Paul Whitman

“I stare out the window at the tire plant across the street. I think about tires, how they’re round and have holes in their centers. It’s analogous to the missing film. Yet the empty space in the center of a tire is useful; it allows the tire to attach to the wheel, which allows it to turn on the axle, which allows the car to move forward. This gives me some hope. Perhaps this missing film will allow me to move forward. Perhaps the missing film is the hole in the tire that is my brain. We must look at loss in all its forms, mustn’t we? Loss of relationships, loss of love, loss of power, loss of memory, loss of status and the panic that ensues. We must accept that loss is a basic element of existence. The element of absence. All will be lost. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain,” says replicant Batty of Blade Runner fame, in a rare moment of poetry and coherence in that inept, wrongheaded film by a director who cut his teeth in television adverts and seems unwilling or unable to recognize that the purpose of cinema is antithetical to that of selling toilet tissue. Be that as it may, this is a profound line that exists only because it was improvised by the brilliant Dutch acteur Rutger Hauer. So I am forever grateful to him and his gevoelige geest.”
― Charlie Kaufman, Antkind