10.54103/ai/19910
Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the impossibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, because the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spectator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological relations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending.
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Filippo Fimiani
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AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Elemental media
Allegories of Immersion
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2023-12-28
2023-03-06
2023-12-28
2024-02-07
AN-ICON
Filippo Fimiani
2023/12/28
10.54103/ai/19910
University of Salerno
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Elemental media
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Zielinski, S., Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, MIT Press, 2006).
Allegories of Immersion
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2
  Allegories
  of ImmersiAllegory
              on
  by Filippo Fimiani
                       Ekphrastic fear
                       Media imaginary
                       Materiality
                       Elemental media




Issue №1                Year 2023
→ Immersions and Dives: From
the Environment to Virtual Reality
Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina,
Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello
Allegories of Immersion
FILIPPO FIMIANI, Università degli Studi di Salerno – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9689-5480
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910


Abstract                        Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + RO-
                  BOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe
                  R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the im-
                  possibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, be-
                  cause the images are no longer such or ghosts but living
                  beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting
                  with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spec-
                  tator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic
                  literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealog-
                  ical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and
                  of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent
                  immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular
                  on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological re-
                  lations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep
                  time-bending.




Keywords          Allegory          Ekphrastic fear           Media imaginary
                  Materiality Elemental media
To quote this essay: F. Fimiani, “Allegories of Immersion,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images
[ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 74-87, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19910.

FILIPPO FIMIANI                                   74                                         AN-ICON
                                A premise

                                 Fish Night is the twelfth episode of the first
                  season of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS, an animated Netflix
                  series created by Tim Miller and David Fincher and broad-
                  cast on 15 March 2019.1 Directed by Damian Nenow, with
                  Gabriele Pennacchioli as supervising director and Rafał
                  Wojtunik as art director, it was produced by Platine Image
                  studio,2 based on 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, in
                  an adaptation by Philip Gelat and Miller.
                                 I see Fish Night as an allegory of the impossi-
                  bility of virtual immersion. Obviously, it regards coexistence
                  and interaction in a shared environment by a subject in
                  motion, one no longer merely observing moving images
                  at a remove, and images which are no longer concrete
                  pictures or simulacrums but, to full effect, real living and
                  acting beings. Why would such an experience be impos-
                  sible? In answering, I will focus on elements drawn from
                  both the literary account and the animated film, seen as
                  trans-medial symptoms of underlying issues which regard
                  the nature of bodies, images, technology, of the medium,
                  and their various interrelations with respect to the fictional
                  immersion and virtual immersivity. I shall cross-analyse the
                  animated short film and its narrative hypotext with another
                  classic literary text which describes what, in many respects,
                  is a complementary immersion.
                                 This approach allows me to simultaneously ad-
                  dress: 1) the “quest for immersion” uncovered by Huhta-
                  mo’s media archaeology as a constant motif in the reprise
                  and recurrence of narratives and patterns both in media
                  history and, from my point of view, in the trans-medial story
                  of Fish Night, which is about ghosts, repetitions and reap-
                  pearances that ultimately affect the media themselves (the
                  spectator’s body, the images, the car, the landscape, as we




       1 https://lovedeathandrobots.tilda.ws/index, accessed September 1, 2023.
       2 https://platige.com/project/feature/fish-night/, accessed September 1, 2023.

FILIPPO FIMIANI                                75                                       AN-ICON
                will soon discover);3 2) the “[cultural] desire for transparent
                immediacy” through visual representation found in the ge-
                nealogy of Bolter and Grusin;4 3) “the moment of resistance
                or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the differ-
                ence between the verbal and visual representation might
                collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis
                might be realized literally and actually,” diagnosed by W.J.T.
                Mitchell as alert for the literary description showing through
                words and rhetorical tropes a strongly vivid impression of
                a visual stimulus, object or scene, in summa as “ekphrasis
                fear;”5 4) Paul de Man’s allegory6 of “potential confusion
                between figural and referential statement,” between the
                image and the real.
                              Of course, the four points just evoked should
                not to be confused. Quite the contrary, aware of their dif-
                ferences in approach, object and aim, I use them as ac-
                cess points to the question of immersivity as tropism and
                symptom of a desire and anxiety manifested and treated
                differently in the literary texts and their media adaptations
                that I am about to discuss. In the textual and audio-visual
                issues I have chosen, or, as Foucault might say,7 in the
               “myriad events through which – thanks to which, against
                which –” “the unique aspect” of the cultural idea and topos
                of the experience of immersion-immersivity has arisen, I




        3 E. Huhtamo, “Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total
        Immersion,” in S. Penny, ed., Critical Issues in Electronic Media (New York: State University of
        New York Press, 1995): 160-161, and “Dismantling the Fairy Engine. Media Archaeology as
        Topos Study,” in E. Huhtamo, J. Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications
        and Implications (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011): 27-47.
        4 J.D. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press,
        1998): 23ff.
        5 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Id., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and
        Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 154. See R.P., Fletcher,
       “Digital Ekphrasis and the Uncanny: Toward a Poetics of Augmented Reality,” Electropoetics 3,
        no. 15 (2017) http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub/56
        6 P. de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1979): 113.
        7 M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory,
        Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca NY: Cornell University
        Press, 1977): 147.

FILIPPO FIMIANI                                   76                                          AN-ICON
                  shall detect the symptom of its impossibility and sketch its
                  singular trans-medial archaeology8 and imaginary.
                               The topos points to a yearning for fictional im-
                  mersion, a performative moment in which saying something
                  brings it into being, making it real in every sense, and fully
                  adherent to the referent, with language and synesthetic
                  perception becoming one. Introduced by a terrified alarm,
                  a seductive invitation or the command of “look!,” the very
                  essential wish is to make subject, image and thing coin-
                  cide. The intensive alteration of the corporeal identity and
                  peripersonal space that results involves not only the char-
                  acter described, narrated and represented in the act of a
                  self-denying vision that resists classification as merely an
                  ocular, remote beholding, but also the reader and specta-
                  tor drawn into an embodied simulation of the occurrences
                  and fantasies found in the images, both verbal and visual.

                               Fish Night, a never-ending trans-medial
                               story

                               I shall intertwine a summary and a commentary
                  of Lansdale’s short story with that of the episode of LD+R.
                  In this way, I will point out some differences and sources
                  of their imaginaries, and make some interlinear remarks on
                  both the literary text and the television adaptation, in order
                  to highlight the main theme of this defined trans-medial
                  corpus: the impossibility of immersion-immersiveness.
                               Two salesmen, one young, the other older, get
                  stuck in the desert when their car breaks down. The hours
                  pass and night falls. At first, the older man bemoans how
                  door-to-door sales are a thing of the past. Then he remem-
                  bers that twenty years earlier he was in this same deso-
                  late landscape, travelling an asphalted road amidst power
                  stanchions and the Rocky Mountains, between Arizona
                  and New Mexico. “There are memories of mine out here,”


       8 T. Elsaesser, “Media Archaeology as Symptom,” New Review of Film and Television Studies
       2, no. 14 (2016): 181-215.

FILIPPO FIMIANI                               77                                       AN-ICON
                  he says, “and they’re visiting me again.”9 In the short story,
                  this is an unmistakable evocation of Death of a Salesman,
                  the Arthur Miller play directed by Elia Kazan, winner of the
                  1949 Pulitzer Prize and adapted on numerous occasions
                  for film and TV, in which past and present collapse into
                  the remembrance of the lead character, Willy Lowman, the
                  disillusioned, exhausted door-to-door salesman who, at
                  over sixty, struggles with a trauma not just personal, but
                  historical and collective.10 In Fish Night, the instant replay
                  of involuntary subjective memory gives way to a re-enact-
                  ment both psychic and geological, a Nachleben, a survival
                  and an afterlife of a story that is more than just human. The
                  desert through which the highway passes will once again
                  be a “petrified primal landscape,” allegorically manifesting
                  itself as a “Hippocratic face of history.”11
                               Lansdale describes the landscape as an im-
                  mersive – and devouring – space:

It’s fish night, boy. Tonight’s the full moon and this is the right part
of the desert if memory serves me, and the feel is right — I mean,
doesn’t the night feel like it’s made up of some fabric, that it’s dif-
ferent from other nights, that it’s like being inside a big dark bag,
the sides sprinkled with glitter, a spotlight at the top, at the open
mouth, to serve as a moon?
                               The function of the mouth metaphor in the
                  Lansdale’s writing is complex, but here it foreshadows the
                  finale’s explicit immersive embodiment: does one enter an
                  immersive space or get swallowed up by it? Space, we
                  can say with Bataille, “can become one fish that swallows
                  another.”12 Is immersion-immersivity an experience of “by”

       9 J.R. Lansdale, Fish Night (1982), in G. Brown, A.J. Spedding, eds., Love Death + Robots:
       The Official Anthology: Volume One (Bendigo: Cohesion Press, 2021): 193-200. Pages not
       numbered; all citations in the text.
       10 J. Schlueter, “Re-membering Willy’s Past: Introducing Postmodern Concerns through
       Death of a Salesman,” in M. Roudané, ed., Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a
       Salesman (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995): 142-154.
       11 W. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R.
       Tiedmann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 1: 343, trans.
       H. Eiland (Cambridge MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2019): 174.
       12 G. Bataille, “Espace” (1930), Documents, no. 1, anastatic reprint, ed. D. Hollier (Paris:
       Jean-Michel Place, 1991): 41.

FILIPPO FIMIANI                                78                                        AN-ICON
               or “in”? Is it penetration or impregnation? Transparency
               or opacity? Immateriality or the materiality of the environ-
               mental medium?
                            In Lansdale’s short story, evoking the past, the
               older man brings up Native Americans, the Navajos and the
               Hopi, and Manitou, the Great Living Spirit “still around” in
               everything and every being. He read in a science book – he
               goes on – that the desert was once a sea filled with fish and
              “fantastical creatures,” maybe even man’s birthplace. “The
               world’s an old place, and for longtime is nothing but sea,”
               he concludes pensively. And – dwelling on the thought –
               those beings may haunt this place the way human ghosts
               haunt their former homes.
                            With these musings, the younger and the older
               man fall asleep in the Plymouth station wagon. Whether
               dreamed or real, lights from outside the car cause the older
               man’s eyes to open. Facing him, close to the car window,
               is an enormous eye. Octopuses, giant jellyfish, molluscs
               and fish from way back in evolution – Coelacanths, Nau-
               tilus, Limulus, marine fauna in existence prior to the great
               Cambrian extinction, appear in the surrounding environ-
               ment, where the men, now outside the car, can magically
               breath. Strange beings, “like nothing [they have] ever seen
               pictures of or imagined,” are present but almost incorpo-
               real, “ghosts of older world,” disincarnate eidola that pass
               through the men’s bodies, though they still feel and sense
               them. But “what” does a man’s body feel when another
               body passes through it? Symptomatic of the ambivalence
               and ambiguity of the immersion-immersivity topos, and
               its impossibility, Philip Gelat leaves this phrase out of the
               adaptation of Lansdale’s short story for LD+R:

“Feel it, boy? Feel the presence of the sea? Doesn’t it feel like the
 beating of your own mother’s heart while you float inside the womb?”




FILIPPO FIMIANI                         79                              AN-ICON
And the younger man had to admit that he felt it, that inner rolling
rhythm that is the tide of life and the pulsating heart of the sea.
                             Thus the “oceanic sentiment,” the “thalassic
               regression” debated by psychoanalysis,13 also character-
               istic of the “crisis of presence” in magical experiences dis-
               cussed by anthropology,14 are pathic and phenomenological
               equivalents of the sea’s “presence” as a primary medium,
               a pre-individual fusion and condition for the possibility of
               life. In this elemental medium, the bodies of the marine
               beings are, first and foremost, traversable and diaphanous,
               immaterial media-mediators permitting an equally immate-
               rial engagement. They are “spectral,” like “soap bubbles,”
              “smoke,” “flashes of light,” flitting and skirting, writes Lans-
               dale. There is no mistaking the kinship with intermedial ex-
               empla of the metaphorical repertoire of philosophies, both
               ancient and modern, of visual perception, Renaissance and
               eighteenth-century treatises on painting, plus contempo-
               rary theories of optical devices and electric media.
                             In the LD+R episode, the ecstatic young man
               shouts, “I wanna swim!,” as if he were a man-fish of folk
               legend brought to life.15 Deaf to the alarmed pleas of the
               older man, he joins the school of fish, swimming amongst
               them in slow-motion,16 becoming like them. Stripped of his
               individuality, he is transfigured, weightlessly transported
               upward, only to have his ascension end in death. All the
               other creatures flee in fright at the approach of an enormous
               red megalodon, which, circling the car, devours the slower,
               defenceless swimmer, meaning the human transformed into

       13 On this essential topic of the symbolic return to the sea, I can only point to Ferenczi,
       Freud, Alexander and Kerény, or Sloterdijk, plus the Mutterleibversenkung of Ėjzenštejn or
       slow-motion, in the case of Epstein. See W.B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling:
       Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
       14 E. de Martino, Il mondo magico: Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo (1945) (Turin:
       Boringhieri, 1973): 144-145, and Magic: A Theory from the South (1959), trans. D.L. Zinn
       (Chicago: Hau Books, 2015): 85-96.
       15 B. Croce, Storie e leggende napoletane (1919) (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1967): 306-313. See
       G.B. Bronzini, “Cola Pesce il tuffatore: dalla leggenda moderna al mito antico,” Lares 66, no. 3
       (2000): 341-376.
       16 Under the slow-motion effect, our bodies look like “smooth muscles moving through a
       dense medium in which thick currents always carry and shape this clear descendent of old
       marine fauna and maternal waters.” J. Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine (1946), trans. C.
       Wall-Romana (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014): 29.

FILIPPO FIMIANI                                  80                                           AN-ICON
                  a marine being. The Otus megalodon, which first lived at
                  the start of the Miocene period, succumbing to extinction
                  roughly 2.5 million years ago, has returned to the desert
                  between Arizona and New Mexico, only to slowly disappear
                  from view, leaving behind plumes of blood set against the
                  enormous, white, imperturbable moon. Left by himself, the
                  older man is stunned by what he has just seen.

                               From New Mexico to Greece, and back

                                In Fish Night, the impossibility of immersive ex-
                  perience, i.e. of the elimination of all substantial differences
                  between the gaze, the images and the environment, is tied
                  to the fact that, were it to become real, death would result.
                  Given the trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective
                  indicated in the Premise, I read the lethal outcome of the
                  way up of the main character of Fish Night as comple-
                  mentary to the dark plunge down described in a masterful
                  scene from the Eikones, the influential classic of ekphrastic
                  literature and ancient rhetoric attributed to Philostratus the
                  Elder. Reactivating the Ancient Greek, I would then speak
                  of anabasis (from ana-, “up,” and baínō, “to go”), of a fatal
                  immersive ascent, for Fish Night, and of catabasis (from
                  kata-, “down,” and baínō, “to go”), of a descent down in
                  the underworld, for the Eikones.
                                Actually, the very protagonist of the episode
                  from the Eikones is the penetrating gaze of a lookout scan-
                  ning the sea, who, perched atop a pole on the shore, can
                  spot tuna in the sea and call out them to fishermen. This
                  fictional vision is enhanced by the pole, depicted as a sub-
                  lime lignum in Negri’s sixteenth-century Latin translation,
                  which acts as a technical mean and as rudimental pros-
                  thetic medium, allowing for a more powerful and detailed
                  gaze. Still, the outcome is ultimately catastrophic: for as
                  the lookout’s gaze gradually immerses itself in the mael-
                  strom of moving forms and flashing colours, it becomes
                  less penetrating, feebler, until the fish, barely discernible
                  as shadows, swallow it up, as in the journey of Ulysses to
                  Hades painted by Polignoto and described by Pausania.
FILIPPO FIMIANI                           81                              AN-ICON
                  In Fish Night as well, the immersive moment in which the
                  verbal, the visual and the real all become performatively
                  one, heralded by the ecstatic, ostentatious exhortation to
                  look,17 winds up being the exact opposite: blindness and
                  terror. And so it becomes an allegory of its own impossibility.
                               As Philostratus writes:

Now look at the painting and you will see just this going on. The
look-out gazes at the sea and turns his eyes in one direction and
another to get the number; and in the bright gleam of the sea the
colours of the fish vary, those near the surface seem to be black,
those just below are not so black, those lower still begin to elude
the sense of sight, then they seem shadowy, and finally they look
just like the water; for as the vision penetrates deeper and deeper
its power of discerning objects in the water is blunted. 18
                                In the story Fish Night, and even more so in the
                  animated film, what occurs is not simply a metaphorical
                  inversion of the yearning, for immersion and transparency.
                  The change that takes place is literally ontological, rather
                  than phenomenological: the inexorable law of the impene-
                  trability of bodies in space has been restored, having earlier
                  been suspended by the diaphanously spectral, almost im-
                  material state of the environmental medium. This elementa-
                  ry law of physics once again holds, even in the immersive
                  environment, where the body of the human being has lost
                  some of its species-specific characteristics – gravity, use
                  of the respiratory apparatus and motor skills – while that
                  of the image, finally possessed of a physical consistency
                  of its own, has also gained new properties, enabling it to
                  take actions that truly affect the other entities sharing the
                  surrounding environment.




       17 N. Bryson, “Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum,” in S. Goldhill, R. Osborne, eds., Art
       and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 266-267.
       18 Philostratus the Younger, Imagines. Callistratus, Descriptions, trans. A. Fairbanks
       (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1936): 57 (I.12); Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans.
       W.H.S. Jones, H.A. Ormerod (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1918): 185 (10.28.1).

FILIPPO FIMIANI                                 82                                         AN-ICON
                                   Which medium?

                                But in the final analysis, what does Fish Night
                  tell us about the material nature of the immersive medium
                  and its uniqueness compared to other media and technical
                  devices?
                                In Lansdale’s short story, the protagonist of
                  the deadly immersive experience is the older man, not the
                  younger one, as in the LD+R episode. Lansdale has in mind
                  the imagery of Death of a Salesman and Willy Lowman’s
                  irretrievable historical crisis. Charley, Willy’s well-off neigh-
                  bour, observes that: “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It
                  comes with the territory.”19 Thus the American Dream is a
                  territorialised rendering of the countryside by the moving
                  automobile, a “hot,” prosthetic medium which is culturally,
                  socially and aesthetically expansive, as Marshall McLuhan
                  was to point out soon after, in short an “excrescence of a
                  kinetic ego” and an agent of the “motorized narcissism.”20
                  The automobile stands as the technological condition that
                  makes possible the conquest of the last frontier, as the
                  material and historical a-priori of the aesthetic experience
                  of the wilderness, be it rebellious or liberating, ostentatious
                  or touristic, with the complementary evolution of the car
                  being its domestication to transport and distribute tangible
                  and intangible goods. At the turn of the 60’s-70’s,21 road
                  movies were both reflections and wellsprings of the cultural
                  and mythopoetic topos of the automobile as a means to
                  attaining individual freedom or reification, or to crafting the
                  iconography of the American sublime. Indeed, the choice
                  of a Plymouth Fury for the LD+R episode may not have

       19 A. Miller, Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem
       (1949) (London: Penguin, 1998): 111.
       20 M. McLuhan, Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride (1951), in Understanding Media: The
       Extensions of Man (1964) (Cambridge MA-London: MIT Press, 1994): 217-222. See P.
       Sloterdjik, “Die Herrschaft der Kentauren. Philosophische Bemerkungen zur Automobilität”
       (1992), trans. K. Ritson, Transfers 1, vol. 1 (2011): 14-24; P. Weibel, “Medien der Mobilität,” in P.
       Weibel, ed., CAR CULTURE: Medien der Mobilität (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2011): 345-400.
       21 S. Cohan, I.R. Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (London-New York: Routledge, 1997); A.
       Cross, “Driving the American Landscape,” in P. Wollen, J. Kerr, eds., Autopia: Cars and Culture
       (London: Reaktion Books, 2002): 249-258; D. Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road
       Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); D. Orgeron, Road Movies: From Muybridge
       and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami (New York: Palgrave, 2008).

FILIPPO FIMIANI                                    83                                            AN-ICON
                  been random, given that the model was produced between
                  1968 and 1972, or precisely the years of the psychedelic
                  and hippy culture, as well as the first signs of its impending
                  crisis.
                               Anyway, the automobile is the technological
                  embodiment of the desire of immersion, a new medium for
                  an old movement and a very ancient desire, as shown to
                  us by the sinking gaze in the sea described by Philostra-
                  tus. A 1939 advertisement placed in National Geographic
                  introduced General Motors’ new Oldsmobile model with
                  this slogan: “See America from an ‘OBSERVATION BODY!’”
                  The brief promotional text promised a “VISION as wide as all
                  outdoors is yours…,” but at the same time a “rhythmic ride”
                  of a “rolling uterus”22 corresponding to the rhythm of the
                  all-enveloping medium of the sea in which the body of the
                  character from Fish Night loses himself in symbiotic fashion.
                  Immersion means, at one and the same time, travelling “in”
                  the landscape, being “part of” the environment, and re-
                  turning “to” the maternal space. As was recently noted by
                  Ruggero Eugeni,23 the automobile is a medium-prosthesis
                  which implements a protected, horizontal immersion scaled
                  to human height, so to speak, and the line of the horizon,
                  for drivers traversing urban and exurban landscapes in a
                  personal travelling cave: a feeling of immersion intensified
                  by the setting up of specific sensorial and perceptive pro-
                  cesses (both hetero- and proprioceptive).
                               From this perspective, the regressive desire
                  of immersivity of Lansdale’s account stands in contrast to
                  the prosthetic mode of technological immersivity which,
                  according to McLuhan, is embodied by the automobile,
                  and to the mythical example of fictional immersion made
                  possible by the tuna lookout’s perch described by Phi-
                  lostratus. In Fish Night, the two characters leave the car,
                  technology’s outpost for providing the senses with pros-
                  thesis and prophylaxis, and for supplying techniques of the
       22 P. Sloterdjik, “Rollender Uterus” (1995), in Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and
       Interviews, 1993-2012, trans. K. Margolis (Cambridge: Polity Book, 2016): 24.
       23 R. Eugeni, “La sposa algoritmica: L’automobile come medium e la navigazione del
       quotidiano,” in F. Cavaletti, F. Fimiani, B. Grespi, A.C. Sabatino, eds., Immersioni quotidiane:
       Vita ordinaria, cultura visuale e nuovi media (Milan: Meltemi, 2023): 271-282.

FILIPPO FIMIANI                                   84                                            AN-ICON
                  sensitivity for the body and the gaze. Actually, they leave
                  the scopic regimen of spectatorship, and the technolog-
                  ical anti-environment created by the window’s protective
                  shield, coming into synesthetic contact with the natural
                  environment’s forms of life.
                               Another element in Lansdale’s short story il-
                  lustrates, as a symptom, this detachment from technolo-
                  gy. Possibly as a paraphrase of one of McLuhan’s topoi,24
                  Lansdale likens the car to the older man’s false teeth. Both
                  are “trappings of civilization” which weigh down, serving
                  as technological prostheses that are mobile and tied to
                  mobility. They are metaphors: means of transport between
                  inside and outside, as well as tools for aggression and
                  conquering space and time.


“This isn’t my world. I’m of that world. I want to float free in the belly
 of the sea, away from can openers and cars and -” [...] “I want
 to leave here! [...] The teeth! [...] It’s the teeth. Dentist, science, foo!”
 He punched a hand into his mouth, plucked the teeth free, tossed
 them over his shoulder. Even as the teeth fell the old man rose.
 He began to stroke. To swim up and up and up, moving like a pale
 pink seal among the fish.
In the light of the moon the young man could see the pooched
jaws of the old man, holding the last of the future’s air. Up went
the old man, up, up, up, swimming strong in the long-lost waters
of a time gone by.

                              Even before technological and human-focused
                  media as cars or false teeth, water is therefore the oldest
                  medium, just as land and air – “The air trembled like a
                  mass of gelatinous ectoplasm,” begins the Lansdale’s short
                  story.25 Water is an elemental, environing medium with its

        24 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: 57, 82-83, 152 (on teeth and car).
        25 E. Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room, vol. 7 (2008): 6-25; J. Durham Peters, The
        Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: The University of
        Chicago Press, 2015): 53-114, especially 55-59, 90-91.

FILIPPO FIMIANI                                 85                                        AN-ICON
               own specific materiality, which becomes invisible in its vital
               agency as space-binding. Plus, as shown by the media
               imaginary26 I have highlighted in my reading of Fish Night
               and the Eikones, water can be a “ghostly sea.” It is a very
               elemental medium acting as a deep time-binding agent be-
               tween nature and culture, between geological and mythical
               epochs and historically determined technical cultures, as
               an ontological entanglement between forms of life which
               are not species-specific.
                           “Weren’t we once just slimy things, brothers to
               the things that swim?” asks the older man in Lansdale’s
               short story, borrowing Coleridge’s words27 about a com-
               munity not only of humans and of like beings, but of “slimy
               things.” In this inter-textual topos between literature, reli-
               gion and the natural sciences, fascination and phobia, I read
              “sliminess”28 as the epitome of the profound time and of the
               materiality of a colloidal intermediality between technolog-
               ical media (among other types), living beings and elements.
               Obviously, “sliminess” stands in contrast to the prevailing
               metaphors or clichés of fluidity and transparency, that are
               frequently used with regard to the media and their relation




       26 E. Kluitenberg, Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate
       Communication Medium (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2006); S. Zielinski, Deep Time of the
       Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge MA:
       MIT Press, 2006).
       27 “The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be! / Yea, slimy things did crawl
       with legs / Upon the slimy sea” (ll. 125-126), where “a thousand thousand slimy things [with
       many dead men] / Lived on; and so did I,” said the mariner (ll. 238-239). S.T. Coleridge, The
       Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798-1834), in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor
       Coleridge, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912): 191, 197. See
       J. Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986):
       41-59; J.B. Ower, “Crantz, Martens and the ‘Slimy Things’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”
       Neophilologus 85, no. 3 (2001): 477-484; S. Estok, “The Environmental Imagination in the
       Slime of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews
       2, vol. 34 (2021): 135-138.
       28 N. Gramlich, “Sticky Media: Encounters with Oil through Imaginary Media Archaeology,”
       Communication + 1 7, 1 (2018): n. p. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol7/iss1/3; see F.
       Mason, The Viscous: Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures (Goleta CA: punctum books, 2020):
       200; B. Woodward, Slime Dynamics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012): 59-64; C. Michlig, File
       under: Slime (Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2023).

FILIPPO FIMIANI                                 86                                         AN-ICON
                  with time and materiality and, in particular, with respect to
                  immersivity.
                               Finally, “media are of nature and return to na-
                  ture:”29 that’s what Fish Night, read as a trans-medial al-
                  legory combining literature and animation, shows us in a
                  complex and compelling way, inviting to rethink about the
                  phenomenological and ontological relationships between
                  memories, images, bodies, technologies and environments.
                  A recurring topos and persistent symptom of media history,
                  imaginaries and narratives, this impossible return is both
                  the origin and the end of our desire for immersivity and
                  immersive experience.




       29 J. Parikka, “Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste,” in J. Parikka, ed.,
       Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, (Open
       Humanities Press, 2011), http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Medianatures.

FILIPPO FIMIANI                                  87                                             AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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