So, I was teaching my small class about mind-body dualism, and I was talking about Descartes’ reasoning for why we have we need both mental and physical substances—that is the need for base physicality to highlight and refine the pure mental/soul stuff of the “real us.”
Anyway, I was talking about this, and I said “For Descartes, we have to have the negative, so that we can see the positive,” and all of a sudden both of these scenes just popped into my head, and it CLICKED.
Top: Cassie Boyle’s body on a stag head, with ravens, from NBC’s Hannibal. Line from Will Graham, about how Cassie Boyle’s murder by a copycat helped him to understand the original Minnesota Shrike: “It’s like he had to show me a negative so that I could see the positive.”
Bottom: Eldon and Rachael Tyrell, from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Line from Eldon Tyrell to Rick Deckard, about understanding the efficacy of the Voight-Kampf Test: “I want to see a negative before I provide you with a positive…Try her.”
Now, I don’t know if this was intentional, and the internals are really kind of intricate—Tyrell’s deception about Rachael being a “Negative” as correlated to Hannibal’s deception about the provenance of the actual negative, each used to guide the investigator down the road they want them to travel, fully knowing the nature of its end—but I do know that I can’t stop thinking about the really quite pleasant similarities between Hannibal and Blade Runner.
Good night.
Crawford/Bryant to Graham/Deckard: “You know the score, pal! If you’re not cop, you’re little people.”
Help I Can’t Stop.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 