Marissa Marcel looks at the imagined audience drearily. She smiles, singing softly, "the two of us, we should have known better." Her lyrics acknowledge my presence in her story, but they don't address me directly. She sings, "you and I were meant to get along, but I want to cry when we get it wrong." For just a moment, she turns my way, looking right over the camera. She is ever so close to seeing me watching her. In the frame, I can see bits of a blood-red wall and a black microphone, but Marissa fills most of the screen. As she sings, her eyes drift from the audience off-screen to the floor. Her voice bears the burdens of two failed film productions. I'm nearing the end of her story, one riddled with elusive signs of ethereal transcendence and corrosion. The shot ends as she stops singing, wincing at a missed note or a failed performance. This was just a rehearsal, and something is disrupting the relationship between the viewer and the performer.
Did I miss something? There isn’t much here to investigate, but I know I must be close to seeing this story through. I scroll back through the footage, and a digital distortion manifests in place of Marissa - The One. They're still singing, now in black and white. The red background is gone, and only a black void fills the screen. Marissa is no more. Staring me down is a spiritual presence, never named in the breadth of Sam Barlow’s Immortality. Can it see me? I ask myself confused.
The presence sings too, but not with their own voice. “I’m gonna watch the blue bird sing…” the lyrics of the cover to Velvet Underground's, "Candy Says" ring out, distorted, “I’ve come to hate my body.” The One does not look like Marissa (the two are portrayed by different actresses). Their hair is slicked back, and their skin is oily. Stretching their arms out, the rubber-like dress's attached ends extend like wings. They are a fallen angel, a divine human-esque being, and they see me. We are separated only by the camera capturing and the screen mediating their gaze. Where Marissa looked at a fictional audience, silently burdened by my panoptic view, The One, shatters that and sings to me directly.
The lyrics continue, but their lips stop moving. Instead, they tilt their head back and close their eyes, basking in the sorrow of existence as a tear rolls down their face. And still, they watch me. They look at me again, with contempt. Am I holding them here? After a moment of stifled sobbing, The One walks off-screen, as the music accompanies complete darkness. Is my gaze the overwhelming cause of The One's sadness, a puppet forced to perform to my whims yet aware of my lingering view? Perhaps the only power The One has is to exit entirely.
Can one make peace with the discontented incongruence of living in a slowly decaying body and live on regardless? Immortality suggests that, through the artistic mediation of characters, people, and ideas, some part of us lives on. Even as we decay, we capture beauty and preserve ourselves for the future, sometimes when we would rather just walk away from ourselves, from the torment of life’s tensions. That preservation, however, does little to protect our most vulnerable expressions from exploitative witnesses or from obfuscation entirely. The housing of the screen is hardly more than a canvas to tamper with however the viewer sees fit. Although immortal now, The One is existentially bound to the viewing tendencies of whoever shuffles through her hidden presence.
I had only been playing Immortality for an hour or so when I first found The One. I was shuffling through a scene, watching Marissa walk around the set of a crime scene. Something wasn’t quite right, so I rewinded a bit. Marissa walked backward, out of the frame, and as we panned over to her, she was gone. Instead, I was being watched by The One, invoked from beneath the subtext. They said something that I don’t quite remember. I do remember how I felt. If art captures and preserves the essence of its subjects forever, then do they watch us from within its recesses? Do they gaze, lurking beneath the frame, just out of sight? I felt shocked as I gazed into the eyes of an unknown subject who was now watching me. For so long, I’ve felt immune to media, guarded by the safe mask of the screen, but no more. Now, I was exposed.
The game, and it is a game, tasks players with sorting through hours of footage from behind the scenes of three failed film productions. Players can fast-forward, rewind, and pause the frame to investigate. With a cursor, players can select an item in the frame, which will then match cut to another shot that holds a similarly shaped item. The only way forward is to search within the depth of the screen, spotting the persons and objects that may be hidden from view. Sure, one could just click on Marissa’s face repeatedly, but they will only get so far. No, Immortality asks players to see beyond the direct subject, to look into the periphery. And it is what they see that guides their journey. It is what they see that determines how its essence will live on.
The film productions are highly elaborate, containing the many on-set tensions, exploitations, and discomforts one would expect from a Hollywood studio. Marissa is a female actress, and her first director is a brash, misogynistic man with a domineering presence. We watch, behind the scenes, as he pressures actresses to expose themselves against their will to capture sex scenes. As The One lives on in Marissa, so does the cruelty she experiences live on in our witnessing of it. We choose what to watch, we choose when to look away, and we choose what to look for. The direction of our focus shapes the form of The One’s existence in us.
Immortality does not configure a perfect immortal person - it sustains a perpetually tormented one. With the full context of their experience in view and the directorial power of our engagement in hand, the subjects become reborn. I’ve never felt quite like I did when I first played Immortality, and I like to think that feeling is a testament to the Immortality of Marissa, The One, and Sam Barlow, who have all seen me, taking residence in my memory until I pass them on to someone else. Immortality depicts a mutual viewing, as users shape (and in some regards control) the continued existence of mediated subjects. The game suggests that those subjects watch expectantly, longing to exist as more than pleasurable puppets, or worse, forgotten victims.
Even now, months later, I remain discomforted by the thought that the essences of those I've seen watch me, imploring me to be shaped by their stories, that they may exist for more than my viewing pleasure.