Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Ice Storm
1997 · Ang Lee · The Ice Storm on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count how often the camera shoots people through glass or a doorway. (camera)
Elmes puts windows, partitions, and door frames between you and these families constantly. Glass, ice, water, and polished wood keep returning. The surfaces grow more crystalline as the storm moves in.
Payoff: Every window is the same window. You can see through it perfectly and you cannot reach anyone on the other side. In the reading: crystal-decomposition. Glass everywhere is what the reading calls crystal-decomposition: an ordered, moneyed world filmed in its own reflection while it quietly rots.
Watch how far apart people stand inside their own houses. (staging)
Lee spreads the Hoods and the Carvers across rooms, hallways, and levels. They are close enough to hear one another and almost never share a frame. The modern architecture does the separating.
Payoff: The houses do the work the dialogue refuses. Nobody has to say they are estranged. The floor plan says it.
Watch Joan Allen's face when she says nothing. (performance)
Allen holds a smooth surface over something seismic. Kline grins through his own lies. Weaver stays brittle and contemptuous. Lee pitches the whole ensemble at one muffled level, so feeling shows on faces and goes no further.
Payoff: Nobody here converts what they feel into what they do. The close-up becomes the only place the feeling can live. In the reading: qualisign (icon of quality). A still face holding one saturated feeling with nowhere to put it is what the reading calls a qualisign.
Listen for flute and gamelan percussion under scenes of suburban Connecticut. (sound)
Danna refuses period rock. He scores 1973 New Canaan with wooden flute timbres and tuned metal percussion that belong nowhere near it. Underneath, a television keeps muttering the Watergate hearings.
Payoff: The music turns a suburb into a tribe observed from a great distance. Its ordinary rituals start to look like ceremony.
Look at the empty swimming pool every time it appears. (setting)
Lee returns to a drained blue basin sitting in the cold, and to a liquor bottle. He shoots these objects like evidence, not decor.
Payoff: The film hands you objects to read. A pool built for summer bodies, sitting empty, tells you where these families are.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Count the windows. Every one the camera shoots through is the same window: clarity you cannot pass.