An Unexpected Russian Film

I watched A Clockwork Orange tonight and was shocked at the language. No, it wasn’t full of vulgarities and profanity, but a different sort of jarring of the ears. A good chunk of the dialogue is sprinkled with pidgin Russian.

For those of you who have never seen Stanley Kubrick’s bizarre dystopian film, I’ll try to give a brief synopsis. Let’s see…it is about Alex and his pack of droogs who enjoy nothing more than traveling around the London of the future and partaking in some ultra-violence and relaxing at milk bars. An arrest brings Alex’s harasho times to an end and he ends up being a guinea pig for an experimental treatment meant to drive his bad qualities out. The treatment involves Alex being forced to watch violent films while his eyelids are propped open (if you know anything of the film, it is probably this scene.) As much as Alex doesn’t want to vidi the films, he must. In the end, he not only ends up with an aversion to violence but also Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (it’s complicated.)

The point is this: On the mean streets of future, violent London, the street thugs speak their own slang filled with words like bog, malachek, and all the italicized words above. These are all slights tweaks on real Russian words.

Now I figure I don’t have to do any homework this weekend.