Daily Dialogue — April 10, 2014

WATURI: You better get outta here right now! I’m telling you!
JOE: You’re telling me nothing.
WATURI: I’m telling you!
JOE: And why, I ask myself, why have I put up with you? I can’t imagine but I know. Fear. Yellow freakin’ fear. I’ve been too chicken shit afraid to live my life so I sold it to you for three hundred freakin’ dollars a week! You’re lucky I don’t kill you! You’re lucky I don’t rip your freakin’ throat out! But I’m not going to and maybe you’re not so lucky at that. ’Cause I’m gonna leave you here, Mister Wa-a-Waturi, and what could be worse than that?

Joe opens the door and leaves. Mr. Waturi and Dede are frozen. The door reopens and Joe comes halfway back in.

JOE: Dede?
DEDE: Yeah?
JOE: How ‘bout dinner tonight?
DEDE: Yeah, uh, okay.

Joe smiles for the first time since we’ve met him, and closes the door again.

DEDE: Wow. What a change.

— Joe versus the Volcano (1990), written by John Patrick Shanley

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Fear, suggested by Gordon. Today’s suggestion by Bretton Zinger.

Trivia: There are at least four references to losing one’s soul:

* In the song “Sixteen Tons” played at the start of the movie, the lyric “I sold my soul to the company store”

* Joe responds to DeDe’s question in the factory while inspecting his damaged shoe

* Patricia’s reference to being soul sick the first night on the yacht

* Several lines involving the Waponi’s Tobi Chief such as when Joe states that he hopes the chief will not lose his Tobi (soul).

Dialogue On Dialogue: Here Joe eloquently sums up the fear that kept him working at this nightmarish job for four and a half years. This is a particular type of fear, not in the moment terror, but the slow soul-sucking kind.

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