Immortality
What a tragic thing. Immortality is the product of such obvious talent, such meticulous crafting, such transparent labor. You look at it and think, god, this must’ve caused some sleepless nights. It tries so hard.
And yet, all of that work is spent on a project so boldly tedious, so profoundly self-sabotaging that I almost despair for it. Immortality is a game about artists working themselves to death in the pursuit of perfection, in a world that will not allow it. The dark twist is that the art they create is largely mediocre. It’s meta. It’s an exploding star.
This is an FMV game that, ostensibly, tasks you with uncovering the fate of Marissa Marcel, a would-be starlet of the late ’60s who vanished from public view before ever appearing in a completed film. She then reemerged 30 years later, seemingly no older, only to go missing again. You search for clues by scrubbing through video clips associated with the three movies she helped create: Ambrosio, a sultry parable about the corruption of a monk by the devil; Minsky, a sleazy ’70s detective noir set in the NYC art world; and Two of Everything, a late-‘90s thriller about a pop star and her body double. Beyond the “actual” movie scenes, you see little moments in the spaces around “action” and “cut,” along with table reads, talk show interviews, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and the like.
Undergirding it all is a story of Hollywood misogyny. Ambrosio, in which Marissa plays a literal demon, is directed by a Hitchcock stand-in known for “sculpting” his actresses. “Your job is to be looked at,” he tells her and a co-star during one table read. We see her smile through salacious interview questions from a faux Johnny Carson. She finds greater liberation through Minsky, a femme fatale flick she creates with lover and Ambrosio DP John Durick, but it becomes clear that Durick sees her as a means to creative ends. She is his muse, that thing, and the camera’s peering eye is his. Two of Everything is more modern, but its story of revenge on a skeevy billionaire who assaults a star artist is easy to read as a reflection on the structures that exploit and dismantle women like her for the sake of male gratification. Marissa is not some helpless damsel in all of this, importantly: She is playful, perceptive, charismatic and sexy. But time and again, she is at the mercy of egoist men (there’s no other kind) as they bombard the world with their bad art.
You unearth clips semi-randomly, through a mechanic Immortality calls the “match cut.” By pausing any clip and clicking on certain objects in the frame — a face, a clapperboard, an exposed breast, an apple, a lampshade — you’ll warp to another clip that’s tethered to that object in some fashion. Clicking on a gun in Minsky could take you to the rehearsal of an action scene for Two of Everything. Andy Warhol shows up at one point; clicking on his face sent me to a shot of a silver tiger statue adorned with a moppy blond wig.
The ways Immortality uses this to spotlight its visual motifs can be clever. And the game impresses as a monument to pastiche. It captures the character of three distinct styles of filmmaking, if not exactly then how our minds remember them. There’s a pleasure to watching it flitter between aesthetics, its actors shifting cadences and flipping in and out of Actor Mode while always acting for us.
The problem it’s still pastiche, so you spend most of Immortality watching impressions of better films. Minsky is a hokey Klute; Two of Everything is no Mulholland Drive. Shots will often present clickable objects in unnatural ways just to ensure you notice them. This is all, in part, by design. But you still need to bore through it.
The game’s scattershot structure is bold: You’ll finish it without resolving every plot thread or realizing some strands exist at all. But because it has to account for you being in one of 200 clips at any given time, it must necessarily have the majority of those scenes hammer home the same themes and motifs. A two-hour movie about the curative and destructive properties of creation and sexist power structures that deny women’s voices is noble. An eight-hour game with three separate films all conveying the same ideas is too, but it can only ever become stagnant. I know, you want to yell at it. It is a video game that gets more egregious, more graceless, the more you play it.
That bluntness is amplified to an astounding degree by the game’s hidden layer. Soon after you start, you’ll hear a deep bass tone play at specific points in certain clips. Your controller will vibrate at the same time. If you rewind at just the right speed when this happens, Marissa will suddenly be replaced by a different character. She cuts an ethereal, menacing figure, with piercing eyes and slicked white-blonde hair. In some scenes, we see her startle and harm the same people Marissa performs with on the “surface.” In others, she monologues on the nature of creation, religion and death. Oftentimes, she is shown with a similar, yet more masculine figure.
The first time you stumble upon these two, it’s chilling. It makes you think about the structural ways films comfort us, how often they keep us at a safe distance. The threat of realities lying in wait behind the screen, staring back at us, is jarring. Then they start talking.
We learn that these hidden figures are actually immortal beings. The woman is named The One, the man is The Other One. Remember the mystery set at the top, about determining what happened to Marissa? Turns out that’s kind of bullshit. In the game’s fiction, “Marissa Marcel” is a skin suit, a French girl The One found dying in a field around World War II and subsequently consumed. Later, she kills Durick and assumes his form after he reacts negatively to the revelation of her true nature. During the filming of Two of Everything, a movie about body doubles, The One tries and fails to be Marissa and Durick simultaneously. Throughout, she is tethered to The Other One, who shows up in various forms to plant doubt in her mind that any of these artistic endeavors are worthwhile.
The One, you see, is a manifestation of humanity’s desire to create, to find freedom through expression, be it film or sex, no matter how much it may kill us to chase our passion. The Other One, conversely, is a manifestation of law, the orders that dominate persons through fear and destruction. Their conflict is destiny; it is core to artistry and liberty. The Passion itself is their story. And it doesn’t take a film studies degree to see how all of this runs parallel to the surface-level tragedy of Marissa and Hollywood power imbalances.
Here’s the thing: None of this is really my interpretation. It might’ve been, but then the game trotted The One out to explain that whole “artistry versus law” bit up there in no uncertain terms. We are told they staged the crucifixion in an attempt to “elevate” humanity. We are told how they take on forms, how their race has dwindled over the centuries, even how they can be killed (fire). We are given dozens of clips in which The One and The Other One surgically and systematically convert all of the game’s subtext into text:
It’s fake, it’s a movie, The Other One sneers during one sex scene. No! The One screams, slamming her fists and storming off.
***
The Other One: Do you know any artists who aren’t disgusting?
The One: Stay away!
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***
The One: What they do, what they create is worthwhile.
The Other One: They’re monkeys flinging shit.
The One: There’s more to life than just existing.
The Other One: There is, but not this.
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The One: I made some movies. With each one I tried to make it perfect.
***
The Other One: The apple and snake were my idea.
***
The One (standing next to two dead men with slit throats): Artists create, transform, and destroy. They find bodies and capture them, own them, tether themselves to immortality. Symbiotic parasites.
It goes on like this. Almost all of them end with someone staring directly into the camera. I know, you want to yell at it, again.
Let me be clear here: This destroys the entire game. The One and The Other One still operate on a symbolic level — they stretch the themes of Marissa’s story out to a more philosophical, cosmic plane. Immortality isn’t just some Game About Aliens, the way Dead Space is. But the details of its metastory are far more literal than you’d think. It veers Immortality closer to the realm of the mystery box, a puzzle to be solved, a work distrustful of its audience and afraid to let itself speak for itself. Its material level, with its actors who worked and dreamed and died together, its gray-area motivations, its people, says it all. It is ham-fisted, but you could sit with it, consider it. With the twist, Immortality becomes a game about answers. It shows you what it’s really all about, and you must bear witness to a satisfactory amount of its explanations to finish it.
This, in turn, immediately makes the events of Immortality‘s “real-world” layer feel less important. When everything you’re seeing is revealed to be an incomplete truth, it becomes fodder to get through, not work to engage with. Put plainly, it makes watching dozens of clips from purposefully hacky films exponentially more boring, particularly as you circle closer to its climax, hoping the game serves up the last clip you need. Look, I’m sure this was intentional: Having us scrub through creative works like madmen, looking for a reality that may or may not be there, is a clever way to demonstrate how artists and audiences can miss the forest for the trees. But these are the conditions Immortality creates. A player will follow them.
While we’re on this idea, an aside: Immortality is outwardly repulsed by the male gaze, yet uniquely revels in it. There are frequent, carefully framed shots of pressured women getting naked and fucking. Reader, there are tits out all over the place. You can click one, treat it as another object, and be zoomed to another boob shot in a different era. The idea, presumably, is to have you reflect on the perversions of these leering cameras, on how you as a viewer are complicit in consuming them.
But you must ask back: Who is setting the terms here? Immortality constructs the exact conditions required to get you to Click On Some Tits — the precise framing, the length of exposure, the pause and rewind buttons, the very “match cut” mechanic that implores you to look for common visual motifs and entities that stand out to progress the game forward. These were all deliberate decisions. When I follow through on all of these nudges, I do not think that I’m being creepy so much as I’m playing the game in front of me. In this way, Immortality is the Spec Ops: The Line of arthouse indies. Presenting the thing that distresses you is not the same as critiquing it. Having the player perform the action you set them up to perform carries no profundity.
You’ll notice I’ve written a lot about what Immortality shows and tells, and not so much about how it plays. That’s because there isn’t much to say. You watch a clip, listen for the hrrrnn, then hold the stick back until a new clip pops up. If there’s no “subverted” scene, you click on something that catches your eye; hopefully it’ll take you somewhere new. There is little natural drama to this. The structure compels, and the way it drives you to pay attention to the margins of clips to find “match cuts” is great, even if that can dilute the gist of what’s happening onscreen. But your role, mostly, is to sit, watch, and let Immortality cudgel you with its melodrama. You either see a clip or don’t. It has little room for a person to make decisions.
Do you think this review has gone on long enough? Do you get why Immortality turned me off yet? I think it sees interactivity as a hindrance. I think forcing you to watch semi-intentionally middling films is a drag. I think pointing out the male gaze is not an incisive criticism. I think it explains itself too much. The stuff with the immortal beings especially. That part. Yeah. I think there’s too much of it. It goes on too long. It’s redundant. Unnecessary. Surplus. Inessential. Kinda like a closing paragraph of an already bloated 2,300-word review that only exists to reemphasize everything you just read. (Wink.) You get what I’m doing here, with this bit, right? You saw me write “wink” just then? You see the irony of writing three synonyms for the word “redundant”? I am reiterating everything you just read, in a way that mirrors my experience of playing this game, whose writing and imagery is often so on-the-nose it could break your cartilage. You get that, right? You see what I’m doing? What I’m saying? I hope you do. Writing is hard.
Immortality ends with all of your gathered clips disappearing to reveal a tight close-up on The One’s face. “I’m part of you now,” she utters, her eyes fixed on your soul. She has achieved immortality, her art having left an indelible mark within me. She sheds tears. She is right.
2/10
Note: This review was originally published on my blog, Jeff Reviews Games.
