"It's a negative. When we print this, it'll all flip back to normal. First we have to fix it. Reach me that bottle of hypo there."
* * * * * * * *
"It's a negative"
Yeah, Merle already figured that out. It's evil! It's the opposite! It's light's dark side! Oh, wait, yeah, um, so Merle just learned the technical term. Right. Okay.
"flip back to normal"
As if it's so easy for those trapped in their madness to return to "normality". There's a reason why this first photograph that Merle lays his eyes on is of the Northern Ohio Insane Asylum. It's one of those metaphors or analogies. While Merle has physically been helping inmates escape (presumably because they didn't actually belong there and were just dumped their by lazy and/or angry cops), the truth is that it's much harder, impossible even. How do you flip a lunatic back to sanity? Perhaps Pynchon hints, through the taking of a photograph of these inmates, that the way to help them back, to flip them to normal, is to actually see them. To listen to them. To understand them. Simply locking them away for the good of "decent citizens" who don't want to be irritated or annoyed, who don't want to pay the high cost of caring, as Pynchon once said in another book. Insane asylums are a symptom of a society that only has room enough for a narrow scope of thinking.
"First we have to fix it"
I guess this is photography lingo for developing a photo but we know Pynchon's actually talking about society. First we must see the problem. Then we can fix the problem.
"Reach me that bottle of hypo"
Or we can drug it into senselessness so we don't have to think about it at all.
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