The story goes back to Aesop. A frog sitting by the riverbank is approached by a scorpion, who asks him to ferry him across. The frog hesitates: “But you’ll sting me and I’ll die.” The scorpion asks, “Where is the reason in that? If I stung you, we’d both die.” Being a reasonable creature, the frog agrees and lets the scorpion hop on. In the middle of the river, the frog feels a horrible pain as he is injected with the scorpion venom. As he feels his body shutting down, he asks: “Why did you do this thing? Now we’ll both die.” I don’t know if scorpions can shrug, but let us say this one can. His last words are: “I can’t help it: It’s my nature.”
Or you can hear Orson Welles tell the same tale in his film Mister Arkadin (1955):
Now what’s the moral of this story insofar as you and I are concerned? Let’s say the scorpion has a shock of bright orange hair. He’s been around for a long time, so we have some notion of how he behaves. Knowing that, why have we allowed that scorpion on our backs?
why indeed… regrets won’t help…
Perhaps it’s our nature?
by the way, I found three Mr. Arkadin films on Netflix. Any comments? I haven’t seen any of them yet.
The best one is the Criterion Edition. Disk 3 contains he most complete version – 105 minutes. It’s a very strange film.