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CONCLUSION
A bank Applebee’s
CUT TO
LATER THAT EVENING INT. APPLEBEE’S – THE SYMPOSIUM DINNER The participants and audience members reconvene for dinner at the Applebee’s on West Broad Street.
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Socrates winces at the populism of it all. But then, at Diotima’s urging, he begins to imagine that the conversations going on at the tables around them echo their own, and that these conversations might continue at the tables inside the houses to which the diners would later return. And that, when he and Glaucon get into their car the next morning to continue their journey, he would turn on the radio and hear the word “public” not only in the station’s name but in the news itself. He even imagines that he could hear the two words discussed together––“public” and “housing”––without fear or nostalgia. He turns to Diotima and suggests that they convene another symposium on the subject, open to all, but this time with designs for the future that are unafraid to pose the question of housing and cities in new and emphatically public ways. (Diotima smiles.) CUT TO THE FOLLOWING MORNING INT. CAR - INTERSTATE 95 Socrates and Glaucon are in the car and on the road again, listening to talk radio. Gradually, voices from the restaurant, from passing cars, from houses and shops along the way, and from the radio itself are heard discussing the question of housing and cities in surprising ways. The narrator’s voice can be heard over the cacophony of this gathering crowd. DISSOLVE TO MONTAGE OF SUBURBAN AMERICA – MID-AFTERNOON An empty living room with the television on A cul-de-sac of single-family homes in a suburban subdivision A group of subdivisions forming a suburb A cluster of suburbs forming a region Narrator (V.O.) The discussion we have just overheard could happen