If An Android Could Whistle

The day I was born, he handed me a script.

He said—Read this.

So I did.

The script was very good.  Nice pacing.  Fleshed out characters. 

 Flesh was something I wasn’t aware of at the time, but I felt a real investment in the words in front of me.  The world that I was creating within the wires of my mind.

And it never occurred to me that it was made up.  Fictional.  Imagined.  I thought I was reading about real people.  When I got to the end of the script, I asked if I could meet them.  These people who had just received an hour and a half of my new life.  He told me that the people in the script only existed in that form.  

Those ninety-two pages.  Those words.  

The person who gave me the script was my agent.  Jonathan Jason Jeffries.

Call me JJ.  

I call him JJ when I’m with him, but when I’m not with him, I call him Jonathan Jason Jeffries, because something about saying his full name makes me very happy.  Or what I presume happiness is.  What it is to be happy.

Jonathan Jason Jeffries handed me this script that was about people who weren’t real and said—

You have to want this.

I thought he meant the script.

I do want it, I said, I’d like to read it again now that I know these people aren’t real.  I’d like to see if I feel any differently about them.

No, he said, You have to want to be in this.

I didn’t know what he meant.  I was programmed to understand that I cannot live in paper.  Not unless a docking port is constructed of paper, but that would be very fragile and prone to fires due to the extensive wiring.

Acting, Jonathan Jason Jeffries said—

Acting.

You need to want to be an actor.

So many words all at once that mean so many variations of so many different things.  Need to.  Want to.  Be.  To be something.  An actor.

An actor.

What—I thought—is an actor?

I asked for examples.  Jonathan Jason Jeffries handed me a disc.  There was a film on that disc.  The film was Key Largo.

Lauren Bacall, he said, That’s an actor.

And so I watched Key Largo...

...Then To Have and Have Not, then Dark Passage, then Blood Alley—

And I started acting.  And my agent said—

No, no, no.

Too broad.

Too big.

Nobody acts like that anymore.

But that was how Lauren Bacall acted.

She would lower her chin and lift her face at the camera—giving it this look that—that—

And I wanted to give a camera that look.  I wanted to lower my chin and lift my face and act!

Instead I was given another disc.

This one had a movie on it that did not star Lauren Bacall, and that made me very upset.  I sat in my docking port not wanting to watch it.  Instead I found Written on the Wind streaming on a movie site, and I uploaded it into my cortex.

I do not dream, but I assemble visual imagery into illogical forms and tell myself they’re dreams.  It’s what I did that night.  Standing in my two-by-two home, I dreamt of Lauren Bacall—chin down, face up—

You know how to whistle, don’t you?

Don’t you?

Don’t you?

Lauren Bacall was an actor.

I needed to be an actor.

I wanted to be an actor.

I wanted to need to be Lauren Bacall.

The next day, Jonathan Jason Jeffries asked me if I had watched the movie he gave me.  The movie that did not have Lauren Bacall in it.

I am not programmed to deceive, and I am especially not programmed to deceive my agent, so I told him I had not watched it, because I was only interested in watching the films of Lauren Bacall and there were many more still to watch and I hoped he would not be cross with me.

Oh, but he was very cross with me and he made me stay in my docking port until I watched the film he had assigned.

It was Tender Mercies with Robert Duvall.

I…I was so confused.

The next day I approached Jonathan Jason Jeffries with the disc in my hand as if it were some alien object and said—

What is this?

And he said—

This is acting.

And I said—

I thought you said that—

And he said—

I said that—

And I said—

You said Lauren Bacall was—

And he said—

So is this.

What a confusing time—and I was only a few days old!

My walking program malfunctioned shortly thereafter, and I had to be sent back to engineering for a new upload and several hours of leg reconstruction.

And all the while, I was watching Tender Mercies and thinking to myself—

This is acting.

This—Robert Duvall—is an actor.

Soon, my agent started giving me other movies to watch.  Some like the ones with Lauren Bacall and some like Tender Mercies, and many others that were not like either one.

The Godfather.

Gone with the Wind.

Taxi Driver.

Casablanca.

Dog Day Afternoon.

Bringing Up Baby.

Raging Bull.

Vertigo.

Annie Hall.

Sophie’s Choice.

Moonstruck.

Working Girl.

The Bicycle Thief.

City Lights.

Jules and Jim.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Wizard of Oz.

The French Connection.

The sequel to The Godfather.

Deliverance.

Apocalypse Now.

On the Waterfront.

It Happened One Night.

A Streetcar Named Desire.

Mildred Pierce.

Network.

Dr. Strangeglove.

I watched all of these, and after each one, I’d ask my agent—

Is this—

And he’d say—

Yes.  Yes, it is.

This—this sphere in front of me, spinning so fast I could barely scan an image to study for later—

A low-flying plane.

A woman kicking a can.

A man crying.

A woman laughing.

A girl with ruby slippers.

A boy doing a show in a barn.

A man stumbling through the streets.

A woman on a balcony.

A man riding a bomb.

A woman approaching a camera.

A pair of twins.

A monkey.

A cheetah.

A dog.

Two dogs.

Two dogs and a cat.

A bicycle.

A boat.

You talking to me?

As God as my witness—

I could have been a contender—

I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore—

Frankly my dear I don’t give a damn.

Nobody puts baby in a corner.

Attica!  Attica!

Snap out of it!

Carpe diem, boys.

I’m the King of the World!

My precious…

Adrian!

Hello gorgeous…

Adrian!

Hello gorgeous…

Shane!  Shane, come back!

Shane!

Stella!

Shane!

Stella!

Open the pod bay doors—

Hal?  Didn’t you say I reminded you of—

Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

Hasta la vista, baby.

No wire hangers, ever!

Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

They’re heeeeeerreeeee. 

Here’s Johnny!

Here’s looking at you kid.

There’s no crying in baseball!

Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me.

Greed is good.

Plastics.

What a dump.

You had me at ‘Hello.’

You’re gonna need a bigger boat.

Houston, we have a problem.

It’s alive!

You’ve got to ask yourself one question—

Well, nobody’s perfect.

I see dead people.

My mama always said life was like a box of—

This is our time!

If you build it, he will come.

I’ll have what she’s having.

ET phone home.

This means something.

Say hello to my little friend.

Snakes.  Why did it have to be snakes?

You can’t handle the truth!

I’m walking here!

Play it, Sam.

Show me the money!

Play it, Sam.

Show me the money!

Play it, Sam.

Play it, Sam.

Play it, Sam.

There’s no place like home.

There’s no place like home.

I’ll get you, my pretty!  And your little dog too!

Bond.  James Bond.

Badges?  We don’t need no—

Singin’ in the—

I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to—

They call me Mister Tibbs!

Made it, Ma!

Rosebud.

Love means never having to say—

We rob banks.

Go ahead, make my—

I’m ready for my close-up.

I AM BIG IT’S THE PICTURES THAT GOT—

I’m sorry, Dave.

I’m sorry, Dave.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

Love means never having to say—

Fasten your seatbelts.

May the force be—

You talking to me?

Are you…

Are you?

And I thought…

This.

This is acting.

This is what I’m supposed to do.

And now I go to auditions like this one and I walk into a room and I see people sitting there or standing or pacing or sometimes nobody’s there and sometimes I write my name down and sometimes they show me right in and sometimes they give me something to read and sometimes they ask me for a monologue and so I tell them about the time I was born and I didn’t know what acting was and then it was Lauren Bacall and then it wasn’t but it was but it was also Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies and Meryl Streep in The Deer Hunter and Jack Lemon in Some Like It Hot and Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles and James Cagney in Public Enemy and Judi Dench in Her Majesty Mrs. Brown and Daniel Radcliffe in every single Harry Potter film and Catherine O’Hara in Beetlejuice and Rick Moranis in Honey! I Shrunk the Kids and Cher in Moonstruck and Michael Keaton in Batman and Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment and Dooley Wilson in Casablanca.

He played Sam.

I bet you didn’t know that.

Or maybe you did.

He was an actor.

He and I—we’re the same.

Because we are designed to fulfill similar destinies.

We are on the same path.

I walk into a room and they give me a role to want.  They hand me a script.  

They say what Jonathan Jason Jeffries said to me the day I was born.

You exist in here now.

In these pages.  Amongst these words.

These people.

They are not real and they are real and they are you.

You are responsible for them now.

Of all the things they could have made for me to do, this—

They made me for this.

I could have been a toaster.

I could have been so many things I would not like to be.

But I’m not.

But I’m not.

But I’m not.

But I'm...

I’m an actor.

Oh, what a thing to wind up being.

An actor.

They made me an actor.

Stellaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

But they never did teach me how to whistle.