Michael Northrop

Do you think Rutger Hauer was watching as the women’s field hockey team from the Netherlands beat China, 2–0, in the gold medal game? I think he was.

As you can see, they are a very, ahem, talented team. Let me just put this plainly: They look like the cast of House Bunny. They also coasted through the Olympics without losing a match. (I’m trying to think of some more colorful way to say that. Maybe, ‘I haven’t seen that kind of Dutch mastery since Van Gogh’?)

If I may put aside the crass objectification and bad puns for a moment, I would like to say that I am really enjoying the random Olympic sports. Team handball, modern pentathlon, synchronized diving, that kind of stuff. It amazes me not only what the human body can achieve (for example, a seemingly casual sub-10-second 100-meter run or a twisting backflip on a four-inch beam) but what the human mind chooses to achieve (for example, well, synchronized diving).

When we were kids, my brother and I were huge fans of the Dutch actor Rutger Hauer. This was largely because of his legendary performance as bad-ass replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner, of course, but there was also The Hitcher (the original), The Osterman Weekend—heck, we even stuck with him through Ladyhawke.

I might be a little late to this party, but I just learned that the line “like tears in the rain” wasn’t in the original Blade Runner script. Hauer improvised it during shooting. A lot of people consider that the best line of the best scene in the best sci-fi movie ever made. I am one of those people, giving it the nod over “Imperial Walkers on the North Ridge,” because The Empire Strikes Back just doesn’t have the mesmerizing grittiness of Blade Runner. And that was basically a PA announcement, anyway.

So, as a tip of the hat to the Teutonic Terror, here it is. I was a little torn about using this subtitled version (and I really disagree with the ALL CAPS moment), but it is gorgeous text, and this is an author’s blog, after all.


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