Daily Dialogue — August 12, 2016
SLAKE: This you knows. I be First Tracker, and times past count I done the Tell. But it weren’t me that tumbled Walker. It was Savannah. So it only right that she take the Tell.
SAVANNAH: This ain’t one body’s story. It’s the story of us all. We got it mouth-to-mouth, so you got to listen it and ‘member, ’cause what you hears today you got to tell the birthed tomorrow. I’m looking behind us now, across the count of time, down the long haul into history back. I sees the end what were the start. It’s Pox-Eclipse, full of pain! And out of it were birthed crackling dust and fearsome time. It were full-on winter, and Mr. Dead chasing them all. But one he couldn’t catch, that were Captain Walker. He gathers up a gang, takes to the air and flies the sky! So they left their homes, said bidey-bye to the high-scrapers and what were left of the knowing they left behind. Some say the wind just stoppered. Others reckon it were a gang called Turbulence. And after the wreck some had been jumped by Mr. Dead but some had got the luck, and it leads them here. One look and they’s got the hots for it. They word it “Planet Earth.” And they says, “We don’t need the knowing. We can live here.”
CHILDREN: “We don’t need the knowing. We can live here.”
SAVANNAH: Time counts and keeps counting. They gets to missing what they had. They get so lonely for the high-scrapers and the video.
CHILDREN: Video.
SAVANNAH: And they does the pictures so they’d ‘member all the knowing that they’d lost.
SLAKE: ‘Member this?
CHILDREN: Tomorrow-morrow Land!
SLAKE: ‘Member this?
CHILDREN: The River of Lights!
SLAKE: ‘Member this?
CHILDREN: Skyraft!
SLAKE: ‘Member this?
CHILDREN: Captain Walker!
SLAKE: ‘Member this?
CHILDREN: Mrs. Walker!
SAVANNAH: Then Captain Walker picked them of an age and good for a long haul. They counted twenty, and that were them. The Great Leaving.
CHILDREN: “Rescue party departed at first light led by Flight Captain G.L. Walker. May God have mercy on our souls.”
SAVANNAH: They said bidey-bye to them what they’d birthed. And from the nothing they looked back and Captain Walker hollered, “Wait, one of us will come.”
CHILDREN: “Wait, one of us will come.”
SAVANNAH: And somebody did come.
CHILDREN: (Repeating) Walker.
SAVANNAH: We’s heartful to you, Captain Walker.
SLAKE: We’s ready now. Take us home.
— Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), written by Terry Hayes and George Miller
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Recollection, suggested by Will King who also suggested today’s post.
Trivia: The film was intended to be the final chapter of the “Mad Max’ franchise, with Mel Gibson bowing out of the role of Max and ending with Max regaining his humanity and walking away into the sunset. And so it was, until George Miller made the 4th sequel with Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), 30 years later.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Will: “Remembrance as social custom. The children left behind in a post-apocalyptic world have adopted an oral history tradition where the storyteller wears a specific costume and uses a prop, the design of which they don’t really understand. It might have been easier for Miller and Hayes to have just made this group a miniature version of the world Max inhabits, but by giving them their own speech quirks and misunderstood phrases, the children come across as more believable and separate as a group the from the adults. Telling their story, using the ruse of it being a “test,” is an act of transparency, of trust, which helps both Max and the audience come to care about their welfare.”
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