I’m glad I saw the movie version of The Ice Storm first, because I could enjoy it without comparing it to the book; the differences, according to Japhy Ryder, are odious. 

Roy, an old college buddy, drove me downtown ten years ago to see the flick.  We were seniors in college at the time the film was set, and we enjoyed the various references to elements of the material culture, or perhaps I should say zeitgeist:  the stuffing of a towel under the dorm room door to prevent smoke from leaking into the hallway, the hypnotic undulation of the waterbed, the sideburns on the men.  Oh yes, and Frank Zappa’s “Dirty Love,” even though Roy and I really preferred “Peaches en Regalia.”  Even though it bothered me, personally, that this Ang Lee fellow had decided to ridicule the high point of American culture – after all, the U.S. in the 1970s was a very special era, and I don’t think it has been replaced by anything superior, personally speaking – still it was a pretty good flick.  And seeing Christina Ricci in a Richard M. Nixon mask was just too much!

Anyway, ten years after that cinematic experience, I read the novel the movie was based on, The Ice Storm, by Rick Moody.  Somewhere during the first chapter I was reminded of those ancient sculptures that we think of as cold, skeletal, white marble, but that, a couple of millennia ago, were painted warmly, richly, brightly – in Classical Antiquity’s version of day-glo colors.  Moody’s prose has crammed the descriptions of stark events and mundane characters with a richness of inwardness, allusiveness, and irony that a film is simply incapable of reproducing. 

I remembered the events of the movie – is The Ice Storm a movie or a film?  I’ll alternate between the two terms for the sake of variety, and to ambivalate between pop culture and auteur theory – well enough to recognize that, for the most part, the material facts presented in both formats are basically the same.  What made reading the novel such a fresh and different experience for me was the mental play over the top of the bare bones of the action. 

For one thing, Watergate was alluded to in the film’s abovementioned Nixon mask, but in the book, there is a recurring thread of references to Nixon, Archibald Cox, the Tapes and the 18-minute “gap” produced by an unbelievably acrobatic accident of Rosemary Woods, and it is this thread that takes the particular events of Thanksgiving weekend, 1973, in the context of two families in New Canaan, Connecticut, and places them in a context of national moral myopia.  The old, supposedly outdated, distinction between “shame culture,” in which you’re wrong only if you’re caught with your hand in the cookie jar, and “guilt culture,” in which You Know You’re Wrong even if you get away with it, is displayed for our contemplation. 

However, as high minded as a focus on such moral themes may be for an essayist such as myself, I do still delight in the fine use of figures of speech that Moody displays.  I know it’s a decadent “guilty pleasure” on my part, but let me share a few of these purely literary gems that can not be translated into film:

“She could see his erection in the tan corduroys, straining like the kid in math who always had the answer” (40).  The fact that “she” is Wendy, and that her companion is Mikey, and that both are on the tender side of the teens is captured so well by the grade-school reference.  At the same time, there is that compelling burgeoning of puberty that is driving both kids to burst out of their pants.

Janey Williams, the main characters’ neighbor, is described at a party thus:  “Her frosted-blonde hair was flawlessly arranged, like a fiberglass waterfall” (122).  This captures the odd combination of naturalness and artifice that characterized the time; I remember my mother with hairspray fixing her hair in a sort of airy, frothy monument, and I somehow associate this with the spill of fiberoptic cables from the well at the center of a lamp.  The tip end of each cable shone with a blue light, in what I remember as the next step beyond the lava lamp. 

There is a magnificent list of pop-psych and quasi-mystical inspirational and self-help books when the narrator is analyzing Elena Hood, the mother of the family at the core of the plot.  From Transactional Analysis to Carlos Castaneda, we see the psychospiritual shopping cart of the time.  At the same time, Eric Berne’s Games People Play does describe with total accuracy what The Ice Storm is about;  everyone is on the Child level, the Parents have lost their authority to tell their kids what not to do, and nobody is an Adult.  The conclusive observation after the entire catalogue has been run through is, “she read this stuff, but it didn’t help her at parties” (153).

The tone of the age is summed up in the description of Jim Williams’s attire at the party:
“Williams was wearing plaid pants – kelly green field with red and yellow lines crisscrossing – and a striped shirt.  Maroon stripes on white.  A big collar wide open at the neck, spread out upon the wide lapels of his tweed jacket.  He had facial hair.  Sideburns, and a large moustache that he stroked contemplatively as he spoke” (174).

The line that, for me, encapsulates so much of the vapidity of the characters and their attempts to act in a way that fulfills them, and to apologize for the botch that they have made in the attempt, is Elena’s retort to her husband:  “Sorry is a nothing word, Ben.  It just takes up air” (265).

Although some of the above can be translated into film – Jim Williams’s costume, for one thing, although I don’t recall whether he looked that way in the movie – so much of the above is precisely literary because it cannot be shifted from the word to the image, and even in the case of the clashing clothes, we would have to be presented with it all as a right-brain gestalt, all at once, as opposed to having it drawn out for us in the verbal, linear, left-brained sequential presentation that leads us along by the hand.  It’s not that the movie “changed” the plot from the book, or that it wasn’t “faithful” to its source; it’s that the novel is a fine novel, and excels in qualities that are purely literary, and that cannot be translated into celluloid moving images (or, now, digital ones).

-- Don Riggs