immortality makes you an editor
(no spoilers, really, though you should really play immortality)
you see a lot of film crew in immortality. I cannot name most of the job titles because I am an film studies idiot, but among others, you see actors, directors, writers (well, writers who are also directors and actors, but writing is an explicitly identified role), executive producers, PAs, costume and set designers, body doubles and extras, the folks holding the boom mikes, the folks who clap the clapper boards.
but you never once see (or hear about! or have any allusions to!) an editor. I’d like to suggest the possibility that this gap is intentional, because the person who fills that role in immortality is you, the player.
now, another very obvious reason for this absence is that all of the clips in immortality are pre-production (we’ll come back to this), and also because none of immortality’s movies were ever, in the fictional reality, finished. in the fictional world, an editor never had the chance to work with the “stuff” of the movies, to form them into finalized things.
but this also means that immortality, both in its totality and across the three films it purports to preserve, is only decipherable through active work on the player’s part to assemble its glut of film footage into something that strings into an actual story. the direction in which they pass through this footage involves scrubbing, skipping to key bits, and the game’s central mechanic: the creation of “match cuts.” the player is the only one who mechanically produces cuts footage in immortality!
the “match cut,” and the continuity of editing that it produces, is one of the cruxes of film as a language we can understand and to which we can respond. (remember as a caveat that I am an idiot about film and most of my knowledge of it comes from, like, the folding ideas youtube channel) the first star wars is often thought of as a movie “saved in the edit,” though it’s probably more accurate to say that it, like most movies, was created in the edit: an editor took a mess of film, a pile of scraps, and plucked out the best bits to weave together, sort of like a kid with a huge box of LEGOs, grabbing just the right parts from the shapeless mass to assemble the car in his mind.
note too how a lot of what we associate with film only comes into play within the act of gameplay. there’s music in immortality, but the in-universe movies themselves have no soundtrack: whether or not the music in the game’s background becomes foreground or background depends on how the player manipulates the film. (watch a longer scene of dialogue and the music drops away; jump rapidly across cuts and the music fills in to score the montage). the vignetting, cross-cutting, and panning of the match cut is the only act of VFX present “within” the films (I’d also include in that the triggering of the secret reverse shots).
someone I threw this idea at noted that it’s not really dissimilar to the broader process of narrative mystery games — uncovering clues and piecing together motives and truths from gathered context, finding a story within apparent chaos. true enough! but immortality isn’t really a traditional mystery game, is it? for one thing, the “who done it” at its center is so abstract that you can “discover” it and have it mean nothing to you, in contrast to some of barlow’s previous work like her story, where if you hit some major “twists” early it feels like you broke the story in a bad way (note: I still very much enjoyed her story!). coherence comes gradually and only through a process of accumulation, in part because immortality is about complexity itself, by way of artistic creation.
and of course your role is also not literal, no moreso than when you’re a “spy” in metal gear solid 3. most crucially, while immortality alludes to the existence of the many other takes and shots available in the fullness of its fictional archive, it only provides the player with singular versions of these. if it purports to be a complete archive, it is in fact a tiny, tiny fraction of what a “real” version of such an archive would contain. its unfinished nature is artificial; in fact it is carefully constructed, utilizing the expectations of “unfinished” film to constantly seed characterization, context, intrigue, and narrative layering. (here’s a half-heard, contentious conversation between a director and his assistant; there’s a few seconds of lingering on an actress’s face as she breaks out of character, or perhaps doesn’t)
but to extend my earlier metaphor, any film’s editor isn’t working with an undifferentiated mass of LEGO bricks—the film crew has selected and organized its shots across the film reels with the intention of making the editor’s job easier, giving them quicker and better access to the takes and shots and angles they need. if immortality gives you only the LEGOs you need and the instruction manual, real-world film editing isn’t quite having one of those “build whatever you want” sets. maybe it’s closer to having a torn-up instruction manual and a few too many kits tossed together, requiring that you pick the best and most appropriate pieces, and assemble them into the beautiful structure you wanted to see.
immortality isn’t giving you an experience contrary to an editor’s; it’s just emphasizing through concision. like “detective vision” in an arkham game, the game provides scaffolding for a non-editor to engage with and in some way understand the artistic, emotional sensation of the process without having to actually process the tedium and precision involved. you are no more in control than you are in any other video game, but even as it guides you, immortality wants you to feel like you’re choosing your cuts.
immortality plays with some of this stuff in its actual storytelling: you can tug at various thematic threads about the exhaustion of artistic production, the artifice of positioning oneself as as artist, the notion of “sculpting” a performance out of another person, the warring ideas of artistic effort as collaborative vs. individualistic.
how wonderful, then, for those themes to be come ludic, to position the act of play as another meditation on what it means to choose to create.