What's Outside Your Window? What Exactly Brought You Here?

I happened to be watching the Blade Runner compilation DVD included in the big "Voight Kamph" collectors edition...

Something I'd never known concerning the making of the film was that prior to script editing, Ridley Scott's older brother had recently died [memory serves, it was cancer..?].

Ridley's style and conceptualization of the script for "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" took a decidedly "dark-er" step as the feelings of guilt and remorse, pain and sadness flooded many days of Ridley's work [the fact that he also chose to delve deeper into work than to allow a 'greiving process' may also have added to the tone of the films tenuous incantation].

The earliest author- working with Ridley and using the title Dangerous Days as the working title was the typical/atypical "granola" style writer- more involved in the tendrils of words and conversation over the substance of interaction and actual "action" in the sense of the moving image.

Something was mentioned in the documentary DVD that's stuck with me to this day... At one point in the writing/re-writing process Ridley was tired of what was becoming a "talky-talk" script and simply mentioned [though not flippantly] "What's going on outside the windows..?"

"What's going on outside the windows?"

Why does a character react to what they're reacting to, the way they react- is it exaggerated, or is it muted? In Blade Runner- the world is dying. People are living and dying and nobody cares. Life or death decisions are relegated to the there-n-now and are very intimate only to those individuals.

Then there are others who have an idea of life-n-death; they're time's limited, their heads are full of memories they've made themselves and they want more of a chance to experience more or relate them to more than just themselves.

So...

"What exactly brought us here..?"

"What's outside your windows- making you think the way you think, write the things you write?"

Personally?

It started 5 years ago.

At one time, I had no windows- barely a roof- 3 people dead and another 5 coming up- I just didn't know it yet.

In '03 to '04 cancer took the lives of three of my relatives. There's your "first three."

By the same point in '04 a year to the day in August- we're hit by Charlie then Jean, then Ivan in almost a staccato two weeks-two weeks-two weeks of insult-to-injury hurricanes.

My Mother-in-Law learned- between Jean & Ivan- that she had Pancreatic Cancer.

During the Ivan storm- she went into Pancreatic Arrest.

Braving 80+ MPH winds- winds that even ambulances won't travel in- I race her and the rest of the family to the hospital. Though my "little nuclear unit" goes home later, after the storm has passed- two weeks later my "Mom" dies- never having left the hospital.

Then the loss of four family friends. All before January of '05.

Now I'm losing my grandparents this past year. First the Patriarch on my father's side of the family. Most recently both family grandparents on my stepmother's side.

Some of the things that Ridley experienced in one fateful expanse of the human condition, I got in spades and protracted over the span of almost two years.

Now- granted, all of us in the family suffered greatly- but as in most things like a blog or daily writing, I have the luxury of personal and selfish suffrage here...

My reason for "delving into the dark arts of the living dead/undead" is relatively simple- it's really the only power I have over death right now.

I choose to live- I need more of a reason than simply a "goal" but perhaps it need be no more lofty than as primal as "survival for the moment".

I've survived catastrophe. Some while in the military under the hands and machinations of man and some by the whims and agnostic glimmers of mother nature and her She-Bitch bad moods.

Could I say I've "experienced" some of what's the emphamatre of "Survival Horror"?

I'm not sure I would say yes- given the nature of the zombie mystique- but the trappings of this mystique?

"What's outside the window..."

Oh... Most assuredly.

So. What brought you to this place- to the fascination of this genre- the desire, in whatever safe way, to participate in this struggle of life & death- where living is no more a reward than being dead..?

"What's outside your window?"