I was glad to read after seeing Michael Haneke’s new film, White Ribbon, that the crowd at the Cannes’ premier, where it won the Palm d’Or, was also left scratching its collective head.
“Who committed the heinous acts depicted in the movie?”
I was sure left scratching mine. Not that that’s a bad thing necessarily. Finding that we’ve missed a clue or two when the perpetrator is finally revealed is an occasion to rerun the story and the revelations; what did I miss and how? In the hands of a trusted mystery writer, who plays fair with the viewer, laying all the cards on the table, it is a satisfaction to be caught up, and then to see.
[A warning here. If you are one who likes to see movies pristine perhaps you should stop here. Much will be revealed. But please come back when you are scratching your head, too and see if you find a light within.]
The slight of hand in the White Ribbon, however, seems to be that Haneke has no intention of revealing, in standard mystery terms, whodunnit. He seems to have set it up so there is no discoverable criminal, thus returning the obsessed with story telling rules to the question — why is the story being told? Though the movies has a mystery story framework he may, in the end, not be playing fair.
The story takes place in a small German village name Eichwald, which Haneke says is not a coincidence. 4-5 families are involved, with more blond kids than you can keep track of. The narrator is an old man reflecting back many years, when he was a young teacher in the village, on a disturbing series of events that happened in the fall of 1913 and early 1914, just before WW I opens.
He tells of a mysterious wire strung across the road into town which tripped a horse, sending it to its death and the rider, the local doctor, to the hospital. He recalls that the unwell mother of a large family was sent from the harvest field to easier work in the barn, where she died in a fall, and that the eldest son blamed the landowner, the Baron, who figures prominently throughout. Two children are set upon by persons unknown and severely injured, though Haneke who loathes on screen violence (e.g. Tarantino) shows us only the results. No perpetrator is ever found, despite the enlistment of the local police.
But wait, there’s more! The injured doctor, it turns out, is a contemptible creep towards women, including his teenage daughter. A despairing father hangs himself. Another father threatens to kick his teen-age son to death, taunted let it be said, by the son.
Naturally, we want to know who did these deeds. And in the closing minutes one of the main characters says to the young teacher that she knows who did these things and she is going to get the police. She cannot tell him. Yet, she disappears, and her son, one of the victims, and the doctor, one of the possible perpetrators, all disappear, not to be heard of. The credits start rolling.
Feels like a sucker punch to me.
Or perhaps, as some have claimed, Haneke deliberately sets up a whodunit which doesn’t satisfy in the traditional way in order to make us ask: if there is no corporal perpetrator then what is it? What IS going on? The traditional mystery story is popular in good part because culprits are eventually found, justice (or revenge) is meted out and the moral world is returned to its proper order. If instead, frustrated in the search for human culprits — that boy, those children, that man– we are intended to interpret the crimes as authorless, or unknowable, or coming from an unseen, and unseeable force we have a serious problem on our hands. There is no resolution; there is no moral order, or at least it cannot be returned to stability.
And since Haneke seems not to be telling a story of child possession, or supernatural horror, we begin to think he has something else in mind. On the body of one of the beaten children a hand scripted note is left, quoting Exodus, or Deuteronomy (I don’t believe it is identified): “He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”
So perhaps the clue we have missed is not who was missing at a crucial time, or a set of spectacles left behind, but in the entirety of the film in which the crimes are carried out — the dreary, authoritarian, punitive upbringing of the children. The static shots, in which characters wait awkwardly, the severe, Bergmanesque, black and white, the claustrophobic interiors all reinforce the image of a joyless culture. Even a small child’s sweetness towards his father is repaid with severity. Children are punished with humiliation and blows. Severe religious lessons are read. Everyone works at manual labor in absolute in fear of losing the economic benefits they have.
The responsibility for the crimes lies not with individuals but in a culture of punishment, guilt and obedience. If this is the solution to Haneke’s mystery, as interviews with him suggest, there is no comfortable resolution; no sense of justice served. In fact, quite the opposite. The results of spooky, authorless violence, will be, as every human experience since the dawn of history will tell us, more authoritarianism. The answer to things being out of control is to impose more control. The acts of cruelty received become acts of cruelty passed on. And not just to generations yet to come in the village.
In the closing moments of the film we learn that WW I starts that summer. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia.
The crimes in the village are merely precursors, or symbols for, the violence to come. What these fathers wrought in the 1910s will be seen in their children 20 years later; the petty sadism of youth, responding to that of their elders in the crimes we see, grows into something more terrible. The cruelty suffered turns to cruelty approved of as the Nazis come to power. Submission once learned as a child is repeated as an adult, finding comfort in authority of the most terrible kind.
It seems plausible and yet it leaves me still scratching my head. Does Haneke think this transmission of submission and cruelty was a uniquely German thing, and WW II a unique war? If children had been raised in joy and progressive autonomy that the Nazis would not have happened? He seems to.
When strictness becomes an end in itself, and when an idea turns into ideology, it becomes perilous for anyone who doesn’t comply with this ideology. The film uses the example of German fascism to talk about the mental preconditions for every type of terrorism, whether it comes from the right or the left, and whether it’s politically or religiously motivated. Wherever people are in a hopeless, unhappy and humiliating situations, they will grasp at any straw that is handed to them. [Interview with Haneke]
It’s an interesting claim. But it leaves all manner of terrible wars to be explained. Can we explain the Rwandan massacres, the Cambodian genocide, the Taiping Rebellion, the torture of prisoners in US prisons by child rearing practices? If German Lutheranism of certain decades created those who created hell, how did Bonhoeffer escape, and the thousands of Germans who resisted the rise of Nazism and were by and large raised by parents of their time and culture? To explain the descent to war by child rearing practices is to not give much explanation at all. Unless of course one wanted to say that particular child rearing cultures created particular cruelties: German Lutheranism generated Nazism; Japanese Shinto-Buddhism generated the unbelievable cruelty of the Sino-Japanese war and the Pacific theater of WW II. It seems a large stretch to make.
Maybe I’m being unfair to Haneke. Perhaps his linkage is merely suggestive, not diagnostic. ‘Germans of those years were in fact the way depicted. The war in fact came. Hitler in fact had wide popular support. Should this be looked at?’ If so, I agree, and certainly don’t disagree that certain cultures give more or less permission than other cultures to certain acts. But Haneke, in his own words, seems to think the case is closed; the linkage is there.
Perhaps the movie is more self-explanatory to a German audience than to an American one. Perhaps there are subtleties of dialect or behavior that are more transparent to those who are the second and third generation removed from that of the movie. Perhaps a German, or Austrian audience will read more into the closing words of the narrator and get some assistance for the leap Haneke is asking us to make.
“On 28 June 1914 The Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Everyone in the village was afraid to say the word, war, but once it was said nothing else could be talked about. On 28 July 1914 Austria declared war on Serbia. On 1 August 1914 Germany declared war on Russia.”
What does the average movie goer know about this? In Germany, perhaps a lot. In the US for most, precious little. At best film goers may know that WW I was enormously bloody, and in far hindsight, considered by many to have been avoidable and pointless. If the lesson is about a German village, what does that have to do with Austria declaring war on Serbia? Why did Germany declare war on Russia and what did the two declarations have to do with each other? What do German cruelty have to do with Austrian declarations of war?
The leap we are asked to make, from German strictness to German wars, is muddied. We falter in the lift off. Nor does the narrator, whose youthful romance with a luminescent Klara [Maria-Victoria Dragus] is a sweet ray of light in the movie, tell us how he– who saw these things– behaved in the 1930s and 40s.
A film to fill your head with questions, and worth seeing for that. Not one you’ll likely come out with any pat answers, or resolutions to your questions — which is as Haneke wishes it.
SPIEGEL: In several of your films, there is no satisfying conclusion to the whodunnit apect of the storyline. In the end, we are always left feeling perplexed. If art does nothing but create perplexity …
Haneke: … then you’re making things very easy for yourself. There is a logical explanation for everything that happens in these films, but I’ll be damned if I’ll tell you what it is.
SPIEGEL: And you know the answers?
Haneke: Of course. But what good would the answers do you? As a viewer, I don’t want to be palmed off with simple solutions, because I know that they’re not real solutions. The world isn’t that simple. The only things I’ve remembered from books or films are the things that made me anxious, the things that forced me to agonize over myself or the world in which I live.