{"id":179,"date":"2006-02-07T00:25:48","date_gmt":"2006-02-07T07:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecompany.net\/jason\/posts\/2006\/the-ice-storm\/"},"modified":"2006-02-07T00:25:48","modified_gmt":"2006-02-07T07:25:48","slug":"the-ice-storm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecompany.net\/jason\/posts\/2006\/the-ice-storm\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ice Storm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The
\nI just finished watching Ang Lee<\/a>‘s The Ice Storm<\/i><\/a> and it reminded me of a lot of other family-oriented dramas — and it especially reminded me of plays from the 1950s.<\/p>\n

I know it’s hardly profound, but I really like it in movies\/plays\/etc. traverse into the negative zone<\/a> (as the movie calls it, borrowing from The Fantastic Four<\/a>), where everything is sort of different and after the characters enter, everything changes. In The Ice Storm<\/i>, about half-way through the movie there is (surprise, surprise) an ice storm during which pretty big events happen.<\/p>\n

The setup is pretty common among literature. Like I said, it reminded me of 1950s plays such as “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”<\/a> and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”<\/a> When I studied “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in college (I wrote a paper titled “Searching for Reality: How Drugs, Self-Deception, and the Influence of Family Help Mary Tyrone Find Her ‘Self’ In ‘Long Day\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Journey Into Night'”), I remember my professor commenting on the fact that a major theme of 1950s American drama was family and drinking.<\/p>\n

Ever since then, I’ve noticed that lots of literature includes a structure where somewhere around the middle (or Act II), there is either some sort of natural disaster and\/or the characters become very intoxicated, and the truth comes out. More recent examples of this setup include Magnolia<\/i> (raining frogs), Anniversary Party<\/i> (ecstasy and a lost dog), and Judy Berlin<\/i> (eclipse), and Short Cuts<\/i> (earthquake). Likewise, I’ve noticed the theme in older works of literature. Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”<\/a> comes immediately to mind — once the characters enter the woods, everything changes.<\/p>\n

Despite the fact it’s a frequently used trope, I think it works. I think all of us can relate to those strange times or places in life when events compound on top of each other, and then some surreal bigger-than-life phenomenon takes place (or appears to), and for whatever reason, we gain some new insight into life and grow as a person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just finished watching Ang Lee‘s The Ice Storm and it reminded me of a lot of other family-oriented dramas — and it especially reminded me of plays from the 1950s. I know it’s hardly profound, but I really like it in movies\/plays\/etc. traverse into the negative zone (as the movie calls it, borrowing from … Continue reading The Ice Storm<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[12,6],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecompany.net\/jason\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecompany.net\/jason\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecompany.net\/jason\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecompany.net\/jason\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecompany.net\/jason\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thecompany.net\/jason\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecompany.net\/jason\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecompany.net\/jason\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecompany.net\/jason\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}