Something That You Know

Perhaps the finest memoir ever was never written at all. It was performed. I'm referring to an improvised scene in a now obscure Harrison Ford movie entitled Blade Runner. In it, the gifted German actor and poet, Rutger Hauer, plays, Roy Batty, a replicant. A replicant is basically a machine, but one capable of human emotion. And in this final scene, Roy, is dying exactly as you'd expect a machine to die. Just like a common flashlight, Roy's batteries are getting low. But Roy is dying a machine death but at the same time feeling and expressing human emotions, a thing no flashlight I'm aware of can do, not even the long black ones the police carry and sometimes use as a weapon. It's one hell of a scene and it's played out for the movie cameras on a rainy rooftop full of nightmarish steam pipes and white doves. If you haven't seen it, you really should. The movie itself, even though it stars a young Harrison Ford and Daryl Hannah, is kind of a stinker. But if you go to You-Tube and prompt in "e;Tear In the Rain,"e; you'll get just the dying-breath monologue that Rutger Hauer, the German actor and poet, improvises for Roy Batty, the replicant who's fast running out of battery life. It goes like this. "e;I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die."e;