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 'Tear In the Rain,' 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. '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.'