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epitome of incomprehensibility
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The Bible isn't Finnish, but it involves fish. Particularly, the Gospel of John ends with everybody going fishing, my dream tells me.
Likewise, A Clockwork Orange as directed by Terence Malick starts with the evolution of fish. "The evolution from ghoti to fish," I say, affecting cleverness, although I'm not sure why that's clever. I'm thinking ghoti is some kind of Indian spice, probably something I'd like to eat with fish.
I'm simultaneously watching the film with my brother and acting as an extra. With my brother, there's a gorgeously expensive widescreen TV surrounded by fake stage curtains. I don't ask how he afforded all that. Perhaps my acting career is going well? In any case, I'm also on set kneeling next to a shallow pond. I have to spot the wriggling modern fish in a nebulous mass of nematodes. I must avoid swallowing the nematodes so I don't get a parasitical infection, but that's easy. When I finally see the fish, black among white-grey sludge, I guide it to open water with my hand.
Next, we cut to Alex's criminal beginnings: short-changing a cafeteria worker. He's at British breakfast school, and the Language Minister, a rotund man in a suit, is calling a dual egg dish "the old in-out" - which, I see, is where Alex will get his jokingly-vulgar-yet-impersonal metaphor for sex. The "in" is an egg wrapped in pasta, looking like a wonton or tortellini piece, and the "out" is a plain fried egg.
For the breakfast students, their cooking instruction is only theoretical. The weary cafeteria staff has actually been making everything since early that morning, and now that the lecture is done the students can line up for their food, though they do have to pay for it. I'm a student in this scene, too, and I'm given three pancakes instead of anything with egg, since the Language/Food Minister insists "girls don't need protein." This makes me mad, but I guess it's a misogynistic world. The lower-class cafeteria staff are mostly women, too.
Alex, who's about thirteen here, pays the girl at the cash only a loonie and runs away, laughing. (Strangely, the money's all Canadian.) I'm next, and to my dismay, it turns out I'm cheating her too, since I take more change than I should and am strongly tempted to keep it. When I try to return the extra quarters, they turn into nickels and dimes in my hand. "Just keep them," the girl, whose name is Becky, says kindly.
End of scene. I'm back at the water's edge, only it's a sea with a rocky coast instead of a flat studio floor with a manufactured pond. On the narrow beach, wind whips people's hair: the people are two young women playing the parts of teenage girls and a woman in her fifties or sixties who's a voice coach. She calls herself a Russian language coach, even though both actresses are recent Russian refugees - dark-haired Tatiana speaks almost no English, while chestnut-haired Martinë has a strong accent. They're seeking their fortune here, Martinë explains, because of the war in Russia. Tatiana and Martinë are their character names, but I don't find out their real names because the scene's starting.
Along comes Alex, older, who starts smooth-talking the girls, Russian refugees in the film, too. Because of the war. The voice coach didn't want to leave the girls, so she's also in the scene, playing a hairdresser. I'm just watching. The scenery still appears to be a rocky seaside (like coastal British Columbia or the white cliffs of Dover in the Matthew Arnold poem) but Alex calls it the Korova Milkar, to be true to the book. And that true-to-the-book thing makes me uneasy.
Terence Malick, for the sake of accuracy, doesn't want to turn the book's often overlooked date-rape scene into a goofy speeded-up threesome as Kubrick did. "Tatiana" and "Martinë" won't be as young as in the book, but Alex will take advantage of their lack of English to lure them to his house, get them drunk, and then... Well, I know it won't be real, but I don't want to look at it. Tatiana's sitting on a couch next to Alex, her eyes half-closed and head wobbly. Make it look violent, don't just let them flop, Malick instructs, and I see we're now inside "my" house, next to my brother watching the movie on the giant TV. He pauses it by poking the screen and exits the room. I start stacking clothes on the floor in order to do cushion my head while doing somersaults. I figure that if I somersault well enough the camera might focus on me instead.
There seems to be a problem: the grey-haired voice coach is also in this living room, in the scene, and Malick wants her out of the way. Alex, he says, isn't going to rape everybody; it would look funny and I want this to be serious.
Maybe he has narrow views on older women? I'm thinking she could be Mrs. Alexander, but I don't want to be there when she's attacked, either. At least now the actors are sitting up on the couch, out of character, alert as they listen for instructions. I hope they don't want to use my clothing-cushion as an improvised bed. I dismantle it with a cartwheel.
I look at the computer-TV with the encircled "" for Play still paused. I'm thinking I read the book, but I can't remember when. It was sometime before the Ezra Pound project, Ezra Pound who was bad because obsessed by a dictator who wasn't from Russia but some country with a different name, and sometime after life evolved out of the sea.
I swim up into consciousness so I can breakfast, travel, lunch, volunteer-translate, and invent some of the hazier details. I'm miserable but you might not know it. At least the fish was encouraging.
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