seems to make everyone around her feel good. Born in a time where women like her were emblematic of the sexual revolution, of the modern world and the shift away from war time conservatism, of a new era in fashion and pop culture that put youth at the forefront. She seems almost like a spirit of the times; in one clip, worldly beyond her supposed years, and in the next, a human woman very clearly struggling against a changing world and those who would seek to “sculpt” her against her desires.
And she seems to find a kindred spirit in John Durick. In a lover who did not try to possess her, in a director who seemed to support her as more than a muse.
The game has several achievements, and theoretically, some of them are markers of the player’s understanding of the story. The first one of these that a player is most likely to discover is the achievement “What Happened to Carl Greenwood” which activates after finding the clip in Minsky where Marissa accidentally shoots her co-star.
There’s a sadness in finding out that Marissa’s career did not go as planned. That the spark of Marissa Marcel was extinguished early by a tragic accident. And there is a warmth in the idea of her returning to the screen, to Durick, to movies.
I am going to reveal at this point that I tried very hard to watch these clips mostly in order. Perhaps that’s not in the spirit of a Sam Barlow game, but the objective of the game was for me to figure out what was going on, and I saw that as the easiest way to do it. I would unlock clips via the hidden object “match cut” system, not watch them, and then when I had enough that I could piece meal the bulk of the story together, I would watch them in the narrative order, occassionally reviewing in the chronological (by order of filming) order so I could understand the frame story as much as the internal stories of the films.
So I didn’t watch any 2OE clips until I had gone through Ambrosio and Minsky quite significantly. I watched in my regular way, piecing as much together with the occassional gap, and I came across the image I started this essay on.
Marissa gives a phenomenal performance of her character Maria discovering that her double has been killed while masquerading as her. It’s a charged scene shot with a largely professional finish. And at the end of it, after they yell cut, John comes from behind the doorframe and embraces Marissa. Two artists celebrating what they’ve created together. It occured to me to match cut the scene of them embracing but it didn’t match anything.
This is a game where you can match kiss to kiss, foot to foot, breast to breast, ass to ass. Somehow, this is the only hug in 3 films worth of kissing and sex. To me, this was Immortality’s powerful scene. Its important moment. The human desparation of trying to make great art, to surpass mortality, and how we share that longing for eternity with others. The tenderness that is created in its wake.
Which, of course, was swept into the shit pile when it turns out that there weren’t any humans involved, just a “symbiotic parasite” wearing these people as skin suits.
Lecram Assiram fo Semit dna Efil Eht
Marissa Marcel is not real. Of course, she isn’t in the obvious sense that she is a fictional character. But within the world of the game, Marissa herself is just a facade being used by another force, which I will explain succinctly:
Maybe not aliens. But close enough. When you play the clips in reverse (a feature that the game forces you to use from the start and which might immediately clue you in to the game’s hidden mechanics), you will occasionally find a secret clip hidden nested within the clip you are watching. Sometimes just reversing is enough, sometimes, you’ll have to do a little more, and I’ll expound on that in a bit because it’s important to my personal experience of Immortality.
In these reverse clips, the player meets the “true” Marissa Marcel, a figure which the steam guide explaining the game’s story seems to refer to as “The One.” I have apparently seen 286 of the 288 clips. I cannot be asked to dig through and find the one I am missing to trigger the 288th and final clip, so if someone wants to link me to a video of that, I’d be moderately grateful. But anyway, in the 286 clips I’ve seen, I don’t think the figure is ever referred to as The One to my memory.
This appellation seems be extrapolated from the term used to refer to the second of the two figures, The Other One.
I did find a clip where The Other One refers to The One as “she,” so moving forward I will refer to The One as she and The Other One as he. I’m being gingerly about these pronouns, because the two of them, who I will collectively refer to as The Immortals, are not human.
They are in their own words, “symbiotic parasites.” Which is an oxymoron. They are inhuman creatures who exist outside of space but have great mastery over the domain of time, and who predate on people and essentially steal their bodies and memories, consuming their identity as individuals in the process. You might think this being an arthouse game, some of this information is like, the result of interpretation or guesswork. But no, it’s very very literal, they explain most of this in a stylized but still prosaic fashion, and they even, for no apparent reason beyond setting up the finale, manuever themselves into talking about what their secret weakness is. It’s fire, by the way. Fire kills them. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they can look directly at the camera and tell me.
I love it when I watch a trilogy of mysterious, ambiguous movies and then immediately have CinemaSins explain that actually, the point was aliens. It’s part of what I paid for in the ticket. The true 21st century experience of art. Asking someone else to tell you what you feel about something. Isn’t that why you’re reading this?
So, as for character: The One is fascinated by humans and their mortality and their art. She is much more central in that she spends the large part of all three films inhabiting Marissa. The Other One sees humanity as a failure after a long bygone attempt to “elevate” them by quite literally becoming Jesus and Mary (The One being Jesus and The Other One being Mary). Their disagreement continues into the modern day, where The Other One tracks down The One who has become enamored with cinema and a certain John Durick, and when he threatens to kill John while wearing the body of Carl Greenwood, The One shoots him. This wasn’t meant to kill him permanently.
I’ve chosen to explain this story in this linear fashion because this was the way I largely experienced the game. I did not understand that the ghostly overlays and the ominous (and unfortunately not loud enough) rolling of the Moviola machine was supposed to clue me in to whole scenes being hidden inside clips which I could only access if I matched the reversal speed properly. I saw a handful of the hidden clips featuring the Immortals, the ones that didn’t require me to screw around with the speed (I was on a keyboard, this is probably part of why it never clicked as you’re meant to literally roll it forward and back with a controller stick I believe), but for the major part of three movies, I did not really understand who the other Marissa was. Who her companion was. Only that they were hidden. That they were supernatural. That they had some sort of connection to Marissa and company, and I didn’t really get what that was. I thought maybe, despite The One saying quite clearly that she was Marissa Marcel, Marissa still existed as a person. This was wrong.
And then while trying to find clips for 2OE so I could watch it in my usual organized order. I found the ending.
I didn’t even get to watch it properly, because I hadn’t realized it was supposed to be the (chronologically) final clip so I just tabled it so I could watch it later in order. When I exited, the screen started filling up with The One’s face. Cut to her staring directly at the camera and saying “I am part of you now.” I get an achievement. Roll credits.
It was at this point I began to feel a great disappointment in this game.
The Possessor and the Possessed
Indrapramit Das’s The Devourers is a dark fantasy werewolf novel that re-imagines werewolves as shapeshifting predatory immortals who consume the life energy and memories of their human prey and sometimes take on their form in the process. It’s a good book, been a few years since I’ve read it, but I still recommend it.
The Devourers has an interesting narrative structure in that there’s a frame story about a translator making sense of a mysterious text written on human skin, and the nested stories that comprise his translation. It’s not the most complex, it is largely just one continuous story, about one of these werewolves who, unsatisfied with the vampiric nature of their reproduction process and a perhaps reverential to the point of fetishistic outlook toward the humans that he’s been preying upon, decides to rape a human woman and produce a child the old fashioned way.
What’s interesting is because the early parts are presented as a direct translation of his words, of his adoration for humanity, his dissatisfaction with what monsters he and his packmates are, you almost see his point of view.
And then the story is told from point of view of the woman who is raped. Who escapes from him and bares his child and protects that child from the wretched father who will stop at nothing to destroy the both of them and probably consume them so he might be one with what he’s created. The shift in perspective, and the order in which it happens, is important. It determines what story is being told.
I lied when I said Marissa Marcel wasn’t real in the world of Immortality. She was real but not as we ever know her in game. She was a French girl who died during World War II, the only ambiguity being whether it was entirely by The One’s hand or by external forces. I suppose it doesn’t matter. What matters is that The One consumed her and took her form.
This is a story about objectification.
Immortality tells me the story of the possessed first. Of the violated. Then it tells me the story of the possessor. Of the devourer. Concealed beneath the smiles of the consumed. All the while pretending that the possessor can continue to maintain the attributes of the possessed while wearing her skin like a mask. This is the most naive and ill thought through thing about this game. Where I can feel that all the creators’ energy has been directed at creating a twist and not in the consideration of what that twist is even saying.
The One hates men that would control her. Who would try to own her. But why? It’s not because she’s oppressed. She is considerably more powerful than they are, in that Hollywood way where a “strong female character” is one who commits a lot of masculine violence. Even her relationship with The Other One, who is marked as her equal in species and standing, does not particularly favor him in systemic power. And yet the game casts her struggling with these men as being identical to Marissa’s struggle with these men, in that they are supposed to be the same person, more or less.
But that’s the thing. They’re not the same person. One of them is a human woman, an actual person who realistically could have existed, and endured many of the things Marissa did, with only her own willpower to rely on to move forward in life. The other one is an immortal monster who despite being able to fuck or murder anyone at her pleasing without anyone even noticing, still, with great hubris, casts herself for the part of an innocent preyed upon by greater powers while meaninglessly attacking a man who is playing the role of villain… that she wrote for him.
That’s right. She casts herself. Because one of the late twists is that Marissa Marcel did not disappear. The One had just consumed a new host.
Portrait of the Artist as Inhuman
She kills John and becomes him. Because John thought he was the artist when he was the muse. What she really hated was the idea that humans thought they could be more than her. Because they were mortals, and she was better than that. And you know, that really does not have the same ring to it as mysterious and suppressed lost female artist.
A monster fetishizes humanity and tries to become part of it through a series of cheap mimicries, without ever once letting go of the high privilege of monstrosity. A familiar story. Any billionaires in the audience? Any Hessenbergs? Any devourers?
Immortality bears some deep confusion in this sense. On the one hand it wants to retain all its feminist themes and retain the nature of the central character, The One, as this sort of avenging angel figure. To try to imprint Marissa’s character and struggles onto her. But that’s not who The One is or can be, because of her positioning. She is not only not Marissa, she is also someone who quite explicitly violates Marissa’s body and selfhood by wearing her like a gown. Granting her immortality by destroying her as a person and reducing her to an image. And then crying about it. As artists do.
When she was herself, finished, she said It doesn’t look like
me. Picasso said, It will.— Three Proofs, by Richard Siken, from War of The Foxes
The One is never truly subjected to the dissections of the male gaze in the way Marissa is and her responses as if she were ring really hollow. There’s no convincing me that The One ever truly functions as the muse. Though she likes to play that role, as long as it’s on her terms. She is the director of the gaze. She is the artist, warping reality into what she wants it to be. Removing the living tissue that gets in the way of her aestheticism. And I’m meant to sympathize with her struggle to create real art because… she can’t quite do it the way she wants? Or am I meant to feel assaulted by The One’s intrusion into my personhood? I think the game’s creators are a bit too optimistic either way. Mostly I’m just gassy.
Then again, it isn’t true that The One is the ultimate power either. Because at the end of the day, the player is the one in control, the player is the one who moves time back and forth, the player is the one who turns off the game and goes to bed. Maybe she’s right to rail against a metaphysical oppressor and she just punches down at those lower on the rung of reality because she can’t truly punch up. Not at the player, not at the real director, not at anyone who actually exists. But the puffed up spectacle of a fictional character looking through the screen and telling me they are real and they are part of me forever and ever amen? Reader, I laughed at that shit. By this game’s measure, the abstinence pamphlets they handed out in my high school are part of me. And anyway, I really don’t give the creators credit in having thought this through in this way.
I admire that a lot of work went into this game. I can see that it was really hard to do something like this and bring it into the world. I know that some people really enjoy what it has to say about the bloody process of making art and that some people were very moved by a particular clip of the central character singing with someone else’s voice. But you know, I just don’t think that much of it. I thought it was going to be enjoyable enough to break down the reasons it didn’t work for me in an essay and that’s about it. Which is funny in that it is meant to be good enough to become immortal and live in my mind forever. The spectacle of how it delivers the twist has got a lot of people talking about it at least. I’ll be generous and say it’ll take a few years before the general public forgets this game ever existed. I wouldn’t be so smarmy if the game wasn’t putting on so many airs of grandeur, but hey, probably nothing I’ve done with my life will outlive me. Join the club.
I just find that taking a human story about the struggle to mean something in this world, the subsequent failure, and disappearance into obscurity; and then twisting it with this metafictional trick that ultimately doesn’t achieve much more than Doki Doki Literature Club, is well… sad. It’s a bit pathetic.
Oooh spooky, the videogame character is telling me it’s real. It’s looking at the camera. Oh my gob, it’s taking a selfie.
Earthbound did this trick in 1994. And a bunch of other games have done it since and maybe even before. I’m not saying I don’t like to see the same trick twice if it’s a good trick, but the shock value alone is not going to impress me. And I can’t say what surrounds the twist was good enough to do it either. In fact, the twist erodes the thing I really saw value in.
What I thought was a rare and genuine moment of human connection amidst artifice… was an alien patting itself on the back, for managing to meat puppet two people instead of just one. Gross.
So. Sam Barlow’s Immortality was interesting to me until it told me what it was. In its very direct and blunt manner. And I walk away from it, feeling no more consumed than before. The mystery was, in fact, greater than the answer.
