Where is Marissa Marcel?

On Friday, I gushed to a friend about this game I was playing called Immortality. I told her the gameplay was fantastic, that the method of interactivity was so simple yet so innovative at the same time. I told her the story was fascinating to explore. I told her that, as a huge fan of Old Hollywood, I saw that they nailed so many of the period details, down to the lighting.

On Saturday I finished the game, and I felt like I should call her back and retract my praise.

Immortality is innovative; it’s engrossing; it’s deft in its simplicity. But the story commits the same acts of misogyny that the game purports to critique.

Immortality presents itself as the long-lost, recently re-discovered archive of the film career of a young actress named Marissa Marcel. Once seen as an up-and-coming talent, Marissa has seemingly disappeared. None of the three films she appeared in were ever released, for unknown reasons. Marissa’s story is interlaced with mysterious deaths, acts of violence, sexual harassment and abuse. The player is invited to watch the footage, and to attempt to piece together what happened to Marissa. Gameplay is straight-forward– the player can swipe right to fast-forward the footage, swipe left to rewind. The most interesting gameplay element is that the player can also zoom in on certain elements of the footage– for example, an object in the background, or a character’s face– and the game will jump them to another piece of footage where the same (or a similar) object or person appears. In this leapfrogging manner the player ends up discovering a path through the footage and making their way towards the truth of what happened to Marissa Marcel.

However, the truth is a lot more complicated than it may originally seem.

—SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE ENDING OF IMMORTALITY—

In short– the person known as Marissa has been possessed by a nameless immortal being referred to in the credits as The One. The One, and her companion, The Other One, have been with humanity for thousands of years. (They’re said to have been involved in the death of Christ. This thing of “fictional characters being inserted into real history” is a peeve of mine, a real cheap grab at unearned grandeur– except when it’s the Cigarette Smoking Man.) They devour human beings, possess them, and live within their bodies. The relationship between The One and the people they possess is normally transactional– they use these bodies for survival. But The One has affection for Marissa, and becomes emotionally invested in “keeping” her.

The One lurks within Marissa’s footage. Spin a tape backwards, and suddenly she’s there in Marissa’s place. When you first discover her hiding place, it’s jaw-dropping. Dozens of the tapes can be spun backwards to discover a hidden message from The One. She talks about her conflict with The Other One, who disapproves of how strongly she feels about Marissa, and humanity in general; she talks about all the times she has been killed, and by all the different methods.

Yet The One, and indeed the game itself, seems uninterested in the question I find most pressing: is Marissa still there?

Possession has been used as a plot device for centuries, but usually the stories that use this plot are interested in clarifying the distinction between host and parasite. Lohse in Divinity: Original Sin II is possessed by a demon who wants to ride her body into godhood; he lurks in the back of her mind and takes her over when he feels that she is resisting his plans. On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it was originally stated that when a human becomes a vampire, they human soul disappears and a demon takes over the form. They later changed this and decided vampirism instead takes the original personality and turns it evil, because they thought that having the human stick around made for more interesting storytelling. Immortality is unclear about what, exactly, the dynamic is between Marissa and The One, and it makes for a muddled story with unclear intent.

The game reveals that The One found Marissa dying in a field in France during WWII, after having been attacked (and, it’s implied, raped) by German soldiers. The One falls in love with Marissa instantly and consumes her, taking over her body. After this, Marissa goes to London and begins her film career. But did she do this, or did The One do this? Is Marissa talented, or is The One talented?

In another clip, The One says that she gets flashes of memories from her various hosts, and that it’s sometimes difficult to remember if she experienced something, or a host did, or which host did. It’s not clear if this means her hosts are present with her, or not. Certainly Marissa and The One behave very differently, implying some independence– but then, The One constantly refers to things that happened to Marissa as things that happened to her. Someone wrote a script for her, a director fell in love with her. At one point The One reveals her true self to the director of Marissa’s second and third films, John Durick, who is appalled; she attacks him.

I am very pro-ambiguity in storytelling; for example, I love the work of David Lynch. But the thing that makes Lynch effective is that even when his stories enter a dreamlike, illogical place, where the plot may not make conventional sense, it always makes emotional sense. Something like Laura Palmer being visited by an angel makes an instinctual, visceral sense. There is a level of emotional coherence and continuity to a David Lynch film that does not exist in this game. I’m okay walking in the dark if I have a rope to hold on to. Immortality has no rope.

An Edge Magazine article on the game by Chris Schilling raises the question during a conversation between Carlotta Mohlin, who plays The One, and Manon Gage, who plays “Marissa”. Emphasis mine:

The connection between the two characters is fascinating, and raises a question that the game doesn’t fully answer, and that both actors say wasn’t really articulated within the script. When The One devours someone, how much of that person remains? How much of Marissa Marcel is still in there? For her part, Mohlin believes that “Marissa is still very much Marissa, just experiencing new things. And also getting all the wisdom and worldly knowledge that The One has, combined with her naivete and limited amount of experience. So it’s very much an amalgamation of the true Marissa and The One’s interpretation of the world through her.” Gage addresses her co-star: “. . . It’s a really good question because when we were shooting this, I was not thinking about that very much at all.”

The strongest defense of this reading– that Marissa is alive, and to some extent aware– is in the scenes surrounding Marissa’s accidental shooting of her co-star, Carl Greenwood, on set. In a scene set chronologically immediately before the shooting, Marissa tearfully tells her director, John Durick, that Carl “is not who you think he is” (i.e., he is possessed by The Other One. But then, again, if Marissa still exists, does that not mean that Carl also still exists?). In a self-tape following the shooting, Marissa tells the camera she “has to go away for a while”. Then, it’s implied, she simply pops out of existence until The One brings her back and embodies her again.

My frustration with this reading is that these are some of the few hints we get towards Marissa’s mindset and awareness. The game labours over making sure we understand The One’s point of view but offers little similar for Marissa.

If Marissa was fully devoured by The One when they first met, then there is no Marissa. In the same way the film industry devours and puppets young women, The One has devoured and puppeted her. Marissa Marcel died during WWII; the person wearing her face after that is someone else.

However, if Marissa is still alive in there, where is she? The game has clip after clip of The One discussing her backstory, her experiences of persecution, what it’s like to be immortal– yet I still feel as though I hardly know who Marissa is as a person. She is the central figure of this game and yet she is hollow. The glimmers of the woman we see out of character are compelling; she seems funny, charming, sincere, passionate about her career. But the eternal question remains– who is this? Is this the parasite, or her host? How does she feel about being possessed? Does she love the power? Is she frustrated that her acting career– about which she does seem passionate, in the behind-the-scenes clips we find from the first film she’s featured in– is constantly being stymied by her own dark passenger? Is she aware of what’s happening in the deeper layer, of her parasite’s interactions with The Other One? Marissa disappears in 1970 and pops up again in 1999. How does she feel about skipping thirty years? We don’t know; the game doesn’t care.

Either story– no Marissa, or some Marissa– could have been told in a fascinating way. If Marissa is dead, we are watching the Pinocchio story of a godlike parasite who “wants to be a real girl”. If Marissa is alive, we are watching a human being wrestle with the power of the godhood she never asked for. But the game rides a noncommital line between the two possibilities.

What most frustrates me is that the game seems to not even care about this question which seems so fundamental to our understanding of the entire story. Equally frustrating is that the game is lauded for its “skewering” of film industry sexism… while recreating it!

The earlier Edge Magazine article contains a quote from game director Sam Barlow, referring to his viewing of a David Letterman interview where the TV host letches over young actress Phoebe Cates:

“There was like a dumb, wish-fulfillment part of me that was like: wouldn’t it be cool if actually, inside of these characters on screen, there was a being who was incredibly powerful and significant– and if this powerful being could exist, then it could then just kind of run around, stabbing the patriarchy and slapping it across the face.”

The funny thing about this is, again, that this game’s parasite embodies patriarchy, embodies literally consuming a vulnerable woman, controlling her, dictating her life, using her as a pawn, literally making her un-exist, then bringing her back out of the blue when it gets bored. Having completed the game, I feel as though, despite the innovative and compelling storytelling decide, despite the attention to detail in crafting authentic 60s, 70s, and 90s worlds– that the game never truly evolved past Barlow’s simplistic point of view in the quote above.