Frizzy in the rain

His favorite film was about a man who worked in a steel mill during the early portions of the industrial revolution, who’d spend the afternoons walking down a dusty path by the river, and admiring the play of attenuated life so much like fish that swam through the trees to rest on the river. The man had a wife and a child who he rarely saw because of his work schedule. And, as the movie continues on it becomes clear that he’s falling in love with the secretary at the steel mill. And, on his short lunch breaks the two of them begin walking by the willows and the water and admiring the varieties of light, but nothing is ever said between the two of them, only felt by the audience. And, as the movie goes on, it traces three years of the man and his wife and child, eating meals together, looking relatively happy, and the man working in the steel mill, looking intense, and the man walking by the water with the young girl looking for all intents and purposes young himself, and telling her about how he’d originally wanted to leave the town, how he’d learned bits of Greek, because he’d always imagined traveling to the Greek Isles and working as a sailor or ship’s mate or whatever. And he tells her that his mother, God rest her soul, had a post card on the refrigerator from his father sent from the Greek Isles with a picture of ice blue water and long beaches, so that he always associated his father, who had only gone two towns over to shack up with a whore, with the wind, and the sea. And he told this girl Helen that he’d always dreamed of the sea, of the salt sea spray on his face. And it occurs to him, or to us, through some really terrific acting that he has never told his wife that he wishes that he was traveling the seas. And he makes excuses to the girl, and hurries back to work thinking about how he can’t wait to get home and tell his wife about his plan of traveling to the Greek Isles.

And, he’s so engrossed in telling all of his colleagues about what it would be like to travel the seas, this normally reserved man, that his hand gets stuck on the belt and is taken off up around the elbow, and he bleeds out rather quickly, and the secretary is there, watching as the man, who she was certain was going to take her out of this hell hole of a town bleeds out on the hard factory floor, while the machines churn on in the background, the director pretending as if this wouldn’t have happened, that some Chaplainesque nightmare is taking place, and so he focuses on the pool of blood on the ground, though it’s less a pool than a triumph of blood, spattered all over the machine, the floor, the man’s shirt, which reads Joe, and inexplicably, on the face of the actress playing the secretary though she’s been nowhere near him enough to have picked anything up, and it seemed like either a mistake, or some very obvious metaphor.

And she walks out of the, cold steel factory and into the hot and wet day, rain is falling, but she doesn’t wear a hat or coat. She trudges along the river, the muddy ground spattering the hem of her white dress. And there is the suggestion that perhaps she’ll throw herself in, and a strange scene involving a three headed woman who sits on the rock in the middle of the stream singing an operatic song of such beauty that the woman is enthralled and stops walking, and just watches the three headed woman sing a beautiful opera in the middle of the stream, and she knows now why the man always loved the river, it was not for her, or his dreams, but for this woman or whatever, who’s voice was like the scent of jasmine or a hint of all the men she would still love. When the song finished she continued walking, humming now, humming the song that the siren, for that’s what it was, sang to her, and the audience doesn’t know where she’s going, but we all want her to get an umbrella, because the actress’ hair gets frizzy in the rain.