Immortality in Video Essays

one essay i tried to write but ultimately abandoned was about immortalising yourself in art and in writing. i spoke about Immortality (2022) obviously but i was also thinking about a very specific precursor to the fuck-off huge personal video essays we see today. so uh dont harrass anyone here please. spoilers for immortality by the way. please go play that game yourself

ok cool lets get down to brass tacks.

ultimately immortality is about immortalising oneself in art, but its contrasted with the actual immortality that The One and The Other have. it’s not just interested in actors being in history forever, but also in the ways that directors want to immortalise themselves by sculpting young talent, namely women. in-universe director arthur fischer isn’t trying to teach marissa, he’s trying to make marissa an extension of him. telling her what to eat. The One also mentions john durick trying to make marissa his own during the shooting of minsky, despite it being inspired by klute, which is a film that jane fonda had a pretty big influence on.

one section i wrote that i liked about the noclip documentary about immortality:

[Immortality’s director Sam Barlow] also talks about the ways in which women were sexualised in the 1960s and 1970s. He talks about the femme fatale particularly, and we can also point to other examples that discuss this more explicitly in different contexts. In Through the Eyes of Women: The Handmaiden,¹ Ian Danskin discusses the femme fatale in terms of desire vs agency. He talks about how well-rounded characters have both agency (whether a character affects the story) and desire (whether we understand why they do what they do), and that flat characters generally only have one of these. He mentions that the femme fatale has agency but their actual reasoning for what they do is not as important. Femme fatales may get to do cool things but without being seen as complete people they can’t be the person we are expected to empathise with. They are, primarily, a power fantasy for men. Barlow also mentions in his interview that the sexual revolution is an extension of this: it’s good for women to be able to have sex outside of the parameters of “cishet monogamous marriage,” but we can infer that men were seeing the real life women involved the same way they saw femme fatale characters: they did not particularly care for the reasons they did what they did, they just cared about the actions that they took, because they benefited their sexual gratification. Barlow follows up a discussion of the sexual revolution with “Actually, the men seem to do really well out of that.”

it is not lost on me that i am talking about power vs agency vs desire in women characters framed entirely by movies directed by or analyses directed by women. so here’s my womanly take on some new thoughts that werent originally present in that essay:

so many shots of The One acting human are framed around her either offering sexual gratification to men, or are framed in the camera the way a male director or DP might choose to. there is also no actual male genitalia in any shot i saw. The One loves movies too much to escape the framing of them.

we can contrast with julie rrap’s Disclosures: A Photographic Construct from 1982, which is a woman artist using photography to frame her own body in non-filmic ways on her own terms. i only saw connections between them when returning to the piece a second time and saw the photos depicting a photo of herself being burned, and connected it to how The One is immolated at the end of the game in an attempt to live on forever through your mind. but in your mind she’s also free from the constraints of being trapped in the camera, of being framed through their lenses and the lenses of men who want to sculpt and fuck her.

horseshoe finale is hard to talk about in this context, because, well, its not especially related to the heavier bits. it’s also a 1 hour 46 minute video from 2015 (!!!) talking about making reviews of my little pony friendship is magic. but this is a guy trying to immortalise himself in art, via video essays. hbomberguy’s video on fallout 3 was already long for its time in 2016, and its barely shorter than this. please let me be incendiary in saying this thing that i do actually kind of believe: horseshoe finale is kind of like a proto-action button review.

but in horseshoe finale, endless jess also talks about making things with his friends, and talks about how the whole analysis community revolves around him. this is in part because he is attempting to be a wrestling heel and is cutting a promo on the audience (kinda, its hard to articulate and you dont have to engage with it at all). some of the people he was close to at the time ended up being very vocal figures in youtube media criticism spaces. unfortunately its hard to talk about because so many of them are now trans, and others have taken down their works made during that time and requested that others dont circulate them, due to things like very casual and very liberal slur use. this is a lineage that you maybe, if you squint, could trace through to video essays of 2014, but we really don’t need to. ultimately, so much artistic influence in this chain of directors and actors that immortality (2022) speaks about is at risk of being forgotten, and all thats left at the end is the real people that it hurt.

horseshoe finale is a wild video for the time it was out. it broke people’s brains. it kind of broke mine! and now i get to see the bits and pieces of it that people insert into other things. but endless jess doesnt upload much publically anymore, and i dont want people to turn him into a lolcow or to characeturise him, so this note is probably the most i will speak of horseshoe finale outside of coded reference.

anyway. dude makes a big video where he talks authentically about his experiences making art. turns out very few people get it. a year later he makes a sequel video where he lays it out even more explicitly. he says he made horseshoe finale for himself and no one else. he also describes himself as feeling trapped by the persona of his videos, acting out the ideas for art that he had in his head months ago. he describes his persona not as am exaggerated one but as a subdued one. all this effort for a glimpse at someone that isnt really him.

so these being proto-action button reviews should make more sense now! especially when tim rogers’ videos have talked about authenticity a lot, and when his older essays drew attention to the fact that they were embellishments of emotional truths that he hoped would still shine through. i didnt write about this originally but tim rogers also tackles some thought processes similar to the ones im exploring here in Let’s Mosey: A Slow Translation Of Final Fantasy VII. its actually about how aerith is “immortalised” in the game and how translation choices influenced how people think about events involving her in the story.

anyway heres the bit i quoted from horseshoe finale one year later at the end of the section:

It’s a story about spitting in the world’s eye, and saying: Fuck you, I have a crazy idea, and I’m not just gonna do it, I’m gonna do it my way, even if it fucking destroys me. It’s putting a flag in the ground, and saying that even if you know no-one is gonna understand or appreciate your art like you do, make it anyways, because that’s the art that matters most.