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In search of my own Antimatter
There's a scene in The Ice Storm where Paul, the boarding-school student played by Tobey Maguire, comes home to his folks in New Canaan, Connecticut after a failed romantic tryst in New York. He's walks off a Penn commuter train, pauses at the top of the platform, and beholds his mother, father, and little sister waiting below. It's one of my favorite scenes of the whole movie, and perhaps one of my favorite scenes of all time.
I just watched The Ice Storm with my own parents a few hours ago as cold, freezing rain pelted down outside our lake cabin in Northern Minnesota. The three of us were bundled up in blankets, sitting around the TV, sipping warm beverages and dropping the crumbs of my mom's chocolate chip cookies all over the place. It was a warm feeling, even if my parents didn't understand the movie. I think my dad tried and perhaps barely grasped its meaning, while my mom simply gave up at the first challenging moment and deplored the brief images of wife-swapping and teenage sex as - gasp - deplorable.
As the credits began to roll, I tried to explain to them that movies can be about things much more abstract than the physical outlines of their plot. In other words, the "deplorable" elements were a vehicle for exploring how traditional 1950's culture was being encroached upon by the sexual and social revolution of the 60's - albeit a few years late (the film takes place in the mid-70s), for we are talking about the suburbs of New England and not Berkeley. And taken a level below that, I think the movie is more fundamentally about family and how its bonds can withstand even the most tragic of - forgive me - incidents and accidents, hints and allegations.
It feels strange to write this, because as I do so, I realize that the film literally feeds these lines to you at the very beginning, when young Tobey is talking about the comic book "The Fantastic Four" and how those superheroes had the power to help and hurt each other, as if they were members of some kind of superfamily. A chill creeps up my spine just as I recall that opening sequence because it's spot on: family is like your own personal antimatter that you use against one another; it is your strongest weapon and the place you run from, as well as the place you return to for strength and renewal.
And here I am, typing this in the loft of this lake cabin located just a few miles north of Brainerd (of Fargo fame), as my parents sleep silently below and I think about my past week here. It's been about watching the fall leaves turn incandescent colors, feeling the cold, wet air against your cheeks, and eating my Mom's chili. It's been about helping my dad take the dock in for the winter, going on long hikes through the wilderness, and driving up to see Lake Itasca, the 10-foot-wide headwaters of the Mighty Mississippi River. It's been about seeing my aunts and uncles and cousins and the country my Mom grew up in.
But has it really been about these things, or are these things just the plot vehicle for a more fundamental reason for being up here?
I think the reason why I like The Ice Storm so much, why I believe it to be Ang Lee's greatest accomplishment of the cinema, is that it examines that most powerful force in the universe: the family bond, a bond stronger than anything found inside the deepest subatomic structure of matter. You can pull apart quarks without destroying them, but try to do the same to a father and his son and you won't come close to succeeding. The weak force and the strong force have nothing on family.
And that's why I'm here, really. I've been away from my family for so long, been so distant and removed - both geographically and emotionally - that it's time to come back and recharge.
It's been a wonderful week, but I have to step on that shaky Saab 340 turboprop at Brainerd Field on Sunday to go back to San Diego. When I get there, it’s not going to feel like home and my friends are not going to have the pull of family. Which makes me wonder: when will I create my own antimatter? When will I forge my own universe of quarks and quirks, bosons and gluons, incidents and accidents, hints and allegations? What is the half-life of the college graduate going through this chain reaction of self-realization, maturity, and the all-consuming hope of love, marriage, and establishment of one's own family?
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