The Philosophy of Ang Lee

Because of the Molecules: The Ice Storm and the Philosophy of Love and Recognition

230 beCause of the MoleCules The Ice Storm and the Philosophy of Love and Recognition Susanne Schmetkamp The Place You Return To For a moment, The Ice Storm (1997) brings everything to a standstill. Everything falls silent. As the audience will learn to appreciate, this is a time for self-reflection and for the contemplation of others. It is a condition that has not existed until this juncture because the respective protagonists have been leading parallel lives instead of recognizing each other as family members, friends, and partners. Up until now, they have been focusing their passion and desire on something that has either led them in the wrong direction or toward something they were not prepared to take responsibility for. This existential silence and stagnation constitutes the starting point of Ang Lee’s film. A train breaks down in the middle of the night, icicles dangling from its wheels. The scene is dominated by ice blue and inky darkness. The camera shows a distance shot of the train, which appears to be lifeless, frozen. The audience is yet unaware of the significance of this image with regard to the film’s tragic narrative climax. In the next scene, we find ourselves staring at a comic book. A boy is sitting in the darkened train compartment reading The Fantastic Four. Suddenly , the light comes back on and the train jolts into life again, slowly and creakingly continuing on its journey. Paul, the boy, then offers us the following insight, which, particularly in view of the film’s tragic finale, could be construed as an exposé of the film’s common philosophical thread: In issue no. 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. It was a typical Because of the Molecules 231 predicament for The Fantastic Four because they weren’t like other superheroes. They were more like a family. And the more power they had the more harm they could do to each other without even knowing it. That was the meaning of The Fantastic Four, that a family is like your own personal anti-matter. Your family is the void you emerge from and the place you return to when you die. This passage is followed by more colorful images of the train pulling into a station. It is daylight: “And that’s the paradox: the more you’re drawn back in, the deeper you descend into the void.” The boy’s family—his father, mother, and sister—stand on the platform looking browbeaten and humiliated, but relieved all the same. Lee’s film The Ice Storm is an exhilarating, critical portrait of the 1970s, an era that featured the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the sexual revolution. The film boasts an outstanding cast, which includes Sigourney Weaver, Tobey Maguire, Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Christina Ricci, and Elijah Wood. Above all, however, The Ice Storm—which is an adaptation of a 1994 book by Rick Moody—presents a bountiful source for philosophers. Existential, metaphysical, ontological, psychoanalytic, ethical, and aesthetic issues can all be discussed on the basis of the film’s dramatic and formal narrative . Topics raised by the film include being, nothingness, death, alienation, loneliness, boredom, fear, puberty, sexuality, physicality, love, emotions, family, recognition, sympathy, empathy, shame, space, time, and suchlike. In this chapter, I concentrate on a few ethical issues while acknowledging some broader existential concerns. The philosophy of love and the theory of recognition serve as central reference points for my investigation, though I hasten to add that these are fields about which there has been relatively little systematic philosophical thought and thus much of what will be said will be me engaging with the film per se. I will illustrate that the unfulfilled desire expressed in the film can be defined in terms of dialogical love, the recognition of oneself in others, the facilitation of freedom, and self-awareness through mutual recognition, as well as the transcendence of solipsism and the initiation of empathy with other people’s pain. My methodology is based on a combination of analytical and phenomenological investigation. I focus on three points, which I consider to be important for the philosophical comprehension of the film. First, I introduce a particular concept of love, one that I hold the most plausible in view of current tendencies in the philosophy of love: the dialogical concept of love, which...