The Ice Storm

Bleak America—exactly how it is. All these people may live in the same house, share a last name, and spend the night in more or less within each other’s vicinities, but that is really about it. If you are looking for anything deeper than a surface-level pat—you won’t find it here, not in this film, nor in the real thing. Strangers living together, ever more growing emotionally distant from each other to the point, where they don’t know the first thing about each other. What is worse, they don’t even know the first thing about themselves. Ever so poignant and relevant to this day, Ang Lee provides this by all means, as they said in their director’s commentary, "a total market flop," but a brutally honest view of how cold it has become within American families. I don’t even know if "family" is the right term here. Suburbia? Nasty word, but it works very well in this context.

K.K. selected this movie during Criterion’s flash sale. I had never heard of it before, but the short description at the back of the disc box intrigued us, so we saved it for viewing until later. We could not have chosen a better time to watch "The Ice Storm" than on Thanksgiving night. Speaking of Thanksgiving, to me, who has had the immense opportunity to grow up all around the world and experience different ways of living, the very idea of the holiday always seemed somewhat odd. Should you not be thankful for what you have every day? I do not mean merely material possessions, though these play an important part in one’s life, they are (hopefully) far from the core requirements of being human. In the film, the "thank you" speech involves specifically material possessions and well-being, rather than focusing on the more intangible things, not something you can put a dollar value on, but fulfilling in ways like nothing else. And of course, for the very root of Thanksgiving, how can one cherish a holiday so deeply when it is soaked and marinated in the blood, tears, and suffering of Native Americans who came before?

I will say it again—bleak. Initially, I couldn’t find the word to describe the whole mood of the setting. "Sadness" was the first that came to mind, but you see, to be sad requires some level of introspection and feeling of something amiss, such that the sad emotions have a way of triggering and being let out. In the American story, there is no such conspiracy, there is nobody "behind it all." It is exactly what people want, what they made their country and nation to march towards, and precisely what they got. Ultimately, there isn’t some "big bad guy" to punch or someone or something to fight and prevail. It’s rotten to the foundation that everything is built on. However, in this case, imagine it not really becoming brittle and collapsing the whole structure—but more of becoming super soggy, slimy, icky, like a rotten fruit, where the rot travels upwards and infects everything on its way, only then starting to sag slowly, such that every inch that the structure falls down takes time and merely unnoticeable, until it’s all gone and done.

This is how I see the picture. The true "American Tragedy," which I cannot say the nation may ever survive. Well, the notion of a "nation" is too strong of a word in this context; when you alienate yourself from your neighbors, friends, spouse, kids, and yourself—what have you truly got? None. The talks of having even a resemblance of a nation cannot be started if all of those critical components are missing. It sounds rather dystopian but look around. One of the biggest movie influences I had regarding the topic of American society was "American Beauty." It focused so heavily and intimately on a single dysfunctional family’s disaster, only to zoom out in the very end to a bird’s-eye view of hundreds, no, thousands of houses in some suburbia, where the same story repeats itself from one house to another, one generation to another, and one "family" to another. Morally and ethically bankrupt society, where almost everything it does and all of its attempts to salvage its sorry state are truly revolting. Adoption of an ancient way to justify adultery is cheating and covering it up as "swingers" is the same as regular, run-of-the-mill, dirty adultery and cheating. Kids discovering sexuality at an age too young to really do anything of substance, because that is their only way of easily recovering a portion of emotional stability, which is lost in the jungles of American suburbia. The list goes on.

Nothing really left to say here. Cinematography was superbly fitting the mood and atmosphere, completely selling the dreary setup of it all. Only if their situation were actively bad, something could have been done—but by being actively engaged in a passive mediocrity—nothing is felt, nothing is found, nothing is talked, and of course, nothing is fixed. Happy Thanksgiving!