Who Committed the Crimes?

By: Chris Valletta

This past week, our class finished watching Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which tells the tale of a small town in Germany and the strange events that are happening right before World War I breaks out. The repression of the children of the village is a major theme of this Protestant community where pleasure doesn't seem to exist, although in the adults we see this pleasure but it is in a secretive and almost sinister form. The doctor of the town, who is injured in the beginning of the film, returns from the hospital and his son Rudi locks himself in a room when he comes back (after we learn the day before Rudi was lost trying to walk to the hospital to see him). However, Rudi eventually comes out to see his father who is finally starting to heal from his injuries. This is one of the first examples we see of the ambivalence of the father figure.

Then the scene switches to the pastor and his family, as he is talking to his son Martin. The pastor in a deceiving way attempts to have Martin confess that he has been masturbating. The pastor does this by telling him the story of a boy his age that he saw who was committing the same acts and eventually died within a few months because he destroyed all of his nerves as a result. Here again we see the ambivalence of the father figure and the use of fear and power to have their children obey them in a horrified way. The pastor, in an effort to have Martin stop his desire, has his hands tied to the bed at night with white ribbon (the symbol of innocence and purity). This acts goes in so far as to restrict his own physical freedom.

We then learn that the doctor has been having sexual relations with Mrs. Wagner for years, even when his wife was alive. The doctor tells Mrs. Wagner in a cruel way that he would no longer like to see her anymore and that she is repulsive. He also makes a comment how he has sexual needs and cannot go longer than a month without sex. This proves to be extremely contradictory since all the adults of the town seem to hold their children to the exact opposite of standards. There is a whole underground pleasure operation going on in the town that is very deceitful and secretive. The overall  meaning is that even the adults needs are repressed to an extent since they have to go about performing these actions (mostly sexual) in this manner. As a result, we also learn that the doctor has been sexually molesting his teenage daughter as well to satisfy his needs.

In the scene where the doctor is molesting his daughter, his son Rudi stumbles in the room but they are able to cover up what is going on. The doctor says he is piercing her ears, remarking that "beauty has to feel pain." This implies that anything with pleasure should be punishable because it is sinful. Mrs. Wagner's son, Karli, is mentally challenged and is found horribly tortured in the woods. The school children seem oddly enamored with Karli and his situation and constantly ask the school teacher if there is anything they can do to help him. They are also spotted trying to look through the window in his house to see him. This extreme curiosity of the children makes the school teacher start to wonder why in fact they are this way.

Another scene depicted in the film is when the son of the steward is caught stealing the baron's whistle. The son is beaten unbearably by the father with a whip, even though his wife begs him not too because she fears he will kill him. This scene was one of the hardest, if not the hardest scene to watch because it was a very realistically done scene of child abuse. It just goes to show how this type of abusive behavior can truly impact a child as they are just starting to grown and learn about what life is. When they are born into this, they are almost always going to exhibit the same behavior, which is what appears to be Haneke's main point.

I believe that the most interesting scene in the movie came with the conversation between the baron and the baroness in their dining room. The baroness reveals to the baron that at her time away from Germany, she fell in love with a man from Italy. The man was very found of their son Sigi and has helped him to grow into a better person. The baroness explains how different life in Italy was and that she could no longer live with her son in a town of such "malice, envy, apathy, and brutality." I felt that this quote from the baroness essentially summed up the entire movie. The environment of this village and the real feelings fueling it with the Protestant work ethic negatively impacted the people in a viscous cycle.

The film concludes with a anti-climatic ending, which was certainly expected based off the slowly developing aspect of the flim. However, it was very powerful and left you wondering who committed the crimes. It is implied that the children of the town were collaborating to commit the crimes since they were harshly repressed and were only able to act out on this repression in harmful and aggressive ways. This is evident through small scenes where the kids acted out aggressively for no reason, such as when one boy pushed another into water simply because he was playing the flute, or when one of the pastor's children when into his study and cut the head off his bird. The school teacher is able to make this conclusion, but the pastor refuses to believe it, although deep down I think he knew that this was the case.