Tom Gunning ties the “desire to heal the breach” to the myth of a total cinema that emerged shortly before these technologies were invented but which has yet to be realized, a situation André Bazin understood in 1946 when he suggested that with each new technological development, the cinema returns closer to its origins (Gunning 13). In short, the cinema was born from an idea about the potential for technology to reproduce reality in all its dimensions, a goal which fell short in the silent era but gets nearer with each new addition to the medium (sound, colour, etc.). So the joining of sound and image was an important step toward the re-unification of the senses within their technological double. Yet, as Gunning suggests, “this recaptured wholeness must also display in some way its artificial stopgap nature, its incomplete restoration of coherence” (23). As such, myths about the cinema’s abilities to wholly reproduce reality acted as a “fetish-like response in the face of a new threat of a loss of reality” under the “dissolving of the human sensorium” exemplified by these technologies (28). This is a situation that Gunning suggests we have not yet firmly come to grips with, even to this day. I argue that thinking about the cinema’s divided nature along ecological lines yields a model for film sound analysis that can attest to the cinema’s audiovisual totality while acknowledging the fundamental separation between sound and image that is a necessary foundation of the medium.