Daily Dialogue — March 7, 2012

Bryant: Hiya, Deck.

Deckard: Bryant.

Bryant: You wouldn’t have come if I just asked you to. Sit down, pal. C’mon, don’t be an asshole, Deckard. I’ve got four skin jobs walking the streets. They jumped a shuttle off world killed the crew and passengers. They found the shuttle drifting off the coast two weeks ago so we know they’re around.

Deckard: Embarrassing.

Bryant: No, sir. Not embarrassing, because no one’s ever going to find out they’re down here. Because you’re going to spot them, and you’re going to air them out.

Deckard: I don’t work here anymore. Give it to Holden, he’s good.

Bryant: I did. He can breath okay as long as nobody unplugs him. He’s not good enough, not as good as you. I need you, Deck. This is a bad one, the worse yet. I need the old blade runner, I need your magic.

Deckard: I was quit when I came in here, Bryant. I’m twice as quit now.

Bryant: Stop right where you are. You know the score, pal. If you’re not cop, you’re little people.

Deckard: No choice, huh?

Bryant: No choice, pal.

— Deckard (Harrison Ford), Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh), Blade Runner (1984), screenplay by Hampton Fincher and David Webb Peoples, based on a novel by Philip K. Dick

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is refusal of the call, suggested by Ryan Smith. Today’s suggestion by Def Earz.

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: Here is a case of resignation to the call.

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