Cold Fever by Alex Nagel

In the movie, Cold Fever, a young Japanese business man goes to Iceland to perform a burial ritual for his dead parents. When told about what he had to do he didn’t really understand why he needed to do this. He never understood what his parents saw in Iceland and did not think it necessary to miss his trip to Hawaii to perform a burial ritual. When he made up his mind to go his boss was shocked. He was not very much of a spiritual or religious man so he also was a little confused as to why he would chose to go perform the burial ritual and miss the trip to Hawaii. Throughout his journey to find the place to perform the burial ritual many unusual things happen to him. For example he meets a woman who likes to funeral pictures, gets his car stolen by an American couple, when he car breaks down he finds a nice family to take him in for the night, when his car gets suck a unusual girl screams and breaks the snow and ice trapping his car, and finally he meets a man at a bar who helps him get to the spot to perform the burial ritual. During this man’s journey, Lane’s four axioms can be seen.
Lane’s first axiom states that sacred place is not chosen, it chooses. In the film, the young man doesn’t just pick a spot to perform the burial but rather goes to a specific location. In fact he knows from the very begging where he needs to go and spends all his time trying to get there. All along his journey he ends up finding people that either help or get in the way of finding this place. Lane’s second axiom says that sacred place is ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary. The place the Japanese man goes to perform the burial ritual was an ordinary looking place but it was made sacred when he performed the ritual. Lane’s third axiom states that sacred place can be tred upon without being entered. When he goes to Iceland he doesn’t see anything special or sacred about it. He was walking in a sacred place but didn’t realize it because he was not conscious of it. The last axiom says that the impulse of sacred place is both centripetal and centrifugal, local and universal. This can be related to the movie because when going to the place where burial ritual was performed he was experiencing the sacred at the local spot. He also was then experiencing the sacred the whole time he was in Iceland. Sacred place as being centripetal is the burial ritual spot in Iceland. Sacred place as being centrifugal is the feeling the man had during the entire trip to Iceland.
Lane’s four axioms that help explain the sacred can easily be related to the movie Cold Fever. In the movie the man’s understanding of the sacred grows during each step of his journey. These axioms help to better explain what he is experiencing as he searches for the location to perform the burial ritual for his parents. Along the way he gets help like from the people like family who saved him in the middle of the night from the cold, the unusual girl who screamed and freed his car from the snow and ice, and the man he met in the bar during the festival who took him the specific spot to perform the ritual. Also he had experiences that got in the way of completing his journey like his car breaking down and then the American couple who stole the car. All of these experienced helped him better understand the purpose of his journey and become a more spiritual man.