Carnivore immersioni : Un’archeologia dei media in prima persona

This article investigates the cinematic trope of swallowing as a figure of the peculiar blurring of the threshold between the virtual and the real connected to contemporary im¬mersive media. In order to reframe the experience of media embodiment usually associated with the first-person perspective, I try to outline a cannibalistic way to immersion, by ex¬ploring the process of virtual ‘incorporation’, in its most literal sense. I aim to show that the fading of the boundaries between the self and the world produced by immersive media and in particular by the intermedial construct of the first-person perspective also entails a form of reciprocal absorption, between my body and the body of the other and vice versa, between my body and the image and vice versa. I will seek to show the connection between the sub¬jective camera and the phantasy or the specter of anthropophagy, by analyzing early cinema James Williamson’s film The Big Swallow (1901) and Johnathan Demme’s masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs (1991). I will argue that there is an intimate connection between this cannibalistic imaginary and the peculiar inversion and envelopment of the POV that the selfie performs, which needs to be considered as an a priori of the digital image. Some of the genre characteristic of post-digital visual culture (such as food ASMR, mukbang, and vore) can be interpreted as objective correlatives of this carnivorous tendency of immersive first-person perspective.