This scene from Nicholas Meyer‘s Time After Time (’79), which I haven’t seen since it opened, is about a hotel-room conversation between the visionary writer and idealist H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) and John Leslie Stevenson aka Jack The Ripper (David Warner). Both have time-travelled to late ’70s San Francisco. One is a fish out of water, another belongs.

The scene is basically about editorializing — Meyer briefly stopping the narrative to remark upon the moral decline that permeates contemporary society.

Start this clip from the 1:35 mark:

Stevenson to Wells: “We don’t belong here? On the contrary, I belong here completely and utterly. I’m home. It’s you who doesn’t belong here. You, with your absurd notions of a perfect and harmonious society. Drivel. The world has caught up and surpassed me. Ninety years ago, I was a freak. Today, I’m an amateur.

“You go back. The future isn’t what you thought. It’s what I am. Do you know that you can purchase a rifle or a revolver? It’s legal.”