The White Ribbon Of Innocence And Purity

“It is not a measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society” – J Krishnamurthi

The very first scene in The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band) by Michael Haneke tells us that the film will be narrated by a man and we should not trust everything he tells us because it is but one perspective of what happened and he will recall the events as he remembers them. We do not know if this is the narrator’s voice or Haneke’s disclaimer, but it sets the underlying premise of the film: there is no singular truth to a story and what is presented is just one version of reality. From this we can infer that there will be no obvious clues and the conclusion will be far from neat.  Haneke is not appeasing our appetite of whodunnit and has no interest in perpetuating the idea that evil exists outside of us or that a conspicuous meme of a villain must be discerned for us to simplify and categorize who we need to condemn and who we need to root for in a film. Haneke gives us no one to root for.

There is a lot of evil that happens in the film but true to his style, all the violence is off-screen and vague. What is not vague is that the violence is very, very cruel. This is not told to us but we know this thanks to our own imagination. In this sense, Haneke is the anti-Tarantino. Based purely on the visuals and the dialogue, one can just as well conclude that nothing terrible happened.

But what is Haneke trying to tell us by tapping into our imagination? One theory is that we as audience have consumed so much graphic violence and have been exposed to so much physical treachery in visual media that we no longer need things to happen in front of us to recognize evil. We are capable of fashioning the goriest images by ourselves without needing a filmmaker to spoon feed them to us. I suppose that is a victory of sorts for the likes of Tarantino and Scorcese.

I am reminded of a recent post by Johann Hari where he argues that it is barbaric to be hateful towards children who become killers. He goes on to say:

“It is strangely comforting to see evil as a primordial external force, something alien that can be hunted down & confined to cages. We all have the capacity for terrible cruelty and sadism, especially if we are subjected to horror ourselves. We want a black-and-white world that tells us: no, it couldn’t have been you; this crime belongs to a different species.”

The idea that children are not the embodiment of innocence and purity and just as capable of wretched violence is a troubling one. I’m struggling with what all this means when placed in the context of crime and punishment. To what extent are we willing to punish children for the crimes committed? Where does the blame lie? Parents? Society? With the children themselves who in the case of White Ribbon go on become the Nazi generation when they grow up? There is no clear answer. That is ultimately what I take away from Haneke’s film.