It’s been really interesting to me that recent release Immortality confronts, among many other
uncomfortable aspects of art and the entertainment industry, the rocky waters of auteurism. A woman
quietly breaks down in tears in a prolonged close up, as a priest lectures on spiritual purity in
the background. In the vacuum in which we first witness it, this is a beautiful, perfectly acted
snapshot of vulnerability, of shame—and yet, she’s shouted down, humiliated by her off-screen
director in a room full of her peers. Make sure she pulls herself together, she’s ruined the shot.
This muted breakdown wasn’t part of the (coincidentally, remarkably Hitchcockian)
director’s vision—a vision we’re told at multiple points he is fiercely protective of. Now,
not only do I struggle to imagine a scenario where this lengthy shot is somehow made better
by removing such emotional intimacy, but it also begs the rather harrowing question—why,
then, is she crying? What happened to her? If you’re anything like me, your brain suddenly
goes into full-blown detective mode, analysing every detail of the frame, inferring what you
can from every object, every wayward glance; noting down your findings as you swiftly move
past this snippet of footage, with all the turmoil contained within, in search of answers, as well as
all-new questions… just as you’ve been trained to do over director Sam Barlow’s now-trilogy of
utterly singular, postmodern FMV mystery games. This is my point—no one else is making games
like this. Sam Barlow may now be working with large teams of people who do a stellar job and
deserve recognition, but it’s become difficult to define this type of game—starting with
2015’s Her Story and including 2019’s Telling Lies—as anything other than a Barlow joint.
While presenting us this narrative that suggests there is more to these products of supposedly
singular minds within entertainment that we don’t see—showing us very directly the human cost
that can often accompany such ill-managed dedication to a vision—Barlow has arguably
cultivated an image of himself as the textbook, Truffaut-approved definition of an auteur.
Now, one could reasonably view this duality as a “have your cake and eat it” situation—and
god knows Immortality, as with Barlow’s previous work, has its issues. Or, as I’ve come to read it,
you could see Immortality as a messy, but honest struggle with the multifaceted nature of art;
the meaning, the power we derive from it; its place in society, complicated by the
mechanisms of industry it exists within. Barlow is an auteur wary of auteurs,
just as Immortality is an often-electrifying example of the truly transcendent power of art,
simultaneously scrambling for an answer to the question— “in our pursuit of such artistic
transcendence, do we ignore – or worse, justify - the pain caused in its wake?”
In a manner similar to the ambiguity found in Barlow’s previous work, this more abstract,
thematic question becomes almost more important for the player to solve, than the central mystery
surrounding the life of promising young actress Marissa Marcel—whose entire body of filmed work,
both on-screen and behind the scenes, is yours to trawl through clip by clip.
Thankfully though, said trawling, such mystery solving, is facilitated by perhaps the most
refined mechanics found in a Barlow interface-sim yet—the novelty of Immortality’s specific suite
lying in your ability to click on an object or person in any given scene, whereupon the game
will, as closely as is possible, match cut you to another clip where something similar is found.
Tonally, the interface itself feels closer to the grime of Her Story; colder than the
comparatively cosy OS of Telling Lies. No handy notetaking feature, no games of solitaire,
no cat walking across the keyboard – in a series of games in which every single feature is a
storytelling device, creating this razors edge between convenience and narrative consistency,
that the diegeses of these games precariously dangle upon, Immortality deliberately,
wisely opts for the spartan approach. This isn’t to say that the kinds of rabbit holes
you would previously tumble into with these games, aren’t present here in spades – where you’d notice
one little detail that would totally derail your previous line of enquiry, forcing you to try and
keep tabs on all these narrative plates spinning at once. It’s just that in Immortality, you’re
less getting lost down a rabbit hole than you are directly, aggressively boring your way through it.
If you see something that piques your curiosity, you don’t exit out of the clip to note down your
findings, you click on it – finding yourself quickly cascading from decade to decade, fashion
to fashion, relationship to relationship; aspect ratio, dialogue, lighting, film stock, audio
mixing, all shifting on you in a moment’s notice as you nonetheless try to construct a coherent
timeline, containing the three film projects featured in Immortality – more ambitious in scope
than any of Barlow’s prior projects for sure, and crucially, all the better to destabilise your
understanding of what exactly is going on here. See, while figuring out what’s going on in these
games has always been a daunting task, it’s at least been grounded by the fact that you aren’t
just exploring these interfaces as yourself—you are playing an actual character. Sure, deducing
your character’s identity becomes its own piece of the puzzle, but in these games you’re at least
confident that you are a real person, in the real world, mechanically turning a narratively
consistent crank in order to witness these events that have happened strictly in the past.
Immortality, along with any quality-of-life features, does away with such grounded framing.
Indeed, following what felt like hours of watching attractive people wax poetic on
the lofty meaning of art while uncomfortably flirting with each other – you know, just as I
was beginning to wonder what the point of all of this was - Immortality decided to play its hand;
it made its hook clear, and I just about leapt out of my chair at 1 in the morning,
the shift was so jarring. Immortality is, moreso than any Barlow title previously, a horror game.
These games have always dealt very directly with an uncomfortable voyeurism – your game-like desire
to find out more about any given scenario being deliberately countered with that sneaking feeling
that you’re looking into snapshots of people’s lives that they didn’t consent to you looking
at. But Immortality not only ups the ante in terms of the often-unpleasant intimacy of what
you’re looking at – it’s as if you’re waiting for the footage itself to jump out at you,
to harm you like the pain you witness on screen. It’s to the point that the ominous drone you
hear at very specific points throughout the game – initially reading as a cheesy,
uncharacteristically on-the-nose indicator that something was off about what I was witnessing,
ended up causing my stomach to drop every time I heard it; as I dreaded the downright sinister
alternate reality that I would inevitably feel compelled to dig into – forcing me to become
an active participant in the game’s horror; to throttle the footage, and the actors within it,
into a jerking, frenzied mess. I simply needed to know more, to get an insight into the reality
of the situation – despite, and this is key, every fibre of my being screaming at me to just
let the footage play; to stay in the realm of the artistic, where it didn’t feel real, where I could
maintain that artistic distance from proceedings. It’s a form of what’s called alienation technique
at work here. The meta-narrative occurring just underneath the surface of these clips arguably
feels less real than what we immediately see on-screen – I mean, you’re required to distort
and bend the physical rules of reality in order to see it. And yet, it still jolts you out of
the comfort zone of the artistic; throwing to the wayside the period-specific film stock in
favour of modern, silky smooth frame rates; staring dagger-eyed outside of the screen,
directly into the soul of the player – a sudden, unsettling shift into your own reality; a call
to consider the actions happening in rehearsals, and their deeply unfortunate real-world parallels.
Now all of this talk isn’t to say Immortality is without its flaws of course. For one, if you were
just to take the game on its surface level plot, I wouldn’t blame you for seeing its impact lessen,
as the game would transition from interpretive ambiguity and meditation on heady concepts,
to increasingly literal, increasingly daft revelations. If you want to know what I mean,
roll credits, then go read the actual synopsis on Wikipedia. Let’s just say that some details
are best left to your imagination. But to me, that text, what’s literally
happening on screen, has never really what’s drawn me to these games, but rather the way
it’s all conveyed to the player. That’s the real story—that’s what makes these games so
utterly captivating, and Immortality takes this already unique narrative formula to
some pretty staggering places in that regard. I’ve previously compared Her Story to Vladimir
Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, in that both make a game out of uncovering the details and rules
of a new narrative world as much as the titular poem or murder mystery itself. With Immortality,
this literary comparison is taken to its logical extreme; creating the same multiple,
winding parallel realities as found in the book; you know, where the character of Charles Botkin
shifts from literary scholar to apparent ruler of the kingdom of Zembla, so too does Immortality
lurch from merely a bunch of people making films, through to godlike creatures inhabiting
and feasting on the consciousness of artists. As such, it can often feel like trying to figure
out the hierarchy of which is the most “correct” reality here can be an unwinnable game – flying
off the handle as frequently as it does – but interestingly, in Immortality’s case,
it does so in a way that directly reflects the struggles of our characters on screen, as they
try to make sense of, and work their way through the murky world of the entertainment industry.
In Immortality’s vision of Hollywood, the relationship between director and actor,
or even actor and actor, isn’t presented as some easily understood hierarchy of power, but rather
a devious twisting of reality, complicated by evolving industry trends of the various
eras we’re transported to - which filmmaker is this week’s hot commodity or whatever.
It’s as if lifted straight out of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish – such obfuscation of
the mechanisms of power (who is calling the shots and all that) leaves the people you see
on screen unsure whether they’re being forced into uncomfortable situations by others, or if
they chose to be there themselves—momentarily shielded as they are by talk of how important
the artistic creation they’re working on is; how they are 100% dedicated to the director’s vision;
how they are supposedly a crucial part of having said vision realised.
But as I see it (and I need to emphasise that all of this is my highly subjective interpretation)
Immortality’s exploration of the relationship between art and control doesn’t end there,
far from it. You know, where do I, as a player, fit into this “chain of power” as
the game describes it? While I may not be playing a character in Immortality,
I’m still manipulating this footage to my own specific whims – I have to get to the bottom of
this mystery, but what will that answer actually solve? I’m not getting the extremely personal
closure that characters in Her Story or Telling Lies seek, for instance - in the game’s fiction,
people are still hurt, dead. In my own word salad pondering about this or that technique or
placement of a specific object, am I not falling into the same trap as the characters do in-game?
That is to say, does my focus on Immortality as a really important artistic piece, figuring
out what it all means, potentially blind me to the immediate peril its characters seem to be in? Even
if that’s the case, though, what other purpose is there to engaging with Immortality? Sure,
I can rewind time, to a point where I can pretend this awful stuff didn’t happen, but
I can’t help these people – I’m merely observing a snapshot, a disparate fragment of someone’s life.
But is to deny my own agency over this situation - to say that merely engaging with Immortality,
this piece of art, isn’t going to change anything - to deny what I’ve always seen to
be the transcendent power of art itself? Playing this game, looking at these images is genuinely
awe-inspiring in the moment, but what can art really achieve if all we see it doing is hurting,
crushing those involved in its creation? Hopefully you see what I mean when I say this
is the specific rabbit hole Immortality has sent me down (you can see what I mean when I call this
spiralling) – the beauty of its ambiguity causing my brain to fly into an interpretive frenzy,
keeping any definitive answers just out of reach, and instead encouraging me to
examine the questions I’m asking in the first place. And yet, I think, at the core of it all,
Immortality actually does possess a surprisingly solid answer to this line of enquiry; regarding
the value of art, and the wealth of seemingly conflicting ideas surrounding its creation.
Indeed, despite how consistently its characters seem to ponder what it all means, whether said
pondering is a part of filmed dialogue or snippets of conversation caught in between takes,
perhaps my ultimate takeaway from the game is that what these people say, what they do,
is barely art. Instead, I see it as a peak example of the kind of mindset the game very
directly warns players against, or at the very least points out—the potential, for those who
wish to control others, to use art as a shield. These people aren’t artists, they’re arseholes!
The end-product of their process, their grand vision, the lengthy diatribes they go on
about exploring the human condition and all that, amounting to little more than finally
getting to fuck someone; someone getting fucked. A fully hollow exercise, perpetuated by forces
these people can’t understand; each tryst adding one more scar, until the person underneath is
calloused, unrecognisable; numbed to the pain they endure under the guise of creating art,
the promise of cultural immortality, of not being forgotten… only deepening the irony that,
at the end of the day, none of the films even come out. It’s all for nought.
I mean, while a lot of these shots and sequences are truly gripping, Immortality arguably doesn’t
need to go to the lengths it does in order to answer the question of “what happened to Marissa
Marcel.” A woman is aggressively humiliated by her director for quietly breaking down in a scene.
Another woman’s nose starts bleeding to be told “this isn’t going to work” by a man coldly holding
a snake towards the camera. Even tearing through the fabric of different realities, the need for
certain people to control others – to cause or ignore pain in the process – remains constant. The
entertainment industry is just a very prominent, public-facing path for people to exert such
control - chewing people up and spitting them out with alarming, desensitising regularity. And so,
Marissa’s predicament, sans its supernatural dressing, is, depressingly, not hard to predict.
In short, I don’t view Immortality as a case of Barlow having his cake and eating it. Rather, it’s
an honest attempt to keep people vigilant of those that would seek to control rather than create,
bolstered by the fact that this is arguably Barlow’s grandest narrative experiment yet;
a singular vision for sure, but one that he obviously couldn’t realise without working
closely, effectively with incredibly large teams of people; without being open to others
offering input and helping shape that vision in subtle ways—of valuing the people he works
with. Immortality serves as a warning, while also just seeking to be a great piece of art. It can
be both, the game seems to argue, and in doing so, further cements my belief that Barlow and
his team remain at the forefront of pushing the true narrative potential of video games forward.
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