In Vitro (2019) Movie Script
0
Each morning, I wake up to this rumbling.
The sound of the underground.
You hear it too, right?
I hear it.
The murmurs of the bedrock.
I only escape
the reality of our entombment...
when they switch on the orchard lights...
and I hear the birds, bees,
and butterflies.
How did you get here?
Did you travel above ground?
No, it's still not safe.
I came through the tunnels.
But the weeds have been back for years...
the waterways are restored.
It shouldn't be long now.
Even the worshippers have returned.
Many of them never left.
They didn't want to abandon
their holy sites.
They sent us off with a blessing...
days before they perished
from the plagues.
We all have our idiosyncrasies.
The last things we recovered
were the cocoons and the beehives.
We released them into the orchard...
to ensure a natural cycle of pollination.
Did you ever try to find out
what happened elsewhere?
We've heard nothing
since going underground.
Others were...
beginning to experience
what we had seen for years.
But it was clear no place would be spared.
Disasters evolve more rapidly here.
This place was always charged.
Similar things were happening
in other places.
Eventually everything caught up with them
and they had their own doomsday.
I was raised on nostalgia.
The past spoon-fed to me.
My own memories replaced
by those of others.
They appear personal and intimate.
They're not real, but seductive...
like lavish illustrations
in a children's book.
Out of touch with life down here...
like bacteria planted in me.
We were all raised
on someone else's nostalgia.
Our own experiences
blending with the stories we are told.
Your memories are as real as mine.
I disagree.
The pain these stories cause
are twofold...
because the loss I feel was never mine.
I forget your age.
I know it is conflicting to be engineered
from the remains of those we left behind.
You were born,
but you are still trapped in the womb.
I'm aware of the genetic replications.
I'm not the first me.
You are the only one who made it this far.
Despite that...
you have never known anything but absence.
Everyone keeps reminding me of that.
My congenital exile.
I have come to resent that notion.
It won't be long before you return.
This place is your exile...
not mine.
I despise the idea
that the present is nothing but a void.
A transition between what was
and what's to come.
A sentimental prelude to the afterlife.
It rejects any sense of now.
The fact of our existence.
This present barely exists.
You were born into purgatory.
Like past generations in this place.
They all tried to redeem their present...
lit it up with old stories...
and decorated the void...
with promises of things to come.
But the void only grows.
Soon, it's so imposing and violent...
it devours everything in its way.
Like a black hole.
Something like that.
This hole...
tries to return all light and matter
to their place of origin...
but it fails...
and leaves nothing
but a dense volume of emptiness.
My parents look a lot like me now.
Once I started
seeing bits of myself in them
the reverse also became true.
I am what makes them partially identical.
At any given point,
the present imposes its language...
and projects the meaning
of this very moment back onto the past.
The past never was, it only is.
These moments will disappear too.
When our time comes,
that time will no longer be ours.
We will be archives
for someone else to make sense of.
The artificial premise of my existence
makes it no less real than yours.
People tend to forget that.
They nurse us on memories
formed before us,
and only raise us for the times to come.
The grief we carry is different.
Loss fails when it's an abstraction.
I have never seen any of these places.
You soon will.
- All I will see is a ghost town.
- Bethlehem was always a ghost town.
- The present upstaged by the past.
- I don't believe in ghosts.
What we are doing here
will not restore the past.
There's no need to.
The past is still there,
as intact as ever.
Maybe your past is.
The only past I know is here.
Everything else is just a fairy tale.
Entire nations are built on fairy tales.
Facts alone are too sterile
for cohesive understanding.
Soon, what we have achieved here
will create a myth of its own.
You will be part of it.
I don't care about your nations.
Their stories, their rituals,
their repetition of imagery.
This struggle, this land, these seasons.
Memory channeled by a handful of tropes.
These scents, this fabric, this history
reduced to symbols and iconography.
A liturgy chronicling our losses.
These plagues.
These disasters. This exodus.
And every exodus before that.
The problem with nostalgia
is that it keeps you entertained
while everything you cherish washes away.
It makes you cling
to the comfort of what you have...
even if it is decimated day by day.
We lost an entire generation.
Your original stock of heirloom children.
The matter I came from.
Recreated in their image.
That's right.
And their memories.
We couldn't afford to lose those too.
Perhaps losing your memories
is essential to starting over?
Forgetting makes you vulnerable
to mistakes you've already made.
Maybe next time they won't be mistakes.
Maybe not.
But you will have the information
to make that decision.
Memories don't distinguish
between fact and fiction.
We spent too long registering,
recording and archiving.
We failed to see
that the only non-negotiable part
of any argument is pathos.
What terrifies me the most
are the memories I know to be alien...
yet are too vivid to dismiss
as somebody else's.
I recognize the stories I'm told.
I know how they end
before they've finished...
as if I have witnessed them myself.
I have never seen the sun rise or set.
Yet I remember dusk and dawn.
I remember walking through the rain
feeling my shirt sticking to my skin.
The flames of a bonfire
heating my face.
I dream of the olive harvests.
Me too.
We need you to guard these images.
Memories.
I'm no longer sure what they are.
You remember seeing things
even if the person
who saw them wasn't you.
Some scenes are more grainy
and faded than others.
It's your mind's way
of maintaining some chronology.
Down here, all transitions are abrupt.
A single switch turns day into night.
Each morning, I wake up to this rumbling.
The sound of the underground.
You hear it too, right?
I hear it.
The murmurs of the bedrock.
I only escape
the reality of our entombment...
when they switch on the orchard lights...
and I hear the birds, bees,
and butterflies.
How did you get here?
Did you travel above ground?
No, it's still not safe.
I came through the tunnels.
But the weeds have been back for years...
the waterways are restored.
It shouldn't be long now.
Even the worshippers have returned.
Many of them never left.
They didn't want to abandon
their holy sites.
They sent us off with a blessing...
days before they perished
from the plagues.
We all have our idiosyncrasies.
The last things we recovered
were the cocoons and the beehives.
We released them into the orchard...
to ensure a natural cycle of pollination.
Did you ever try to find out
what happened elsewhere?
We've heard nothing
since going underground.
Others were...
beginning to experience
what we had seen for years.
But it was clear no place would be spared.
Disasters evolve more rapidly here.
This place was always charged.
Similar things were happening
in other places.
Eventually everything caught up with them
and they had their own doomsday.
I was raised on nostalgia.
The past spoon-fed to me.
My own memories replaced
by those of others.
They appear personal and intimate.
They're not real, but seductive...
like lavish illustrations
in a children's book.
Out of touch with life down here...
like bacteria planted in me.
We were all raised
on someone else's nostalgia.
Our own experiences
blending with the stories we are told.
Your memories are as real as mine.
I disagree.
The pain these stories cause
are twofold...
because the loss I feel was never mine.
I forget your age.
I know it is conflicting to be engineered
from the remains of those we left behind.
You were born,
but you are still trapped in the womb.
I'm aware of the genetic replications.
I'm not the first me.
You are the only one who made it this far.
Despite that...
you have never known anything but absence.
Everyone keeps reminding me of that.
My congenital exile.
I have come to resent that notion.
It won't be long before you return.
This place is your exile...
not mine.
I despise the idea
that the present is nothing but a void.
A transition between what was
and what's to come.
A sentimental prelude to the afterlife.
It rejects any sense of now.
The fact of our existence.
This present barely exists.
You were born into purgatory.
Like past generations in this place.
They all tried to redeem their present...
lit it up with old stories...
and decorated the void...
with promises of things to come.
But the void only grows.
Soon, it's so imposing and violent...
it devours everything in its way.
Like a black hole.
Something like that.
This hole...
tries to return all light and matter
to their place of origin...
but it fails...
and leaves nothing
but a dense volume of emptiness.
My parents look a lot like me now.
Once I started
seeing bits of myself in them
the reverse also became true.
I am what makes them partially identical.
At any given point,
the present imposes its language...
and projects the meaning
of this very moment back onto the past.
The past never was, it only is.
These moments will disappear too.
When our time comes,
that time will no longer be ours.
We will be archives
for someone else to make sense of.
The artificial premise of my existence
makes it no less real than yours.
People tend to forget that.
They nurse us on memories
formed before us,
and only raise us for the times to come.
The grief we carry is different.
Loss fails when it's an abstraction.
I have never seen any of these places.
You soon will.
- All I will see is a ghost town.
- Bethlehem was always a ghost town.
- The present upstaged by the past.
- I don't believe in ghosts.
What we are doing here
will not restore the past.
There's no need to.
The past is still there,
as intact as ever.
Maybe your past is.
The only past I know is here.
Everything else is just a fairy tale.
Entire nations are built on fairy tales.
Facts alone are too sterile
for cohesive understanding.
Soon, what we have achieved here
will create a myth of its own.
You will be part of it.
I don't care about your nations.
Their stories, their rituals,
their repetition of imagery.
This struggle, this land, these seasons.
Memory channeled by a handful of tropes.
These scents, this fabric, this history
reduced to symbols and iconography.
A liturgy chronicling our losses.
These plagues.
These disasters. This exodus.
And every exodus before that.
The problem with nostalgia
is that it keeps you entertained
while everything you cherish washes away.
It makes you cling
to the comfort of what you have...
even if it is decimated day by day.
We lost an entire generation.
Your original stock of heirloom children.
The matter I came from.
Recreated in their image.
That's right.
And their memories.
We couldn't afford to lose those too.
Perhaps losing your memories
is essential to starting over?
Forgetting makes you vulnerable
to mistakes you've already made.
Maybe next time they won't be mistakes.
Maybe not.
But you will have the information
to make that decision.
Memories don't distinguish
between fact and fiction.
We spent too long registering,
recording and archiving.
We failed to see
that the only non-negotiable part
of any argument is pathos.
What terrifies me the most
are the memories I know to be alien...
yet are too vivid to dismiss
as somebody else's.
I recognize the stories I'm told.
I know how they end
before they've finished...
as if I have witnessed them myself.
I have never seen the sun rise or set.
Yet I remember dusk and dawn.
I remember walking through the rain
feeling my shirt sticking to my skin.
The flames of a bonfire
heating my face.
I dream of the olive harvests.
Me too.
We need you to guard these images.
Memories.
I'm no longer sure what they are.
You remember seeing things
even if the person
who saw them wasn't you.
Some scenes are more grainy
and faded than others.
It's your mind's way
of maintaining some chronology.
Down here, all transitions are abrupt.
A single switch turns day into night.