Notes On Ice

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Ice recently. I assume I don’t have to explain why. I’m not sure right now how to apply that thinking, but for me the first step is usually putting my thoughts into words. To that end, here is a series of brief notes on Ice, which I hope will inspire more thinking and, eventually, action.

1. We never witness any of Ice’s action from the point of view of the party under pursuit. The only voice we hear is the voice of the pursuer, the agent whose only cause––whose only reason for existing, even––is to capture and subdue an innocent subject. Put simply, we never hear the story from a voice we can trust.

2. The person telling the story regularly assumes the thoughts and feelings of the person he’s apparently been assigned to apprehend; he describes her panic in the face of danger, her compliance under the threat of force, or her will to resist it. As elaborately as he articulates these thoughts and feelings, he imposes his own fantasies on the person who suffers them. Ultimately, he maintains the fiction that her fear and her resistance are hysterical distortions of her true desire to be caught.

3. “Fear was the climate she lived in; if she had ever known kindness it would have been different…Systemic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of her personality, made a victim of her, to be destroyed.”

4. The narrative of Ice assimilates a wide array of atrocities, but by the time they reach the audience their affect is flattened, dispassionately recast as unremarkable features of day-to-day life. In the world Ice imagines, atrocity is not injustice; the only injustice is the subject’s continuing ability to evade detention.

5. Harm to the subject is also not considered unjust, as long as the agent is the one who causes it: “I felt I had been defrauded; I alone should have done the breaking with tender love; I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds.”

6. The agent reports back to his superior, but his reports are inconsistent, contradictory, implausible; this uncertainty does not deter either party. Consistent miscommunication between the agent and his superior does nothing to hinder the progress of the mission. Even when it’s not at all clear who is in charge, all that matters is that the pursuit continues.

7. The agent consistently believes he is somehow serving a higher purpose, a common good which transcends his authority’s ends, or his own. “I was involved with the fate of the planet.” This belief perpetually drives a brute force that only occasions destruction.

8. This higher purpose finds its ultimate antagonist in the opposing authority the agent imagines to be hindering his progress at every turn; an enemy is doing everything in its power to control the object of the agent’s pursuit and use her to serve its own sinister ends. This legitimizes all of the agent’s actions, no matter how violent: he must save his target from the threat of this imagined authority, even if he harms her in the progress.

9. If anyone expresses or experiences pleasure, happiness, or comfort in any circumstance in which the agent’s purpose is not served, it can’t be valid; it can only be an expression of the opposing authority’s growing influence, which the agent must muster even more force to combat. “People were deluding themselves; they induced a false sense of security by means of self-indulgence and wishful thinking.”

10. Once the agent has accepted his purpose, he is unable to act against it. Whatever the purpose demands of him, he executes without question or hesitation, as if it’s no longer his choice to do so or not. “It did not seem to matter what I did now. I was committed to violence and must keep to my pattern.”