Ice Storm and Welcome to the Dollhouse family rituals
A cultural theme that is explored time and time again in film is family and domestic situations. For the purposes of this paper, the focus will be on dysfunctional representations of family. Two films that represent realistic or imperfect families are Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm and Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse. Both these films depict typical family rituals as pointless and merely driven by tradition. Lee and Solondz show the people who take part in these rituals as disinterested and unenthusiastic. The opening sequence from Welcome to the Dollhouse examines the family portrait tradition, whereas The Ice Storm takes a look at Thanksgiving dinner. Both these rituals are common place, but these two filmmakers use them to show us what is beneath the surface of these two families.