#the ice storm is a dense text layered with meaning

[jacquelinemerritt]

Thanksgiving Films You Forgot: The Ice Storm

Originally posted November 16th, 2015

It’s November, and because it’s the most thankful time of the year, I’m taking a look at the Thanksgiving films you either didn’t see, or forgot existed. This week, I’m looking at The Ice Storm, which was directed by Ang Lee and stars an ensemble cast of Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Henry Czerny, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood, and Adam Hann-Byrd.

The Ice Storm takes a very deliberate approach to its story; it’s a character drama at its heart, and Ang Lee takes his time progressing through the story. The first half of the film focuses on the few days before Thanksgiving, and follows two major stories: Kevin Kline’s affair with Sigourney Weaver, Christina Ricci’s relationship with Adam Hann-Byrd and his younger brother Elijah Wood.

Kline’s affair is a fairly simple story; he and Joan Allen are married, and he’s seeking sexual satisfaction with his neighbor Henry Czerny’s wife, Sigourney Weaver. Lee shows us that this simple arrangement isn’t quite what we might predict however, when Kline begins babbling to Weaver about his problems at work.

It would seem he’s seeking emotional fulfillment more than sexual fulfillment, and Weaver refuses to reciprocate his outpouring of emotions, telling him that if she wanted to hear about his problems, she’d just go speak to her husband. Later on, she abandons him, leaving him in his boxers with free reign over his house, sending the message that she’s not even interested in him sexually any longer.

The relationship between Christina Ricci and Adam Hann-Byrd is a complex one as well. They’re both fourteen year olds, going through the beginnings of puberty, and they’ve begun to experiment sexually, keeping this hidden from their parents. Ricci’s character is particularly sexual, and steps out of the bounds of their relationship to show herself off to Elijah Wood, Hann-Byrd’s younger brother.

Wood’s character, though tangentially interested in sex, is actually repulsed by Ricci’s exhibitionism, and responds appropriately, calling for help and getting his mother, Weaver, to kick Ricci out. When Hann-Byrd discovers this, he’s slightly dismayed, but as soon as Ricci exhibits sexual interest in him again, he forgets his concerns, and the two of them begin to experiment in his parents’ basement.

The second half of the film focuses on Thanksgiving night, which follows Kline and his wife Joan Allen as they attend a cocktail party, Ricci as she sneaks off to spend the night with Wood. At this point in the film, the stories begin to parallel one another, with each exploring themes of sexuality and personal connection in different but similar ways.

At this point in the film, Joan Allen has discovered that Kline is having an affair with Weaver, and their relationship has taken a significant toll as a result. This toll is intensified when they arrive to the cocktail party to discover that it is a “key party,” or a party wherein the men leave their keys in a bowl for the women to select from at random to determine who they will be going home with. Allen and Kline quickly get into an argument about this, with Allen eventually deciding to let Klein do whatever he wants, and throwing his keys into the bowl for him.

At the end of the night, when the women all select the keys, Allen chooses near the end after her husband has passed out drunk, and decides to go home with Czerny. They attempt to have sex, but Czerny is deterred, lacking the confidence to move forward, despite the fact that Weaver left early on with another man. Where Allen is ready to surrender to her physicality, Czerny refuses, letting his need for honest emotional connection supersede his desire for sex.

While her parents are away at the cocktail party, Ricci sneaks off to meet Elijah Wood at his house, and upon arrival discovers that his brother has left to go to an abandoned swimming pool in the forest. She and Wood decide to go up to his bedroom and lie in his bed together naked, but once they’ve stripped down, they don’t engage sexually. Instead, they talk, and lie in bed together, reveling in an honest emotional connection. It’s a very sweet and innocent moment, and it reveals that Ricci’s hypersexuality is a tool she uses; it scared off Wood, but not Hann-Byrd, and through this, she was able to determine that Wood was genuinely interested in her.

The parallels between these storylines are most clear when examining the way sex is used as a tool by these characters. Weaver most clearly uses sex as a tool, and she does so for no other reason than her own sexual pleasure, rejecting the intimacy of sex altogether. Ricci uses sex as a tool to test people, but she also uses it as a way to gain acceptance.

When she finds someone who isn’t interested in her for sex alone however, she recognizes her need for intimacy, and embraces a moment of non-sexuality. Finally, Allen, at the end of the film, attempts to use sex as a tool of revenge, wanting to sleep with Czerny only to upset her husband. But Czerny ultimately isn’t interested, desiring only the intimacy that comes alongside sex, and wanting to keep that intimacy between him and his wife.

Finally, Kline himself uses sex as a tool to gain intimacy; he sleeps with Weaver in order to try and have an emotional connection with her, and he spirals out of control when he doesn’t get that connection from her, ending up making a fool of himself at the cocktail party when Weaver leaves with someone other than him.

Ang Lee’s exploration of intimacy in this film is brilliant and subtle, showing the many ways people use sex to gain intimacy. The only real “complaint” I have about this film is that its setting around Thanksgiving is mostly incidental; this story could have happened at any point in the year, and its themes don’t line up with the themes of family and appreciation that are inherent to Thanksgiving. Still, ‘The Ice Storm’ is an excellent film, and you likely won’t find a more interesting film to watch this Thanksgiving (assuming you also require it be set around Thanksgiving).

#the ice storm #film criticism #ang lee #kevin kline #joan allen #sigourney weaver #henry czerny #christina ricci #elijah wood #adam hann-byrn #i think this is probably the strongest piece i wrote for the odyssey #the ice storm is a dense text layered with meaning #and is a fantastic exploration of intimacy #and i think i do a decent job elucidating those themes #if you are looking for a movie set at thanksgiving to watch #this is the best one i've found #and its exploration of intimacy actually does fit the setting of thanksgiving very well

[zafaria]

Precious Metals

Sometimes, I just feel so intimately connected to everthing in the Spiral...

It may strike a wizard as a rather mundane fact to know that the Spiral is dust. That they, are dust.

But think on this a moment. What is dust, and how much of it is scattered across our Spiral, throughout the worlds and on top of them, and on top of the things within them? 

How many farm plots have we seen across the lands, one of Farley’s brothers always graciously tending it? Maybe we even have dust in our homes, whether it’s in our own fields that we water and shape, or across the tops of our books that we haven’t touched since we were novices. We think ourselves too advanced for such texts now. But, we are the same as we were then, at least with regards to what we are made of.

Is it not dust that makes dirt? Bartleby grows in the center of Ravenwood, but not between cobblestones and brickwork; he grows on tender earth, just like the Tree of Life does, just like Yggdrasil above Nastrond does. And though he does not grow on them, those cobblestones around him are made of, well, stone. They are pressed and fused rocks. Like all brickwork, soil and dirt and, yes, dust, had to be cemented together to create those walkways and those bricks and those buildings. Whether they are grey, brown, red, black, green, or yellow, they are from clay, from earth.

If we were to go back, one-by-one, we might remember the many different strata that bend the worlds and create our universe. In the crypts, in Darkmoor, or the Djeserit or Ahnic tombs, there was dust. Some we made (or, rather, brought forth) with fire, some we witnessed. The books in the mausoleum crumbled from parchment, not into nothingness, but into imperceptible fragments. The telescope at the top of the study had a glass lens made from sand. And that sand, in its crystalline form, did wonderful things, broke other rock in the form of an alabaster phylactery, freed souls, brought light, healed ancient wounds and let them become scabbed, confined things. After all, the soft fibers of a bandage come from a plant that must grow in something. We beget softness, kindness from these spots.

In Krokotopia, we might well remember the raging sandstorms that sheltered the old families in the Sphinx or the Well. We might remember how these bits tuck to us, with us. In our shoes, in our mouths, under our nails, in our hair. 

We might remember the sand falling from the top of the Pyramid of Fire, or pushed up against its sides in little hungry piles, leaping upwards. We might even remember finding the location of Alhazared, but not until after we cleared sand over a small map, pointed a solid blue crystal over the projection, and let the magic of light and dirt do its work.

Later on, we called upon old spirits and unfathomable demons using crypt dust, soot and dirt and cobwebs. We lit candles, and the wicks burned and tinged the wax with black powder. We opened portals to unseen realms, places where cursed spirits still lingered, freed from their dust, but something more remained, trapped. Just like they did in those places separate from space and time, those places where stars fused metals overhead, leisurely, like a smooth and thoughtful artist stirring paint, still readying to lay down the strokes.

On the rooftops, there is the soot collecting from the chimneys, and the coal that gave Stoker and the clockworks life, that made gears and wood and ropes and cogs into meaning into existence. In the Dark Cave, the large stalactites that hung over our heads, reaching downwards, intertwined with great roots. Maybe from Bartleby, or any of the saplings around him.

And then the matter of the specialties of all these particles. There was the small collection of sand above the ocean in Celestia where the sun never set and the fronds grew vibrant, and the center shallowed out for a little oasis, no other one quite like it. There was the rich soil full of nutrients and magic and leaf litter that let the jungles of the Aeriel grow so densely; the dust, the dirt cemented into stones used to build the Athanor, imbued with electricity. The scorch marks from our crashed ship.

There was Xibalba. And it, too, was dust. The things that have power to seemingly create can also seemingly destroy. They transform. Just as Xibalba was a conglomerate of particles picked up from the sky, the fragments made from it and the soot from its fires are made of the same stuff. Only, with different intent.

And then there are the fractured segments of the primordial forest, the birch trees falling into flakes and pieces and bits, into earth. All of the fragments of the world itself, circling around, with a haze of colors blue and orange and yellow and magenta, leading the way between them. The streaks in the sky that could be seen on a quiet, level beach, or from the top of a blue-ice mountain.

In Mirage, amidst storms of the stuff, the very flow and moments of time itself are kept bundled together in an hourglass, a whole field of magic dedicated to its study, its control, its knowledge and its mercy.

And what might all of this have to do with us, the forsaken heroes of these realms, the curators of all that exists within them, and even those things that exist without them?

In this grand spectacle, we are the same as any of these other things. We are the stars that long hung over Celestia. The ones that exploded because they saw a better way forward. 

We are the dirt from around the base of all those great named trees, the same life-giving, vibrant clay that was blessed by the roots we hold so dear. 

We are a product of our environments, whether we grew up in a brickwork apartment in Chelsea Court or a simple red farm with yellow soil and a riveting tornado out back the cellar.

Perhaps we are mighty, but think to the last time we fizzled. Think of the hope, the promise, the passion of all those spells before they collapsed--crumbled--before us in the air, the thing that only soot could do. And if we were less hasty, if we counted our cards after battle and looked around us a little longer before taking off for the next great thing, maybe we would have noticed that all of those fizzled spells, well, they pile at our toes, piles of soot. We take our dreams. Even when they don’t turn out as we hope, they are brought into reality as something else. And maybe that soot still contains the passion and the promise that we originally cast those spells with. We leave our signals where we’ve done battle. We memorialize with ash.

Think of our journey. Think of us winding through the lands and the sleeplessness and the heartache of it all. Think of us tripping in any of the many forests we’ve explored, or sliding on sidewalks or decking. We did not wash our hands, or our bodies, until and since Azteca, for things moved so fast. And from this, we collected. We collected grime, we collected dirt. When we fell on the ground, we skinned our knees, and the sticky wet layer of skin collected, too. We walked for weeks then, with small black smudges that trapped themselves over the wounds and hung around the corners, forming the barrier between new and old. 

Actually, we are exactly new and old. There are old great trees in us, fragments of Dragonspyre’s warriors running in our veins, the old Celestians connecting, constellating, and forming our minds. I look at my nail and I see the half-sliver of Xibalba streaking through the sky. I look at my freckles and see spots of earthy poison from swords in Avalon against my skin. I know there is more, like the onis in the spirit realm, Tatyana bound to Darkmoor, the whispers and legends of the Celestians. But something important is in front of us, around us.

For, we are made of the most potent stuff the universe has to offer. We are the dust of dust.

#y'all ever just think about not only who but what your wizard is #where magic comes from #why these places and people we've enever met before care so much about us and why we care so much about them #??? #also the canon fact that your wizard has not bathed before or since azteca?????? #w101 #wizzy fandom #wizard101 #w

[actually--olivia]

16 January 2020

day six: sad boi

My dearest, Thea,

The storms here, since we arrived, have lasted no more than 15 minutes, but I woke up to a downpour that continued through the morning—four hours at least. The winds are strong enough so only the eastern side of the palms are touched by the rain. The sun rose an hour before I woke up, but even after an hour before leaving my room, I had yet to see her peer out from behind the clouds dense from evaporated waves.

If If a life raft carried someone to the island, would they be relieved to see the 15-foot waves breaking against the coral and serrated rock? How would they get ashore? If they attempted to climb up, how long before Poseidon sent a billow to rip them down? I kept staring at the rock while walking atop it, and even though I believe myself to have a high tolerance for pain (see: stage right rib cage and left ankle), I was lost in the potential of the sea grabbing my arms and dragging me across the rocks, shearing off everything to the bone.

I want to stop imagining that.

It makes me feel as if there’s a corset tightening around my lungs (do they even make them in lung-size?).

Walking barefoot through the cacti forests doesn’t scare me as much as the waves. It would be of my own volition.

I know I’m a Gatsby faux-romantic (ie: I love the novel, but it also frightens me how one can be the antagonist of his/her own story), but I’m really missing my annotated copy right now; I want to read my thoughts when I first read it, untouched by scholarly input. I know what I can discern from the text now, but I want to remember what I initially read from it, rather than what it means to me currently. Yes, Gatsby is the villain of his life, but at one point, I revered his idolization of Daisy, what did I think of Nick before I realized he narrates Daisy as villainous, when she (in terms of family status and comfort) has no options.

I feel stuck on a life raft: no way to climb ashore. Sometimes I feel like Nick’s Gatsby. Today I feel like Tom’s Gatsby.

--

“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

--

What if I’m not motivated to enact change in my life and subsequently my surroundings? There are days I wish comfort more than I wish to change the world. There are days I wish to be accepted more than I wish to fight the current sweeping me against the cliff-face. It’s hard to not feel inadequate by every measure.

Today's wisdom from Keely and Ally:

“I don’t want a perfect body because that means I couldn’t eat ice cream— I’m thankful for the one I have because I can still be healthy while keeping a lifestyle I want”

“The perfect body is very toxic, because there’s someone in the world who looks at you and thinks you have the perfect body, everything is perfect somewhere, and thinking you’re not is just wasting your own attention”

Sometimes I forget we’re all fighting alongside each other against a world that wants to see us destroy ourselves.

I’m living with some wonderful people here, but part of my head feels like a fourth grader who protects herself by judging those who she's afraid of. I want to turn it off. Sometimes I can’t see value in myself so I force my brain to ignore the value in others so I don’t feel lesser. Perhaps I’m just an awful person who hasn’t outgrown her tendency to see competition in powerful women.

On a different note (or series of notes: ie, song)

We snorkeled off the coast of the salt pans on the southern tip of the island. The beaches were bright pink from the algae that grows on the salt as it’s being dehydrated. Salt is Bonaire’s #1 export. There were pools of bright pink water from where they were harvesting the sea and drying it out faster.

I saw 6 sea turtles today, a spotted eagle ray (Mr Ray from Finding Nemo), many breeds of angelfish (yellow-tailed, French, and Rainbow) ,and a loooooong ass (2 1/2 ft?) trumpet fish that I saw disappear into its own camouflage.

I’ve seen lots of cool fish on this trip, which I am slowly learning how to identify (the first step towards serving justice is knowing their names, right?)[back to sad boi: I’ve been reading a lot about the marine life and native plants, but regardless of how much I consume, it’s never enough. I can never do everything justice, and I’m slowly coming to terms with whether or not I’ll be able to win a war of attrition against those with endless resources].

Some random lady walked up to me while we were about to get in the water near the salt flats, she asked me a couple questions about if we were all divers or snorkeling, and then complimented my tattoo and we started talking about how RBG is officially cancer free and how much of a badass she is.

A different man came up to us after we got out, we were telling him and his wife to watch out for all the sea urchins and fire coral along the rocks when entering the water, and he told us “we’re in full wetsuits, not bikinis. We’re a little more protected.” The audacity.

Dana and I recited (screamed) Satisfied from Hamilton while waiting for everyone to gather after lunch, and our fellow theater/music geeks slowly joined in as our professors watched and laughed with us.

On our way to snorkel through the Mangroves on the southeastern side of the island, we all practiced our Shrek impressions, screaming “Donkey!” and “Ogres have LAYERS!” I can confidently say I’ve learned too much about Keely’s boyfriend’s nipples. We saw piles and piles of queen conch shells when we arrived. We swam through water so shallow, the fear of being stung across the belly by the anemones hiding amongst the seagrass flowed through my mind. So many flamingos: bright pink. There were many seagulls; Quinn has decided, since they were over a bay, to coin them “bagels.”

Yesterday the snorkel peeps were split based on how many we could pack onto the boat after the divers were separated; Sydney, Spencer, Dana and I were left to our own devices. We almost drowned while huddling to take a selfie on a go-pro; we’re waiting to see how it turned out.

I washed my laundry in the sink today, hanging it to dry on the rope that Dr. Wolf has us cut the first day of class.

There's not much else to my day. I feel ungrateful for needing to focus on the tangible experiences so I don't feel unworthy of this trip. I'm slowly infiltrating the group of geology majors who are frustrated by the presence of an introductory class. Many of them enjoy teaching us, but there's still a few who don't think we should be here with them. It's disheartening to see them monopolize a powerful collection of information.

I still miss you, and I don't think there's a remedy for that in my first-aid kit. Or on the island at all, for that matter.

Hope you're enjoying NOLA, keep me updated with all the amazing things you experience!! This is Ginger, the book keeper.

yours,

olivia

(PS: the warmth of your hands across my sun-kissed skin is a thought that keeps me up and bends my back into the arch that you know too well. I wonder how long it'll take you to count the uneven lines on my hips.)