Concluding The White Ribbon

By: Melissa 

The family structures within the movie The White Ribbon continues to astonish me. The family dynamics are nothing like what I am used to in this day and age. It seems as though all the members of the family are true repressed not only by their leaders but also by the other members living within their society. They have a perverse understanding of how their community should be run. They speak of a community that is just and trustworthy while they are run by a dictatorship, the baron, and keep expressing overly aggressive actions within their daily interactions. 

 In one family, their son committed a crime against the owners of the estate because he believed they caused his mothers death, their rebuttal by the Baron was to fire the family members. The father of the family then disowned his son and later committed suicide. His actions were rash, leaving his family without any guidance or closure. Its hard to imagine a father orphaning his children like that now a days, just over the loss of an income. 

We also learn a lot about the town's doctor in the last part of the movie. The doctor does not know the age of his own daughter and sexually abuses her in the privacy of their home. He messed around with the mid wife and then tossed her to the side when he finally got disgusted with her. He spoke down to her as though she were garbage and she pretty much just let him continue until she had a small insignificant rebuttal. It was astonishing watching them interact with one another, like animals cutting each other with words.

At one point the doctor was piercing his daughters ears and stated that " Beauty has to suffer, thats what they say". The expression now is that we suffer for beauty. These are two very different sentiments. The first states that the beautiful must suffer in order to exist while the second statement implies that the ugly must suffer to obtain the status of beauty. Was this a slip up by the doctor, or did he really mean to imply that the beautiful, like his daughter, deserve to suffer (possibly because they deny him) ?