You know, in the Ice Storm, he is going to die – the film stays with him; he walks down an icy road – the only question is how? Fated to die, he must die; death is waiting for him – death is patient because it knows death is inevitable. And we know that, too, as viewers: we have entered the realm of necessity; death is close, and there is silence around the one who is about to die.
He has been separated from us; he half-knows this, half-knows his fate; but as he becomes the sacred one, homo sacer, it is also that we come closer to him – too close, in the claustrophobia of those who now know their own end by a kind of substitution. It’s not that he dies for us, but dies in our place, there where we will die.
There – but he is not there. Or it is that fate claims him in some strange way before he is himself? His body knows, something in him knows, but he half-knows, that is all. And when the end comes, he is not surprised. It is just. Death comes at a stroke – it is determinacy, blessed relief after that period of wandering on the icy road. And what do we know, as viewers? That it will be relief, too, when the end comes, and that after death – after our own deaths – silence will fall momentarily over the world.
And before our knowing? Before the relief of his death which comes by way of electric shock? He draws dying forward in us, in each of us. Dying comes forward; dying is apportioned. But what is shared? A kind of dying set free from relief. Dying unbound – dying untied from death, from the determinacy of the end. Who dies? Not you. Who is dying?
Lars Iyer's Blog 