Brit Marling's Impossible Dream

Brit Marling’s ethereal series The OA is the year’s first sleeper hit. Which is funny, given that a few years ago, it likely never would have gotten made.

- Katrina Onstad

ONE SUMMER, when Brit Marling was a kid at camp in Wisconsin, she told ghost stories late at night to the girls in her cabin. At first, everybody loved this. But after a few nights, something changed. “I think things were just percolating in everybody’s imaginations,” says Marling. The camp called her parents and said they had to pick her up; her ghost stories were freaking people out. Clearly the form of her stories (bunk-bed broadcast) didn’t match up with the content (Marling’s uncanny conjurings).

Until recently, a variation of this problem marked Marling’s career. As a screenwriter and actor, she’s created several widely praised but little-seen indie films, such as 2011’s Another Earth and 2013’s The East. Then, with almost zero fanfare just before Christmas, Netflix released The OA, an eight-part series starring Marling that she co-wrote with director and creative partner Zal Batmanglij. This zigzagging tale of a traumatized survivor of a near-death experience and a mysterious abduction quickly became the latest riddle-me-this series to cause an online frenzy. An unreliable narrator and episodes of varying length add up to something that’s not quite episodic TV and not quite film; Marling equates it to a novel, considering it a new form for a new kind of TV. “The OA couldn’t have existed three years ago,” she says.