Daily Dialogue — July 23, 2014
TYRELL: Well, Mr. Deckard?
Deckard is looking at Tyrell and wincing indecisively.
He doesn’t get it. Are they playing with him?
TYRELL: (continuing) Perhaps some privacy will loosen your tongue, Mr. Deckard.
He turns to Rachael
TYRELL: Would you step out for a few moments, Rachael?
Rachael exits looking a little shaken. What’s going on?
Deckard stares at Tyrell.
Tyrell meets his look.
TYRELL: I’m impressed. How many questions does it usually take to spot one?
DECKARD: I don’t get it.
TYRELL: How many questions?
DECKARD: In columns of four cross referenced, twenty or thirty.
TYRELL: It took more than a hundred for Rachael, didn’t it ?
DECKARD: She really doesn’t know?
TYRELL: She’s beginning to suspect, I think.
DECKARD: Suspect! How can she not know she is.
TYRELL: Well, we began to notice in them a strange obsession.
Tyrell is pacing now, lecturing.
TYRELL: After all, they are emotionally inexperienced with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we gift them with a past… we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions.. and we can control them better.
DECKARD: They want memories?
TYRELL: It’s the dark corners, the little shadowy places that makes you interesting, Deckard….. gusty emotions on a wet road on an autumn night.. the change of seasons… the sweet guilt after masturbation.
DECKARD: Jesus Christ,Tyrell!
Tyrell looks startled.
DECKARD: Where do you get them, the memories?
TYRELL: In the case of Rachael, I simply copied and regenerated cells from the brain of my sixteen-year-old niece. Rachael remembers what my little niece remembers.
DECKARD: I saw an old movie once. The guy had bolts in his head.
Deckard looks amazed while Tyrell looks pleased with himself.
— Blade Runner (1982), screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, novel by Philip K. Dick
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Robot. Today’s suggestion by Jon Raymond.
A note from Jon: “Note the script has been substantially changed. The production version is shorter, more concise, and direct to the point of the “memories” concept. In the released version, Deckard simply speaks the word “memories,” while in the script this is explained in much more detail.”
Trivia: Philip K. Dick first came up with the idea for his novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ in 1962, when researching ‘The Man in the High Castle’ which deals with the Nazis conquering the planet in the 1940s. Dick had been granted access to archived World War II Gestapo documents in the University of California at Berkley, and had come across diaries written by S.S. men stationed in Poland, which he found almost unreadable in their casual cruelty and lack of human empathy. One sentence in particular troubled him: “We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children.” Dick was so horrified by this sentence that he reasoned there was obviously something wrong with the man who wrote it. This led him to hypothesize that Nazism in general was a defective group mind, a mind so emotionally flawed that the word human could not be applied to them; their lack of empathy was so pronounced that Dick reasoned they couldn’t be referred to as human beings, even though their outward appearance seemed to indicate that they were human. The novel sprang from this.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Jon: “The basis of robots in movies, for me, has always been the comparison with them to humans. What can they do that humans can’t? What can humans do that they can’t? Ultimately it always comes down to a reference to the abstract, such as to art, love or to the soul. Can a robot have a soul? Can a robot love? I find Blade Runner especially interesting. Rachel apparently isn’t aware she is a robot, she is so perfectly made. Even Deckard can’t detect her at first and he is the supposed expert. I love that she is a love interest in light of all this.”
If you have any suggestions for this week’s theme, please post in comments.
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