The Ice Storm · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The branches go first. Frederick Elmes films them sheathed in ice, each twig in a clear glove that catches the light and turns an ordinary New Canaan tree into something faceted, gorgeous, and about to kill a boy. Hold that image. The whole film is in it — a familiar surface glazed until it becomes glass: beautiful, lethal, impossible to reach through.

Watching The Ice Storm, you keep waiting for someone to do something. Ben Hood is sleeping with the neighbor; Elena, his wife, more or less knows; two houses over the children run their own furtive experiments. In an older kind of movie this is a setup for action — a confrontation, a decision, a marriage saved or burned to the ground. Here nothing converts. The adults attend a "key party" and draw car keys from a bowl as if performing a rite whose meaning has long since drained out of it. They see their situation with perfect clarity and cannot act on it.

Deleuze gave this exact stall a name. He called it the crisis of the action-image. Classical cinema ran on a simple circuit: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cut serves that chain. After the war, Deleuze argued, a different cinema appears in which the circuit snaps — people can still perceive, often acutely, but the world no longer answers to what they do. The Ice Storm is that crisis moved indoors and into the American suburb. The lens is worth granting because it explains the film's strange weightlessness: this is not a drama of bad choices but of choices that have stopped mattering, a household "coasting without consequence," as the dossier puts it, until consequence arrives from outside, as weather.

Look at how Lee and his editor Tim Squyres build the thing. Two families, two generations, a dozen weakly linked people; the film cross-cuts between the parents' party and the children's groping in the dark, drawing rhymes the characters never feel. Deleuze would call this a dispersive situation stitched by weak links — many figures, slackened causality, the elliptical cut that accumulates small domestic observations instead of driving toward a goal. The pacing is patient to the point of refusal. Whole stretches advance nothing: a man mixes a drink, a girl drifts through a neighbor's empty house. This is dead time, temps mort — the everyday simply held, not as filler but as the film's real subject.

And the spaces are emptied to match. The recurring image of the drained swimming pool — a concrete basin meant for summer bodies, sitting blue and vacant in the cold — is what Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever: a place that has stopped being a setting for action and become a pure patch of mood, fragmented, deserted, affective. Elmes shoots the modernist interiors the same way, spacious and chilled, characters dispersed across rooms, physically near and never connecting. The architecture itself does the isolating.

When the camera does come close, it finds faces that hold a feeling without discharging it. Joan Allen's Elena is the great instance — a study in suppressed fury, the face a smooth contour over something seismic. Deleuze's term is the affection-image, and more precisely the qualisign: an immobile, reflecting face expressing a single saturated quality with nowhere to go. Multiply that across the ensemble — Lee draws from everyone the same "muffled, articulate unhappiness" — and the close-up becomes the film's native unit, because nobody can act, only register.

Now put the ice back. As the storm nears, the imagery turns crystalline: glass, water, polished wood, characters framed through windows and partitions, the world progressively glazed. Deleuze's crystal-image describes exactly this regime of mirrors and reflective surfaces — but the finer node here is crystal-decomposition, the crystal in its rotting mode: an ordered, moneyed world filmed in its own glassy reflection while it quietly decays from within. New Canaan is the aristocratic order; Watergate mutters from the television; the surface is immaculate and the inside is going. Mychael Danna's score seals it, scoring 1973 suburbia with gamelan-like percussion and flute timbres so estranged the whole milieu starts to look like an anthropological ceremony — a tribe's rites observed from a great cold distance.

Someone is observing. Paul Hood, watchful on the train, narrating the family through a Fantastic Four comic — "the void you emerge from and return to when you die" — is the film's seer, Deleuze's voyant: not an agent but a watcher, the figure who can only look and try to read. He is our access to a film that has converted its props into things to be deciphered. The key bowl, the Nixon masks, the comic itself are symbols in the strict sense — objects that condense the film's organizing relation rather than decorate it.

The lineage is honest about its debts. The Swimmer taught it to carry suburban anomie across symbolic props and an empty pool; Ordinary People the immaculate home as a vessel of unspoken grief; Interiors Bergman's glassy chamber chill as the grammar of paralysis; The Graduate the body framed through glass and water; and Elmes himself, fresh from Blue Velvet, the hyper-exact surface with rot underneath. What Lee adds is the storm — the decision to let the only decisive event in the film be an accident no one chooses, a boy and a downed power line. That is the crisis of the action-image rendered as a literal climate. The catastrophe is real and it means nothing, and the family is left with grief instead of resolution.

Watch it again for the glass. Every window the camera shoots through is the same window: clarity you cannot pass.