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The White Ribbon
The White Ribbon
Wed, 16 Dec 2009
Are the questions more important than the answers? That’s what Trevor Johnston wonders as he furrows his brow and tries to unpick the workings of Michael Haneke’s latest celluloid conundrum, a story of dark deeds and mysterious motives set in rural Germany in the days before the Great War. Spoilers ahead – well, up to a point, as you’ll soon discover – while we untie…. The White Ribbon.
When the voiceover reveals that the story about to be unfold may not be strictly true, it’s surely a message from the film-maker to be on our guard. What we’re about to witness, we’re told, has been pieced together years after the event, from various sources, and some parts may even be hearsay. This much the speaker freely admits, but still insists it ‘might clarify some things that happened in this country’. The country’s Germany, so the inference is clear. Before we’ve really met any of the characters or have much idea what shape the plot will take, we’re furnished with two quite possibly contradictory principles – to question what we’ll see, and to discern within it some hints of the fascism which subsequently overshadowed communities much like the one we’re about to see here.
That certainly sets an agenda, but it also informs us that even though we know nothing as yet of the story and characters, there will be a point at the end of it. This is essentially what’s delivered when a voiceover belongs to someone who’s looking back on events which have already taken place – the viewer gets a sense that it’s coming from a place of recollected experience and cumulative knowledge. It doesn’t necessarily ensure that we’ll be interested enough to stay with the story in the meantime, but the main body of Haneke’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner lays out an intriguing whodunnit in which the narrator’s younger self acts as a sort of detective seeking an explanation for a series of confoundingly upsetting occurrences. We’re drawn towards a conclusion then, that the cumulative knowledge promised at the end of the story will be the solution to the crime(s). Or so it seems, at this early juncture…
Not that we immediately realise that the old man narrating is actually the kindly schoolteacher in the village, since he doesn’t identify himself right away in the voiceover. Creating intrigue by denying us information is to be a central tactic in Haneke’s film, but then again we’re already hooked into the mystery aspect of the story by a disturbing and bizarre incident – the local doctor being hospitalised after his horse is felled by an unseen tripwire at the entrance to his property. This causes a kerfuffle in the locality, which results in the pastor’s two eldest children Klara and Martin staying out late and missing their supper – and brings a heavy admonishment down on them. The stern pastor orders the entire family to go without their dinner, leaves the guilty parties pondering their actions as the preface to a sound whipping, and insists that Martin put on the eponymous white ribbon.
Crime and punishment
This is to be worn as a reminder of the innocence and purity of childhood, to which state Martin is expected to return – after what the pastor terms the purification of punishment. Here set against one another are two of the key story elements: criminal acts upsetting the status quo, as opposed to a punitive regime seeking to keep social order in balance. These ideas are dramatised through action, in each instance generating uncertainty which provides a plot motor. Will the mystery assailant be found? Will the kids toe the line or rebel?
Having laid this foundation, Haneke then builds on it through repetition and elaboration, and intensifies the central whodunnit by leading us down a blind alley. The death of a farm-worker in a sawmill accident leads to the deliberate spoiling of the cabbage patch belonging to the Baron, local landowner and de facto employer of most of the villagers. That the culprit is soon identified as the dead woman’s angry son doesn’t get us any closer to figuring out who tripped the doctor’s horse, but, as the harvest festival is celebrated, it does reveal the seemingly unshakeable social order in the community. The Baron is at the top of the heap, with the pastor more or less a right-hand man, the working folk on the very bottom run of the ladder, and in-between the likes of the doctor, the schoolteacher and the Baron’s foreman. The clergyman’s reinforcement of aristocratic authority moreover indicates that the state of affairs is not some social happenstance but part of the godly design of the universe, and not for the likes of us to be questioning. That’s why incidents like the attack on the doctor are so shocking in this context, indicating some unknown individual seriously stepping out of line. So, although the cabbage-scything actions of the vengeful son ultimately serve as a plot diversion, they do metaphorically articulate a sense of seething frustration at the suffocating intransigence of the accepted social order. Worth the detour then.
The Baron’s barn going up in flames gets the whodunnit back on track since we assume that the mystery prankster is still on the loose, and potentially driven by class animosity. An off-screen attack on the Baron’s tousle-haired small son Sigi (who, we’re told, has been stripped, hung upside down and whipped) serves to unsettle the situation still further, not least since the apparent targeting of the Baron points to a culprit from within the community. There’s fear and recrimination, tension and foreboding in the air, but – although the children of the pastor, foreman and doctor nearly always seen to be loitering with intent – no direct answers. The acts perpetrated against a child intensify the viewer’s unease too, yet our own desire to see the cycle of violence come to a resolution may perhaps be tempered with a smidgen of understanding for anyone attempting to shake up the rigid feudalism and unyielding Protestantism which holds sway in this milieu.
Love and marriage
Amid the doom and gloom there is some light. The village schoolteacher, who identifies himself as the narrator, falls more or less instantly for the Baron’s beautiful but shy governess, Eva. The harvest festival gives them a legitimate excuse for a dance together, further igniting the spark between them, and setting up another story thread – how can the podgy, thirtysomething schoolmaster win her heart? She’s from a nearby village and, thankfully, his social equal, but it’s by no means certain that he can persuade her and win over her father’s assent to her hand. It’s an irony that he’s facilitated by the dark goings-on, since Eva’s apparently unjust dismissal after the incident with Sigi allows the teacher provide her with shelter and interject on her behalf, all the better to gain her confidence. Curious that we know her name but we don’t know his, yet this is consistent throughout the film, where the young people are named but the adults in representative positions of authority are known only by those positions (the Baron, the pastor, etc). Presumably, the inference is that power dehumanises (hinting perhaps at the Nazism flagged up by the opening voiceover?), though in that case the teacher is clearly an exception, since he’s decency personified – and as such an obvious identification-figure for the audience as he attempts to figure out just what’s going on in the village.
We’re clearly rooting for him in the course of an extended courtship, but as the whodunnit moves into its later stages, he develops his own suspicions that the children are involved in the murky goings-on (of which more below). By making representations to the pastor, whose children Martin and Klara the teacher believes are deeply implicated, the whistleblower serves to put himself at risk, since the pastor takes the accusations as a personal affront and vows to ruin the teacher in response. Thus the whodunnit plot and what might loosely be termed the love-interest are brought together, prompting the possibility that good will not triumph and evil will go on unchecked. Okay, it’s a Michael Funny Games Haneke film, but can this really be so?
The sins of the fathers
In the meantime, what might loosely be termed the ‘whodunnit’ and ‘authoritarian repression’ elements of the narrative have both been moving on apace. The doctor’s return from hospital allows us to witness the inner workings of this widower’s household, shaped around an abusive sexual relationship with his housekeeper, who’s become increasingly aggrieved by his brutish treatment of her and suggests that she’s seen him molesting his fourteen-year-old daughter. The schoolteacher’s eventual decision to take his suspicions to the pastor is prompted by the housekeeper informing him that she knows who’s responsible for the mysterious attacks, then riding off to tell the police, leaving the doctor’s empty household behind. This effectively broadens the possibility of guilt, since she certainly has a motive for attacking the doctor, while what we see of his behaviour behind closed doors is monstrous – could his disappearance together with his children be an admission of culpability? Haneke raises the possibility and leaves it for us to cogitate.
The attacks have also been escalating. The most disturbing is the fate of Rudi, the housekeeper’s son who has Down’s Syndrome (possibly fathered by the doctor?), who survives but is severely traumatised by having his eyes gouged out. His attackers leave him for dead in the forest with a note quoting the Bible in its assertion that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children. This might be a reference to the doctor, though there are also more signs of something malignant in the children, in the way Klara, for instance, rebelling against the pastor’s authority, impales his beloved budgie on a pair of scissors, or the scene in which the steward’s boys push little aristo Sigi into the lake, nearly drowning him for the sake of snaffling his recorder. By this point in the film, layers and layers of suggestiveness and ambiguity have provided myriad suspects and motives for the crime, but given us little direction on how to find our way through to the truth. If we do assign guilt to any particular party or parties, how much might that be down to circumstantial evidence, hearsay or our own moral or ideological prejudices. When the doctor’s caught late at night in his surgery with his daughter, has he been piercing the girl’s ears as she suggests, or should we believe the housekeeper’s testimony and conclude that he’s been interfering with her? Is the desire for a single truth an impulse as authoritarian as some of the behaviour we’ve see in the story?
Drawing the strands together
The richness of the film is in part a function of the way it continues to pile on information, putting the onus on the audience to sort out what’s important and what’s secondary. It may not be that much of a surprise to discover that Haneke originally wrote it as a TV mini-series before screenwriting legend Jean-Claude Carrière (erstwhile collaborator of Luis Buñuel) filleted it all down to a 144-minute feature. The result is that it’s almost a bit too much to take in at a single sitting, so lets pause for a moment to assess the salient story components:
(i) Mystery: a series of violent, unexplained incidents shattering the settled routine of a small rural community
(ii) Detection: a individual seeking to solve the mystery and thus return the community to its previous sense of order
(iii) Narration: the same individual narrating the story from a vantage point many years later, admitting that what we see may not be entirely true, and thus encouraging the viewer to treat with scepticism the perspective from which the story events are viewed
(iv) Uncertainty: the placement of story beats which undercut or contradict the viewer’s attempts to play detective for themselves and solve the mystery
(v) Goal: the narrator’s objective in telling the story, its ambiguities and potential misinformation notwithstanding, is to contribute to a moral understanding of subsequent German history
The ending is the beginning
In essence, the climax of the film is when the teacher, armed with the conviction that the village children have been behind all the carnage, focuses the audience’s suspicions by raising the alarm with the pastor. In an atmosphere of curdled animosity, he makes a stand for decency, and we’re clearly rooting for him. The unexpected element in the story at this stage however, is the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the outbreak of the Great War, which means the mobilisation of the men in the village and upheavals which take precedence over the solution of the mystery. Haneke leaves us in church, where the service manifests a gesture of social cohesion in times of trouble – even though we now know that this cohesion is a sham given the sundry discontents which have surfaced in the course of recent events. The narrator assures us that the pastor took no further action, that he did get married to Eva, that he never saw any of the villagers again. The resolution is that there is no resolution – cue howls of anguish from audience members wanting closure…justice…revenge.
If Haneke really wanted us to understand German history, why didn’t he name the guilty party or parties? It’s certainly a risky strategy for filmmakers to deliberately withhold satisfaction from their paying audience, but one assumes in this case the artistic justification that the questions are more important than the answers. The experience of the film shouldn’t finish with the end credits, Haneke appears to be saying. Rather than facile certitude, we should reflect on the questions the film leaves with us. If a rigid moral code seeks to impose itself on a social system, does the loss of individual liberty then prompt transgression justifying the need for stricter repression? In this context, do guilt and innocence become relative judgments? What does the act of accusation say about the accuser? The questions go on and on…and, in a way, they are the film. It may seem perverse or contradictory to initiate a mystery story and then refuse a solution, but it’s through creating that audience intrigue and interest in the first place that Haneke gets us to engage with the issues he really wants to address, and leave us usefully pondering on the unsettling complexity of any given ‘truth’.
Hints and tips
Maybe you do have to be Michael Haneke to get away with refusing to solve a mystery plot, but if you’re giving the audience something bigger than story resolution then the decision is artistically tenable – though potentially limiting in terms of commercial impact. Although Haneke’s decision to highlight the story’s connection with German history has seemed too blunt for some of the film’s detractors, it does ensure that the debate the film prompts is wider than its whodunnit story. Whether there are similar issues of looming significance in a British context is open for discussion, but Haneke’s film at least sets a template suggesting a viable narrative model.
A good mystery demands a variety of suspects, but even those who aren’t guilty can offer a worthwhile contribution to the narrative fabric. The way in which Haneke uses diversions and red herrings to flag up a whole array of class, generational and sexual tensions offers compelling evidence that these devices not only intensify intrigue by delaying and withholding information, they also suggest thematic approaches which add complexity to the viewer’s ongoing attempt to make sense of the central mystery.
Ambiguity of perspective can be a useful storytelling tool. An obviously unreliable narrator can keep the audience on its toes, while there’s play to be made here if the story seems to be viewed from a POV outside the narrator’s field of knowledge. This is especially relevant here, since the whole notion of the story’s ownership and the way in which it cajoles the audience into seeing guilt and innocence from a certain angle is obviously highly charged.
©Trevor Johnston/The Script Factory 2009
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