Was Mikey a bit suicidal?

No, I don't think he is quite suicidal - he's just sort of indifferent; he seems to be the sort of person that goes through life observing it and enjoying it but not really allowing himself to get too caught up in it emotionally - note the way he just sort of cheerily turned his bike around in response to what Wendy said. I used to take walks outside in bad weather like that - I loved ice storms - when I was his age; it was a nice sort of meditative time in which the various pressures of life - the normal concerns one might have - would be forgotten amid the beauty of nature. As for the diving board bit, I think I myself actually did almost the same thing once - although I don't think I went all the way onto the edge of the diving board, it was still iced over a bit and above an abandoned, empty pool. Not one of my smarter moments, granted, but it is sort of liberating in a way to get that close to the edge of something that makes anything else that might be wrong seem totally insignificant. It's not a suicidal impulse so much as maybe it's the sign of someone looking for a deeper meaning and not finding it in the daily mill of isolated suburban life; perhaps mikey felt that only while jumping up and down and taking his life in his hands could he really get a handle on whether or not it really meant anything to him - again, it's not a strictly suicidal impulse so much as it is contemplative.

Hopefully that might help; that was my reading of it - any other ideas?

Mikey reminded me of the unusual title character in J. D. Salinger's short story, Teddy

I think he was just a little off. In comparison to American beauty, he was the Ricky first character. Always observing everything.

Definitely not suicidal...just clueless! He was one of the first of the generation raised by "absentee" parents, who never taught their kids that you don't do stuff like skate around in an ice storm (hell, two of the parents DROVE in it!).

Also, people in that area (NY, NJ) are far less aware--and I mean NO disparagement here--of the forces of nature. My ex-boyfriend, who grew up in central NJ, pulled some majorly dangerous stunts, like swimming into rip-currents in California or climbing up Mt. Washington, NH, in a blizzard...and he was past college age!

Mikey was just pushing the envelope of experience...and it "Got him"! He probably had NO idea that metal, or even water & ice, conducted electricity. Thank his idiot parents and the educational system.


She deserves her revenge, and we deserve to die.

Definitely not suicidal...just clueless! He was one of the first of the generation raised by "absentee" parents, who never taught their kids that you don't do stuff like skate around in an ice storm (hell, two of the parents DROVE in it!).

Also, people in that area (NY, NJ) are far less aware--and I mean NO disparagement here--of the forces of nature. My ex-boyfriend, who grew up in central NJ, pulled some majorly dangerous stunts, like swimming into rip-currents in California or climbing up Mt. Washington, NH, in a blizzard...and he was past college age!

Mikey was just pushing the envelope of experience...and it "Got him"! He probably had NO idea that metal, or even water & ice, conducted electricity. Thank his idiot parents and the educational system.


She deserves her revenge, and we deserve to die.

"To find yourself in the negative zone, as the Fantastic Four often do, means all every day assumptions are inverted. Even the invisible girl herself becomes visible and so she loses the last semblance of her power. It seems to me that everyone exists partially on a negative zone level, some people more than others. In your life, it's kind of like you dip in and out of it, a place where things don't quite work out the way they should. But for some people, the negative zone tempts them. And they end up going in, going in all the way."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119349/quotes?item=qt0200112

I grew up in New England and whenever there was some strange weather event me and my sister used to go out in it. Don’t think he was suicidal. He saw the power line down and just watched it flipping around. It was at the very last second he realized he was in danger but didn’t have time to react.

This

No, I don't think he is quite suicidal - he's just sort of indifferent; he seems to be the sort of person that goes through life observing it and enjoying it but not really allowing himself to get too caught up in it emotionally - note the way he just sort of cheerily turned his bike around in response to what Wendy said. I used to take walks outside in bad weather like that - I loved ice storms - when I was his age; it was a nice sort of meditative time in which the various pressures of life - the normal concerns one might have - would be forgotten amid the beauty of nature. As for the diving board bit, I think I myself actually did almost the same thing once - although I don't think I went all the way onto the edge of the diving board, it was still iced over a bit and above an abandoned, empty pool. Not one of my smarter moments, granted, but it is sort of liberating in a way to get that close to the edge of something that makes anything else that might be wrong seem totally insignificant. It's not a suicidal impulse so much as maybe it's the sign of someone looking for a deeper meaning and not finding it in the daily mill of isolated suburban life; perhaps mikey felt that only while jumping up and down and taking his life in his hands could he really get a handle on whether or not it really meant anything to him - again, it's not a strictly suicidal impulse so much as it is contemplative.

I don't think Mikey was looking to die so much as he was looking for anything that was pure and true in a world that seemed to hold none of that for him, his brother, or his closest friends.

Mikey wants purity, the purity of clean molecules, of the perfect space in his mind and imagination that cannot be touched by the corrupt, real world. It seems to me that purity like that can only be found in non-existence, whether as a young teenage boy Mikey could ever speak to this observation or not.

Mike's last speech to his brother about purity, about cleanliness, his fixation on these feelings while living in such a subtly corrupt and traumatizing world, a world where literally no adult is telling the truth about anything that's happening. Obviously it's hurting Mikey very, very badly in ways that, much like his own father, he has no emotional tools to express at all.

So Mikey's journey into the ice storm is a literal and symbolic search for the purity he described to his brother when he was helping him with his homework, (his brother dismisses this reverie with, "But I just need help with my homework.")

The ice storm is the physical manifestation of that free and perfect space in Mikey's soul. He's innocent and alive out in the woods alone, maybe more alive than he's been his whole life; in a place where his mind, imagination and the natural world meld into one last perfectly symphonic moment for him.

Is that journey suicidal? To my mind, the way Ang Lee presents it, it is, just not with all the expressive psychosis we have come to associate with the act of self murder in our current age of mass therapy.

Maybe the better question to ask about Mikey's ultimate fate is: did he achieve the purity he was searching for in his death? Well, that's a question we can never know the answer to until we take the journey ourselves.