A Staring Contest with Danger

Rating: 9/10 (22 June 2010)

This monolithic piece is set in rural Germany in the years before World War I. All has been calm and resolute in this village for as long as it can remember. Baron, farmer, pastor, doctor, schoolteacher, tailor, servants, children, all perform their designated functions. It is a male-dominated, dogmatic community, that is, the form of community that was common at that time throughout the world. We are told the narrative by the schoolteacher many years after it happened. In the film, we see him young. The old man wants to recount with impartiality and efficiency. He won't deduce or speculate. He doesn't have the answers. He'll consult only the verifiable truth. The initial one is this: While out riding one morning, the doctor was injured when his horse falls over a trip wire. Someone set up the wire. Could they have been certain the doctor would be their mark? Some malicious power is at work in a small village, initially suspected in a chain of unrelated "accidents." This compels the villagers, who all know each other, to watch more cautiously. Is one of them responsible? How can that be? One person couldn't be accountable for all of these off-putting occurrences. Have many been overcome by a depraved contamination? We're conditioned to view such plots as thrillers. A film by Michael Haneke is never that cut-and-dried. It all may have been committed, but what if there appears to be no guilty party? What if misfortunes affect good people who are not as good as they believe they are? Haneke's sense is that we can never be sure.
Other occurrences transpire. Each of these acts must've been done by someone, but the same person could not have competently done all of them. There is account of where certain people were on certain occasions. It's like an enticement to play detective and figure out the perpetrator. But the evidence never corresponds. Of what would evidence even consist? It might just be a matter viewed from the perspective of distrust. Life goes on in a conventional manner. The baron stabilizes his people. The doctor continues his work, yet he's shockingly callous toward his mistress. The teacher teaches, and the students study, and they sing in the choir. Church services are observed. The white ribbon is worn by children who have been immoral but will now try to be moral. The crops are gathered. The teacher charms the pretty village girl. And doubt permeates. There is an urge to resolve the enigmas. Arbitrary cruel deeds generate chaos and dismantle the people's faith that life falls into place. The idea that the verifiable truths cannot be made to connect is as disheartening as if the earth opened up under their feet.
Haneke makes the mystery more intriguing than its resolution. It's too much of a cinch to suggest the film is about the birth of Nazism. If that were so, there would be many more Nazis even now. It is plausible to say that when the suppression of "terrorism" is valued more than the protection of freedom and independence, tyranny strengthens and becomes its own enemy. If we are to stop terror, someone must be leader. The role of course goes to those focused on exacting control. Accordingly, all not under control is evil and must be stopped, and that's how the benefits of the state become higher priorities than the benefits of the people. Maybe the gist is that we become so unnerved by threat or catastrophe that we'll forfeit freedom, even expect to. Do we believe we're safer in a totalistic society? Many do. But things eventually flare up, and the Berlin Wall falls, or we see the Green Revolution in Iran. The catch-22, as some philosophers have observed, is that activists become consumed with driving their cause that it becomes a vicious circle.
For what little respect I have for a filmmaker who authentically slaughters an animal in nearly every one of his films, including this one, I have to accept that many admirable filmmakers have also done less than admirable things as people. Kazan named names. Gibson claimed Jews are responsible for all wars. Ford spent a career teaching a pivotal generation what to think of the savagery of Native Americans and the heroic superiority of their oppressors. Herzog authentically killed an assortment of animals in Even Dwarfs Started Small. We just have to judge their work for its own value, not how it reflects their character. Haneke's ingenuity lies in implanting deep ambiguities in films fixed on the day-to-day lives of everyday people. He cold-shoulders the clear-cut resolutions of most films, in which everything is resolved by the roughshod conquest of one side. His films are like twisted fables, professing that bad things sometimes occur merely because they occur. The cosmos ridicules man-made order and does what it will.
The film is aesthetically excellent. It returns to the beautiful artistic density of Ingmar Bergman. It's in black and white, naturally. Color would undermine its impact. In terms of cast, the real stars of the film are the children, who are perfectly cast and oppressed by so few lines they evoke so much disheartenment and bewilderment purely in their faces. Purely as it is, The White Ribbon tells an elementary allegory in a village about little people and indicates that we must face the randomness and unavailing complexity of our universe and achieve equilibrium between doubt and refuge.