ANG LEE’S FILMIC voice indicates the paradigm of globalized fragmentation in the contemporary era—that ours is no longer a world of totality—that the world has become more and more fragmentary. One of the most harrowing examples of this fragmentation in the work of Ang Lee is The Ice Storm. In this film, Lee challenges the viewer with a new level of deconstruction and fragmentation of the family. This choice is an interesting one for the director, who had already negated and subverted the traditional Confucian patriarchal Chinese family structure in The Wedding Banquet. In that film, the homosexuality and individualism of the protagonist challenged and transgressed traditional Chinese cultural norms. Now, in the The Ice Storm, Lee had come to a new challenge of representing on film the deconstruction of the American family in the 1970s. It is quite an achievement that he was able to deeply penetrate and appropriate the spiritual and moral emptiness of 1970s American suburbia. In doing so, he strikes a balance between the postmodern fragmentation of meaning and signifiers, and the true humanity of searching for meaning. And once again, as he did in his previous Chinese films, he explores intergenerational conflict by focusing on the younger generation, bringing their indiscriminate longings to the forefront. The pivotal roles in The Ice Storm all belong to teenagers, especially the high-school age brother, Paul Hood (Tobey Maguire), who humiliatingly struggles through experiences with drugs and sex, his 14-year-old sister, Wendy (Christina Ricci), whose mysterious and perverse sexual journey dominates the film, and her boyfriend Mikey (Elijah Wood), whose search for transcendence has a fatal outcome.
In this film, set in the 1970s glasshouse suburban world of New Canaan, Connecticut, Ang Lee creates a stark, alienating, gray microcosm for his players—difficult to watch, but oddly compelling. The Connecticut winter is at its most harsh and unforgiving, and the scenes leading up to the famous storm are filled with bare trees, dead leaves, and bitter cold air. This paints an apt picture for the tone of the film, which is about sexual detachment and alienation within the family. The film is a masterpiece of irony and bitterness. One can go so far as to say there is practically no communication—that is, the transference of understanding and coherent exchange of ideas between the characters—in the film. Each scene is fairly short, and if conversation takes place, it is usually brief or interrupted. Characters speak with their backs to each other, from under bedclothes, from behind closed doors, from within a Nixon mask, without meeting each other’s eyes. Characters do not listen to each other. Silence is an actual medium in the movie—the film is all about what is unsaid—and the unexpressed thoughts fill the movie like a picture highlighted in relief. Kevin Kline and Joan Allen play a married couple, Ben and Elena Hood, for whom an upcoming weekend of Thanksgiving vacation could provide a chance to reconnect with each other and with their two teenage children, Paul and Wendy. Instead, however, Ben Hood is distracted by his own affair with a neighbor, Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver), while his children are engaged in their own precocious sexual pursuits. Children mimic parents in their meaningless and labyrinthine chase.
Some of the most unforgettable scenes in the film regarding miscommunication and the search for true intimacy include Ben Hood and his daughter Wendy’s silent walk through a wet and muddy woods, as he carries the chastened teenage child home in his arms (her feet are cold). The final scene is also a masterfully delicate moment, as Ben weeps, penitent, bent over the steering wheel of the family car, while in the backseat, his son looks on quizzically, watching the rear view of his tortured father’s head. Other haunting scenes include the kiss, in a winterized, drained swimming pool filled with dead leaves, between Wendy and her adolescent boyfriend—he first takes chewing gum out of his mouth in a gesture that seems both sexually charged and boyishly innocent. Lines from the film which linger in memory include Janey’s scathing line to Ben, postcoital: “You’re boring me. I already have a husband.” Her husband, Jim (Jamey Sheridan), returns from a business trip to Houston and says to their two boys, “Hey, guys, I’m back.” The older son Mikey replies, “You were gone?” There is also the angelic cherub-like son, Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), who tells Wendy, “I love you.” In response, she asks, “Are you drunk?” In addition, there is an early scene where Paul recommends to a girl on whom he has a crush to read The Idiot by Dostoevsky, as he stands on a staircase feeling like one. “I think you’d really like it”—he says—“The Idiot.”
Ang Lee’s familiarity with 1970s Connecticut life is formidable—even more so considering The Ice Storm was his first feature film on an entirely American subject. The movie was filmed on location in New Canaan, Connecticut, including the town’s main street, train station, drugstore, library, and Waveny Park. This town is the epicenter of white upper-middle-class Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, and the accoutrements of the movie—stereo phonographs playing “Montego Bay,” rainbow-colored toe socks, polyester fashions of the ugliest nature including long lapels and gaudy leisure suits, hairspray-hardened hairstyles, waterbeds, the hardcover volume of Watership Down, etc.—are all products well-remembered by those who came of age in those years. The modernist houses used in the set—shag carpets, wall-sized windows, flat interior design, gray paneling, unattractive box TV sets, etc.—are all exact replicas of the 1970s community. Even the television commercials (i.e., the weeping Indian, Iron Eyes Cody, in an advertisement for environmental protection) and programs in the background are authentic television footage that clearly evoke the era. The use of both drugs and sex as escape routes in the movie accurately mirror the American social scene as it unfolded in 1973. The human dramas in the film are made all the more convoluted, murky, dreamlike, and detached by the emotionally-numbing involvement of drugs, sex, and alcohol. Alcohol is served at every party and gathering among the adults in the film—there is never an adult without a drink or a cigarette, usually both. The sexual relationships include those between Wendy and the two sons of a friend’s family, Paul and his love interest, plus the adulterous relationships of both parents. This culminates in the notorious “key party” in which everyone exchanges car keys and goes off with everyone else—including, until his early exit, the town’s preacher (“Sometimes the shepherd needs the company of the sheep,” he says to Elena; “I’m going to try hard not to understand the implications of that,” she replies).
The date of 1973 is pinpointed by the footage of Richard Nixon on the television set; Thanksgiving week in 1973, in which Nixon is about to be relieved from office over the Watergate scandal, the war in Vietnam is an ongoing political disaster, and disillusionment pervades the atmosphere. This was the accurate historical date of the famous ice storm which hit Connecticut and a large swath of New England in 1973, in which the air over the eastern seaboard suddenly turned to a freezing temperature, and in a single night a rain storm coated every exposed surface with a glaze of ice. The storm was dangerous, and entire communities and neighborhoods were immobilized and isolated for days. Trees cracked under the weight of the ice, and the falling of these huge trunks crushed houses, buildings, and automobiles. The storm in both the movie, and in reality, highlighted the distance and alienation felt at that time. This is captured in Lee’s film by the sights and sounds so clearly etched in one’s memory—the clinking and cracking of the ice as the wind blew through ice-encrusted trees, the squeaking cracks of falling branches, the impassible roads, the loss of electricity. The “ice” metaphor is given further weight by the close-ups of a metal ice tray appearing in the film. Metaphors are further suggested by the short, cold days accentuated by the gray skies and the bleakness of the approaching winter. Those from the New England area recognize Thanksgiving as the beginning of a long winter season, incessant and relentless until April. The ice is even given a role in the film, as husbands and wives gingerly make their way across slippery, unfamiliar terrain.
After the storm, the “embarrassment of forgiveness”—Paul’s family awaits him at the train station in the final moments of the film.
Challenges in the Making of The Ice Storm
The Ice Storm is a remarkable achievement on the part of Ang Lee because it demonstrates, just as Sense and Sensibility did, the director’s amazing versatility, proving definitively that his directorial range cannot be confined to a single culture or genre. Indeed, the film demonstrates a phenomenal grasp of the 1970s American suburban experience it depicts. In addition, the book itself, which became a best-seller in the United States, was written by Rick Moody, who grew up in the environment he describes, and for whom the experiences related are semiautobiographical. While Moody’s fiction shows a confidence with his material, the film in some ways surpasses the fictional experience—how often can it be said that the book was not as good as the movie? And yet in this case, the book can be judged due to its appeal as a type of “pulp fiction”—it contains far more explicit sex than the film—almost needing to entice the reader through its softly pornographic writing on nearly every page. The movie transcends this sexual obsession, presenting the sexual material more obliquely, or even omitting it, in favor of more sophisticated portraits of its characters. The book, for example, opens with a scene in which Ben Hood is wandering around in his neighbor’s house, and he takes a pair of her underwear and masturbates into it, and then throws it into her son’s room. The film omits this graphic scene. Another specific example is the teenage son’s crush on his Manhattan classmate—in the book, a detailed scene of masturbation is described as the boy takes advantage of the girl’s drugged stupor. The movie treats this situation more tenderly and comically—more skillfully in general—the girl passes out in the boy’s lap; the expression on the boy’s face is one of stunned gratitude. However, he does not take advantage of the situation in such a prurient way. Instead, trapped under her body, he uncertainly and clumsily moves her, clunking her head against the ground in one of the most bittersweet and believable scenes in the movie. Then he has to leave, running for his train that will carry him into the freeze of the ice storm. The subtlety of Lee’s presentation trumps the graphic sexuality of Moody’s fiction. James Schamus has also commented on his “censoring” what he called “Paul’s horrifically endearing bout of masturbation at Libbets’ apartment.”1 According to Schamus, “[Reading about it is one thing, but] seeing it would have been something else altogether, in particular if the image were stripped of the help the book’s narrator gives us in appreciating the moment in all its pathos and humor.”2
The ice storm itself is one of the key elements of the film and perhaps plays its largest role, at least for the director, who clearly enjoyed lingering on its otherworldly sights and sounds. Lee obviously relished filming a true period in history in which “The entire world becomes covered in transparent crackling glass.”3 The making of The Ice Storm, with its heavy metaphorical imagery, was perhaps most closely related to Eat Drink Man Woman with its emphasis on food—slicing, stewing, stuffing, and frying. In both Eat Drink Man Woman and The Ice Storm, the director freely and extravagantly experimented with rich visual imagery, taking large amounts of dialogue-free screen time to do so. Lee’s signature technique came through clearly in both films as he used visual metaphor to tell his story, independent of dialogue. In discussing the making of The Ice Storm, Lee wrote in the preface to the shooting script:
When I think of The Ice Storm, I think first of water and rain, of how it falls everywhere, seeps into everything, forms underground rivers, and helps to shape a landscape. And also, when calm, of how it forms a reflective surface, like glass, in which the world reappears. Then, as the temperature drops, what was only water freezes. Its structure can crush concrete and push iron away, it is so strong. Its pattern overthrows everything. This is the structure I have hoped to create in my movie, The Ice Storm. Whatever the surface patterns you might see reflected there, the customs and morals, and hopes, and loves of the characters are infused, and overturned, and reestablished by the force of nature that the storm represents.4
Not all critics agree that Ang Lee was successful in his adaptation of Moody’s work. Charles Taylor represents one dissenting opinion:
Everything about “The Ice Storm,” from the cool green titles that seem to smoke and shift (as if seen through ice) to Mychael Danna’s score of lonely, Asian-sounding wind instruments, is tasteful and distant. … Moody was writing from the inside; Lee doesn’t get beyond displaying artifacts from a lost civilization … the movie does call up the early 1970s. But being an anthropologist isn’t the same thing as being a dramatist, and I’m not convinced Lee understands the period. How could he? Lee’s being Taiwanese didn’t matter in his last picture, Sense and Sensibility, because the early 1800s are distant to everyone, but the calamity of American life in 1973 is still fresh in the minds of anyone who lived through it. The exhausting, one-damn-thing-after-another tenor of American life, with the outrage of Watergate striking before the hangover from Vietnam wore off, was far removed from the cool, ascetic portentousness on display here.5
The biggest challenge for the film was to make a coherent narrative out of a book that presents a fragmentary one. The story is not linear, but rather patchy series of events described without chronological order in a chapter-by-chapter exposition each told from a different character’s point of view. Only in the final chapter is it revealed that the story has been told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator, the teenage son Paul Hood. Because the narrator could not have had access to each character’s private thoughts and stream of consciousness, as he did by the skillful literary device in the book, the story had to be told in an entirely different format in the film. James Schamus’ screenplay filled in backstory that was only hinted at in the book—the first half of the movie does not occur in Moody’s novel at all. Dialogue was created from the parts of the book that were inner musings in characters’ heads. Thus, part of the postmodern, splintered feeling of this film comes from its source material—the filmmakers had to create a narrative from what is essentially a cubist and fragmented piece of work. In an interview published in 2005, Lee explores this idea further:
The Ice Storm represents the natural evolution of the ideas I began exploring in Eat Drink Man Woman. I think that beginning with Eat Drink Man Woman I started departing from what I had done in the first two films. I was beginning to experiment with cinema and was thinking mostly of cubism. Instead of a linear structure, I was looking at a different way to hold the movie. So I was trying to develop one incident or one character and look at it from all sides. But when you want to watch from all sides, you also have to shoot in a way that reflects that. It is funny, when I went back to Taipei to shoot Eat Drink Man Woman, I felt like the whole city—it is kind of an ugly city—looked like a painting by Braque or Picasso. I didn’t go all the way with [cubism] at that time, but I couldn’t wait to develop it further with The Ice Storm.6
The nature of the film is part satire, part psychological drama, and part tragedy. It is also a period piece, requiring the director to address accurately a time period in which he was not physically located in the United States, and also an era that is very recent in people’s minds.
I basically made the movie from the crew’s suggestions. For one scene, I wanted some kids’ toys against the wall in Mikey’s room, to give the scene texture, and we tried a field hockey stick. It looked really good to me, until someone had to say that in America, field hockey is more of a girl’s game. Gradually I got tuned into the world—that happens on every movie. I did a women’s movie, and I’m not a woman. I did a gay movie, and I’m not gay. I learned as I went along. What hit me the most was when Wendy says, “Mom, are you all right?” And I couldn’t understand when Ben tells the kids to go to bed by 10, and they don’t do it—I couldn’t relate to that. I had to learn from the crew, who explained to me that this was a time when the kids were really raising their parents. The parents were so self-absorbed that the kids had to take responsibility for their own upbringing.7
Fragmentary Dialogue and the Use of Silence
One outstanding element in the screenplay for The Ice Storm is its dialogue, which reflects the repressed communication style of families steeped in unhappiness, a lack of communication, and unfinished conversations. Although Rick Moody’s novel is a lengthy narrative told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator, the screenplay by James Schamus develops Moody’s ideas through broken sentences, unfinished thoughts, and interrupted communications.8 This creates a marvelous sense of abstraction and fragmentation; at the same time, the viewer is able to piece together the bits of dialogue to come to a more complete understanding of the characters. As has been mentioned, this fragmented effect is similar to cubist art, where small segments of the picture can be observed from different angles. Most of the lines spoken by the actors are only one or two phrases, or incomplete sentences. Conversations overlap, weave together, and are interrupted. A speech longer than two or three sentences, or sometimes two or three words, is rare in this film.
In one example of charged dialogue, the characters use simple words flooded with meaning in emotion and tone to set up the primary conflict between them. In this scene, Elena and Ben Hood are attending a dinner party at their neighbors’ home. All has gone smoothly, and the conversation has remained superficially polite, but the spilling of some wine onto Ben’s trousers results in Janey Carver wiping the stain absentmindedly with a napkin. This action is ambiguous; however, there is a slight charge in the atmosphere as Elena, Ben’s wife, notices the casual exchange between her neighbor and her husband. Soon after it is indeed revealed that the two are having an affair. However, at this early stage, the only hint of Janey’s guilt appears as she sharply refuses to let Elena help with the dishes. The two maintain the utmost in propriety in etiquette while their true feelings are not at all hidden.
| (The dinner party has moved to the living room for after dinner drinks. Elena remains behind to help Janey pick up the table. She stacks a plate on top of another.) |
| Janey: |
Please don’t. |
| Elena: |
It’s not a bother. |
| Janey: |
I insist. |
| |
(beat) |
| |
Don’t touch them. |
| |
(Elena realizes that there’s an edge to Janey’s voice.) |
| Elena: |
Oh. |
| Janey: |
(realizing she’s gone too far) It’s really quite all right. |
| Elena: |
Of course.9 |
In a second example, the two characters, Elena and Philip (Michael Cumpsty), are engaged in a conversation at a used-book sale. Philip is trying to charm Elena and flirt with her, but Elena abruptly changes the topic when she sees her daughter riding past them on her bicycle. This shift in conversation makes the self-important minister change tack; however, he is unable to see what Elena is thinking. Elena herself becomes confused, lost in thought, and transfixed by the distant memories of childhood. In an interesting twist, Elena forgets what the topic is and it is Philip himself who reminds her; she then agrees with him as if he were the one to bring it up. The conflict is perfectly transparent to the viewer in the following exchange:
| Philip: |
Well, I of course flatter myself that our church is not exactly what most people would call organized religion—at times it’s the disorganization that’s liberating—and of course I’ve begun to minister much more in what one might call therapeutic environments, in small groups, and one on one, couples … |
| |
(Elena looks outside the window, and sees Wendy speed past on her bicycle.) |
| Elena: |
(cutting him off) My daughter. I haven’t been on a bike for years. |
| |
(still not really looking at him) |
| |
When was the last time you rode a bike? |
| Philip: |
(a bit taken aback by the abrupt topic change) They say you never forget. |
| Elena: |
(jarred back to his presence) Forget what? |
| Philip: |
Forget how to ride a bike. |
|
(Silence.) |
| Elena: |
No, of course you don’t, you’re right.10 |
A third example of dialogue is that of an intimate conversation between a husband and wife, Ben and Elena. These two are very familiar with each other, having been married nearly twenty years, and can finish each other’s sentences. This has become a habit of communication with them, so that they do not even clearly articulate what they mean, and in fact, may not even be certain of exactly what they are trying to say.
| Ben: |
Elena. I need some help here if this thing’s gonna defrost by tomorrow. |
|
(She comes up and together they tug and pull until they succeed in extracting a large, frozen turkey. As they pull it out, it slips from their hands and, after a dull thump, slides along the floor. They smile. Elena bends over to pick it up. Ben observes her. She notices his look.) |
| Ben: |
Here. |
|
(He goes over and picks up the turkey, placing it in the sink. He looks back at her and notices her vaguely distraught look.) |
| Ben: |
You all right there? |
| Elena: |
Oh. Sure, I—Did you remember to pick up the cranberry sauce? |
| Ben: |
Um, yes. |
|
(They stand together, his concern and her vulnerability forming an awkward attraction between them.) |
| Elena: |
Because you like it on your turkey sandwiches. |
| Ben: |
I do … I’m—are you … ? |
| Elena: |
I … I think I … |
| Ben: |
(pause) You know Elena, I’ve been thinking … |
| Elena: |
Ben, maybe no talking right now? If you start talking, you’re going to … |
|
(She kisses him as if she needs him. |
| INT. HOOD HALLWAY. DAY. |
|
Ben and Elena enter their bedroom. Elena closes the door quietly behind her. |
| INT. HOOD BEDROOM. DAY. |
|
Ben and Elena undress shyly. They make love. Elena’s face is almost fearful. |
| INT. HOOD BEDROOM. LATER. |
|
Elena and Ben lie in bed side by side in the pale afternoon light.) |
| Ben: |
Wow. You kind of forget what you’re missing … |
|
(He gets up and starts to get dressed.) |
| Ben: |
I should probably be getting going, to get Paul. |
|
(He smells the armpits of the shirt he’s putting on.) |
| Ben: |
Yikes—I was hoping to wear this thing to the Halford’s Friday. |
|
(He looks at Elena, and realizes she’s started to cry.) |
| Ben: |
Hey. Elena? |
| Elena: |
It’s nothing. |
| Ben: |
What? What is it? |
| Elena: |
That shirt? |
| Ben: |
What? |
| Elena: |
Leave it—I’ll wash it for you. |
|
(He looks at her ruefully.)11 |
This dialogue is presented very realistically, with the two uttering fragmented sentences in their most intimate exchange, as they discuss their momentary physical attraction: “I do. I’m—are you?” The other replies: “I … I think I …” Here, meaning is exchanged without being explicitly stated, while Elena’s hesitancy reflects her feeling of ambivalence. When Ben asks Elena twice how she is feeling, the first time she changes the subject: “Oh. Sure, I—Did you remember to pick up the cranberry sauce?” and the second time she denies her feelings: “It’s nothing.” At the end of this short series of scenes, the conversation comes to a heartbreaking conclusion over the subject of Ben’s dirty shirt. In promising to wash the shirt for him, Elena promises to continue to stay in her marriage despite her deep dissatisfaction. She will go on repressing her true feelings; this is the decision she must make to preserve her family.
In another example, a soliloquy from the adulterous wife character, Janey, has a special poignancy as she has caught her lover’s teenage daughter acting inappropriately with her own preteen son. As she attempts to upbraid the girl, her efforts falter and she sputters in futility. She fulminates on quasi-biblical notions, perhaps half-remembered truths from a Catholic-school education: “A person’s body is his temple,” and “This body is your first and last possession.” When misquoting scripture does not help her, she turns to a more anthropological argument:
| Janey: |
A person’s body is his temple, Wendy. This body is your first and last possession. Now as your own parents have probably told you, in adolescence our bodies tend to betray us. That’s why, in Samoa and in other developing nations, adolescents are sent out into the woods, unarmed, and they don’t come back until they’ve learned a thing or two.12 |
Clearly, this lecture from Janey Carver to Wendy Hood is misplaced parenting—how does the cheating Janey Carver have any integrity to model for the sex-obsessed young girl? In addition, Janey is furious and full of righteous indignation over Wendy’s promiscuous behavior, but from this speech we can see her moral impotence. She cannot even reprimand the girl directly, for she herself offers no better a role model. This is echoed in the conversations between Ben Hood and his son Paul, as the father wishes to take the proper opportunity to tell his son about “the birds and the bees.” This excruciating conversation is a classic moment in the “sexual education” of every post-1960s American teenager. The representation in The Ice Storm is acerbic and true. In this case, the conversation takes place on the drive home from the train station after Paul has been picked up at the beginning of Thanksgiving vacation:
| Ben: |
You know Paul, I’ve been thinking, maybe this is as good a time as any to have a little talk, you know, about—well— |
|
(He makes a sharp turn. Paul puts his arms up on the dashboard to steady himself.) |
| Paul: |
(nervous) About? |
| Ben: |
Well, the whole gamut. Facts of life and all. Some fatherly advice, because, I tell you, there’s things happening that you’re probably old enough to … digest. |
| Paul: |
Uh … things? |
| Ben: |
Well … things that happen between a … For example, on the self-abuse front—and this is important—it’s not advisable to do it in the shower—it wastes water and electricity and because we all expect you to be doing it there in any case—and, um, not onto the linen, and not on your sister’s underwear or any clothing belonging to your mother … |
|
(He pauses to gauge the effect of his monologue on his son, then continues.) |
| Paul: |
Uh, Dad— |
|
(Just then Ben runs a stop sign and almost slams into another car.) |
| Ben: |
Holy! Well. If you’re worried about anything, just feel free to ask, and, uh, we can look it up. |
| Paul: |
Uh, Dad, you know I’m 16. |
| Ben: |
All the more reason for this little heart-to-heart … great. |
|
(They drive up to the house.) |
| Ben: |
Um, Paul. On second thought … I was thinking, can you do me a favor and pretend I never said any of that. |
| Paul: |
Sure, Dad. |
| Ben: |
Thanks.13 |
The fact that at the end of the conversation Ben Hood asks his son to ignore his own “fatherly advice” and to actually cancel out his words is doubly subversive, once again pointing to the pivotal role of the father figure in Lee’s films. In the first place, as a cheating spouse, Ben Hood is a poor role model (as Janey is to Wendy in the previous example), and does not have the moral integrity to parent his son. Ben is an antihero in the narrative; he lacks authority over his household. Other father figures also provide examples of weakness and absence: the Carver father is frequently away on business trips, the town preacher (also a type of father figure) demonstrates moral weakness by his seductive behavior toward the married Elena, and Libbets’ (Katie Holmes) father is also vacationing in Switzerland, leaving his daughter to spend the school holiday alone in their New York apartment. Finally, in the film as in the novel, at the symbolic center of narrative are Richard Nixon’s televised addresses to the nation and the Watergate Hearings, which offer an ongoing demonstration of crumbling integrity by reiterating that the nation’s ultimate father figure has, in fact, been lying. In the second place, the above exchange offers yet another example of The Ice Storm’s truncated or aborted attempts at communication. Ben’s telling his son “Can you do me a favor and pretend I never said any of that,” is a particularly clear example.
The Comic Genre: The Fantastic Four
Finally, both the beginning and ending of The Ice Storm focus on comic book imagery. Paul Hood is reading issue number 141 of The Fantastic Four when his train from Manhattan to New Canaan gets caught in the ice storm, preventing the train from continuing its journey. The carriage is in predawn shadow with only dim light, perhaps emergency lights on the train, for Paul to see the comic book page. The camera focuses on the comic book, on a page where Reed Richards (also known as Stretch) has just shot his young son with a cosmic ray gun to neutralize the destructive energy that the enemy, Annihilus, has implanted in him. The Thing, Medusa, Flame, and Richards’ wife, Sue Storm, are shocked into silence, stunned by the callousness of the father’s action. The comic book reads: “THEN YOU’VE TURNED HIM INTO A VEGETABLE. YOUR OWN SON.” In the comic panel, Richards replies: “DON’T YOU SEE, SUE? HE WAS TOO POWERFUL … IF HIS ENERGY HAD CONTINUED TO BUILD, HE WOULD HAVE DESTROYED THE WORLD!” Paul mulls this over as the train sits immobilized on the track.
This reference to the Fantastic Four as a metaphor could relate to either the Hoods or the Carvers, whose nuclear family members both come to a total of four. The original Fantastic Four, as is commonly known, were permanently altered at the molecular level when a rocket in which they were traveling passed through a storm of cosmic rays. Reed Richards, in the original comic book, was a ponderous and stuffy scientist who acquired the somewhat contrasting super-power to stretch his body into any conceivable shape. His wife, Sue Storm, could transform herself into The Invisible Girl (and later the more matronly Invisible Woman), and also had the ability to project a force field as a defensive weapon. Both of these roles seem to fit Ben and Elena Hood, especially Elena’s meek demeanor which renders her nearly invisible, as well as her powerful defensive force field. The third member of the Fantastic Four in the original comic was Johnny Storm, Sue’s younger brother, who was given human torch capabilities and seemed more interested in showing off than using his super-power to fight crime. Finally, the last member of the group was The Thing, a test pilot with a rough sense of humor, who is transformed into a hideous craggy monster. The key character in the Fantastic Four issue read by Paul on the train is the young son of Richards and Sue Storm, Franklin, who is a stand-in for Mikey Carver. The son is a threat to human existence and is basically neutralized by his father to stop the destructive energy implanted in him (“If his energy had continued to build, he would have destroyed the world”). The odd electric humming heard repeatedly by Mikey in the film (and imperceptible to anyone else) identifies him definitely with the doomed Franklin. Mikey repeatedly says, “Can you hear that?” referring to what can only be described as electrical buzzing. This foreshadows Mikey’s fate during the night of the ice storm; the sobering fact of Mikey’s death is what brings clarity and balance to the off-kilter world of the adult generation.
As the film opens, the Fantastic Four comic book takes a prominent role, and the very first voice-over relates the narrative of the Fantastic Four to the four-member families that will be presented in the film.
| In issue number 141 of The Fantastic Four, published in November 1973, Reed Richards has to use his anti-matter weapon on his own son, who Annihilus has turned into a human atom bomb. The problem is that the cosmic rays that infused Richards and the rest of the Fantastic Four on their aborted moon mission have made young Franklin a volatile mixture of matter and anti-matter. |
| |
(The train moves slowly through a suburban, semi-forested landscape.) |
| |
And that’s what it is to come from a family, if you analyze it closely. Your family is kind of like your own personal negative matter. And that’s what dying is—dying is when your family takes you back, thus hurling you back into negative space … |
| |
(On Paul, as the sun breaks over the horizon. His face glows warmly in the yellow light. He looks down idly at the comic book.) |
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So it’s a paradox—the closer you’re drawn back in, the further into the void you’re thrown.14 |
The juxtaposition of the comic book narrative with Paul and his family is significant. In the opening scene with Paul on the train, the final panel of the comic book reads: “… AFTER WHAT YOU JUST DID, THERE CAN’T BE A TEAM ANYMORE. … THIS IS THE END. … THE END OF THE FANTASTIC FOUR!” This foreshadows the threat of Paul’s father’s adultery against the family—at times, the Hood family’s resiliency is in doubt, but the emotionally-charged reunion at the train station hints that the Hood family will endure the hurt and stay intact. “Perhaps the finest moments of the Marvel Age occurred in the pages of The Fantastic Four, where a group of humanized superheroes squabbled with each other, but rose above their conflicts to confront the vast gulfs of an overwhelming universe. The comic book took on mystical and cosmic overtones, which no one suspected the medium could achieve.”15 This theme of rising above the family’s own conflicts to confront the world at large is reflected in the opening and closing scenes of The Ice Storm. The idea that the hurts inflicted upon the family by individual members must be overcome is demonstrated by the solidarity shown by the Hood family as they await Paul’s arrival on the train. In the preface to the shooting script, Ang Lee talks about his film being made of “small details and particular moments. … In this case, it was the moment when Paul is joined at the train station by his family.”16 Elsewhere Lee has remarked how this climactic moment helped convince him to make the film; he visualized the entire film around Paul’s frightening and yet deeply moving experience of seeing his own father in tears. This truly transcendent moment in the film is also described in the script by screenwriter James Schamus: “At the end of the film, it is Paul’s face on which we finally hold. It is his vision of his father’s tears through which he, and we hope, the film as a whole achieves a troubled but still liberating epiphany, a kind of embarrassment of forgiveness.”17 Lee adds:
My producers and I often joked that 1973 was America’s most “embarrassing” year; with Nixon, polyester, the admitting of defeat in Vietnam, stagflation, the energy crisis. In researching for the film, my production team and I read many of the novels and the self-help books of the period, and watched many movies made in the early 1970s. Rather than approach the period as one of “kitsch,” this process led us to a tremendous respect and humility. It turned out that there were many truths buried inside the pop psychology and sometimes painfully naive self-help philosophies of the day, and that we, two decades later, have much to learn from the “embarrassing” past.18
In an interview given when the film was made, Lee especially brings attention to the advantages he had making the film as an outsider and a director from a different cultural background.
I tried to keep the emotional core of the tragedy—that’s what prompted me to make the movie. … I think [the tone] is a lot softer. Less angry. I didn’t grow up there. I wasn’t pissed off. That distance helped me to make it art—it wasn’t so personal. But I think if the movie moves people, it’s because it has a subtext that’s universal, that anyone, from any culture, can relate to. 19
In the last sentence of this statement, Ang Lee himself points to the global nature of the story of the dissolution of marriage and family that is a common theme in his work. The universality of Lee’s filmic voice transcends cultural boundaries. Lee himself has stated “Quite honestly, I don’t know what’s what anymore. I wanted to make a Chinese film [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] so that I could be different from Hollywood, but actually my Hollywood films are more Chinese in vision than the Chinese films I made before. My first three films were just made for the mainstream Taiwanese audience. I wasn’t thinking about being Chinese or not Chinese.”20 In considering the work of Ang Lee, questions must be raised about the relation between parts and whole, between local and general, between individual and global. For Lee, the filmic voice he has created reflects a multifaceted approach which symbolizes globalization and informs it with a process of enlightenment and liberation.