Last night I watched Ang Lee’s film The Ice Storm for at least the fifth time. It had been awhile since I’d last seen it, and with every viewing, I’m struck by just how loaded with dead-on metaphor Rick Moody’s story is, and just how ably Lee (who was growing up in Taiwan when the film was set and from whom we cannot expect such prescience around the subtleties of American culture) has rendered it on screen. For anyone who has not seen it, The Ice Storm tells is the story of 2 neighboring families living in a tony Connecticut suburb circa 1973. This was an era in which the lid had been blown off the pot of simmering 1950s and 60s repression, marriage therapy had made it to the suburbs, and all that had previously been politely stored underground was now fizzing to the surface. This could appear quite a feat of op art to its denizens, whose M.O. had been the down low. And who would most stand in the line of fire of all this too-little, too-late awareness? The children, of course.
Looking back at this era from the vantage point of 36 years, of 3 1/2 decades of technology, psychological sophistication, the birth of the Internet, and the rise of New Media, it is striking how much these characters’ world view differs from our current time of “too much information.” If it’s a TMI world today, 1973 suburbia was definitely a world of TLI: too little information. In this landscape, couples barely communicated with one another for years on end. In one scene, a father comes home from a business trip, and after a rather bizarre conversation with his 14-year-old son, asks his wife, “Is Mikey OK? He seems a little out of it…” To which his wife responds, “Mikey’s been out of it since birth.”
Young Mikey is actually quite likely schizophrenic, or at least schizotypal. The notion that his parents would not have had a conversation about his behavior until after his 14th birthday is just one example of how these couples, and families, are so very disconnected. These days, there would have been teacher and school conferences, psychologists’ reports, extensive information available on the Internet, books, support groups, listservs, medications, playgroups, etc. It would be highly unlikely in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in the NY metro area that such a child would slip through the cracks as merely “out of it.”
And, as Moody graphically relates, the cost of such unconsciousness can be high. The boy is ultimately killed by a jolt from a telephone wire that comes crashing down during a severe ice storm. It is, of course, a metaphor for the toll exacted by the psychic ice storm of denial that surrounded him. Yet, for all of their communication challenges, the 1970s did have a completely different, entirely more interpersonally related feeling to them. You could venture into a public place and actually have a random conversation with a stranger, as no one was preoccupied with his or her electronic device. Parents actually spoke with their children on the playground, instead of pushing them to go play so they could fidget with their Blackberrys. People spent time interacting with each other, not in the anonymizing field of cyberspace. There was simply a lot more “face time,” time when one could gaze into the eyes of another human being, which is a key ingredient of forming attachments and maintaining psychological health.
But as enjoyable as it is to wax nostalgic for the precomputer age, it is almost painful to go back and watch this chapter in The Ice Storm. It is Thanksgiving weekend, 1973.
The Watergate trials have been airing all summer, Nixon has just delivered his “I am not a crook” speech, crafting a highly debatable prelude to his impeachment 7 months later. TV broadcasts are the primary means these characters have for learning about what is happening in Washington. And just one of them, a 14-year-old girl, is bright and engaged enough to even be watching; the rest have shut it out as “too much.” Otherwise, it is a quiet world indeed. No one has yet jacked in to the matrix. There are no computers. No cell phones. No Blackberries. No texting. No emails. No blogs. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Google. And believe it or not, the son off at prep doesn’t even have a landline.
And no one is talking—certainly not about anything meaningful. In one hilarious scene, a father attempts to have a “heart-to-heart talk” to discuss sex with his 16-year-old son.
He sputters through it, spouting a series of nonsequiturs and meaningless statements that do nothing but make his son squirm. Clearly these people have never talked about anything deeper than the weather. And they wonder why their kids are having problems. (Though I do have to shake his hand for even trying. Back in 1973, my own father's verbal tools of "communication" comprised 4 key phrases: "Get me the screwdriver, NOW!" "Shut the hell up," "Tell your mother to get down here," and "Stop eating--you're too fat already." The nonverbal ones were worse.)Flash forward 36 years to our oh-so-evolved, wired-to-the-gills universe, in which research and communication tools beyond our wildest imaginings occupy huge chunks of our homes and schedules. We seem to chatter with each other night and day, with IMing, Facebook comments, Twitter notes, incessant emails, text messages, and a constant barrage of items that seem to require instant responses. Certainly the Internet has opened our eyes to so many world events, connected us with so many people who share similar interests, brought us incredible research tools and access to people all over the globe. It is, obviously, one of the most amazing pieces of technology ever invented, hands down.
However, is all the New Media actually improving our communication—or is it simply a pendulum swing in the opposite direction? Do we feel closer to humanity because we have emailed 20 people today than if we had sat down with 10 neighbors and shared a meal? Are we better able to communicate our thoughts to our partners because we have time and space to write them down, or do we alienate them because they can’t see our faces, hear our tone of voice, and watch our gestures as we speak? Do I feel more loved because 120 people have agreed to be my Facebook friends than I used to when I sat around with 15 of my buddies from college and talked over pizza? I’m not sure I do…
I think there’s a lot of quantity out there—and a lot of confusion between quantity with quality. It’s a longer topic about the whole digital age that I plan to address in the next entry. A smokescreen that can make us believe we’re getting something—but then why do we still feel like we’ve been handed a cheap shortcut? Maybe because we have.
I think it’s ultimately wonderful to possess tools and equally important to use them well—to stay connected with people in the traditional ways: through face-to-face contact whenever possible, through voice over just the written word, and through lengthier exchanges over simply a text, e-card, or other abbreviated form that we busy people try to pass off as significant, from-the-heart communication. We are still creatures that crave the tangible world. We like to touch and feel and smell and hear and engage our senses. We like to feel love--and it’s mighty hard to feel that in any depth through a computer screen. And we are fascinated by watching the human face, with all its expressions giving meaning to the words, which have been proven only 7% of a factor in overall communication. A sobering statistic, that, especially for us writers. But in the big picture, talk is cheap, and words can only say so much, despite what we in our text-heavy society may imagine.
Tonight I was reading an article on Salon.com about a woman's "addiction" to Twitter, and the letters that followed were, as usual, simply fascinating. One letter writer, whose handle was rainbirdreader, wrote, "In my 20 year career, I've seen a huge rise in the number of kids who need speech therapy and are slow to talk in recent years because their electronic toy toting parents ARE NOT TALKING TO THEM! Dull as it may be, part of parenting a young child is to talk them through their day, using our parent language to describe the people and places around them so they can eventually learn to recognize vocabulary words and start reading. The brain experts are now saying that oral vocabulary, either through conversation or stories, actually GROW KIDS BRAINS. The television doesn't register on the human brain the same way the human voice does, apparently, and kids are particularly tuned into their mother's voice...big surprise. So if you are the life of the party, start taking your children on adventures and using all the vocabulary in your vast arsenal to help them learn about their world. Believe me, you don't get that time back. I can tell by age three who has been read to and talked to by their parents because there is a light in a kids eye when they are engaged, absorbed and verbal that nothing can ever replace. Those early conversations about groceries, parks, playgrounds, cleaning, cooking, etc. are the foundation for the all the learning yet to come and teach kids HOW TO HAVE A CONVERSATION."
