The gelatin in film stock was made from the hide, bones, cartilage, ligaments, and connective tissue of calves (considered the very best), sheep (less desirable), and other animals who passed through the slaughterhouse. Six kilograms of bone went into a single kilogram of gelatin. Eventually, the demands of photographic industries generated so much need for animal byproducts that slaughterhouses became integrated into the photographic production chain. Controlling the supply chain became key to Kodak's success. In 1882, as Kodak began to grow as a company, widespread complaints of fogged and darkened plates stopped production. The crisis almost ruined Kodak financially and resulted in the company tightly monitoring the animal by-products used in gelatin. Decades later, a Kodak emulsion scientist discovered that cattle who consumed mustard seed metabolized a sulfuric substance, enhancing the light sensitivity of silver halides and enabling better film speeds. The poor-quality gelatin in 1882 was due to the lack of mustard seeds in the cows' diet. The head of research at Kodak, Dr. C. E. Kenneth Mees, concluded, "If cows didn't like mustard there wouldn't be any movies at all." By controlling the diet of cows who were used to make gelatin, Kodak ensured the quality of its film stock. As literary scholar Nicole Shukin reflects, there is a "transfer of life from animal body to technological media." The image comes alive through animal death, carried along by the work of ranchers, meatpackers, and Kodak production workers.

Mutual fascination is always a risky business. Lacan suggests that it is the consequence of an imaginary identification in which the self strives to incorporate the other in an act as aggressive as it is loving. It is never clear who, snake or snake charmer, is mesmerized by whom.

The fact that Bosch was, historically speaking, a premature Renaissance man also marks him out as the alchemist of an ongoing mutation. He belongs to the tradition of those who, by peering deeply and without indulgence into themselves, have obstinately advanced the excavation of our desperately inhuman history. The dream of a society where life triumphs over the contempt visited on us by the rule of the commodity is not an illusory restoration of some golden age, but instead the way out of the nightmare that chokes us ever more tightly each day. Bosch’s contribution is to have held up a looking-glass to our anguish as well as to our irrepressible will to live. A looking-glass that we must pass through if we are to make our way beyond the realities it reflects.