Elizabeth Watkins - Cold Fever

I found the movie Cold Fever to be a very intriguing and unique story. Aside from the strange happenings, such as the sock puppet scenes, the movie was a very interesting story. It was of a young Japanese man that goes all the way to Iceland to honor the spirits of his parents. They passed away seven years ago and their son wishes to perform a private memorial service for them. While the young man was at first not interested in making the journey, he later decides that going to Iceland is important because he must make sure that his parents can rest peacefully. Upon this trip, the young man encounters the four axioms that Belden C. Lane discusses in his book. Let us first look at how the first axiom relates to the film. The first axiom is that “sacred place is not chosen, it chooses”. It is obvious in the film that the young man would agree with the notion that wherever his parents were laid to rest would be sacred to him. That place happened to be Iceland. If it were up to the young man, the sacred place where his parents lay would not be in Iceland but elsewhere. He clearly does not wish to go there at first. However, it is also evident that he cares for his parents. So perhaps in his perfect world his parents would be nearby so he could honor their gravesite in an easier manner. But sacred place does not allow a person to choose its being. The film also relates to the second axiom which states that “sacred place is ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary”. We see this axiom come into play for a short while in one scene at the beginning of the movie. When the young man first arrives to Iceland and stops at a gravesite, we see a funeral procession in the background as the young man talks to an older man digging a grave. While in the past this site was probably simply a piece of land, it is now a sacred place because of the funerary rituals that take place there. We can also see a relation to the third axiom in the film. The third axiom states that “sacred place can be tred upon without being entered”. In Iceland, the young man meets a woman who told him that she would provide him a car. Whether the girl was haggling prices with the young man or not, she was very serious about the car having a certain presence. The young man, however, did not see this. It is just an example about how some people cannot see things that others can. This relates to the ability of sacred place to be ambiguous and not clear to some people who encounter it. The fourth axiom also relates to the movie. This axiom maintains that “the impulse of sacred place is both centripetal and centrifugal, local and universal”. I like to think of this axiom’s relation to the movie as something one would not conventionally think of being a relation. I believe that the young man’s entire journey was an impulse of sacredness that was not universal but local. His encounter of sacred place was not in the way he thought he would find it and instead sacred place came to him in a different way than he had imagined.