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CAA Cinema: The White Ribbon (2009)




Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is a 2009 German language film shot in surgically precise black and white. The time is 1913, the place is a small, isolated German village named Eichwald, and the narrative evolves around a series of unexplained acts of cruelty and malice perpetrated against the remote, rural community.


The mark left by a trip-wire used in a booby-trap.
A mysterious fire.
The Baron's son is thrown in the river.

In common with Haneke's Hidden (2005), The White Ribbon is purposefully ambiguous. Motives are never laid bare and pointed fingers fail to skewer definitive targets.  In this way, the film refuses easy categorisation, but for this viewer, at least, Haneke's menacing exploration of shame, reprisal and complicity continues a fine cinematic tradition of paedophobia: stories that evince or seek to evoke a visceral distrust or dislike of children.  

While The White Ribbon determines for its audience neither motive nor culprit for the violent acts, it certainly doesn't dissuade us from thinking the worst of the neat, straight-backed children who inhabit the village - they who gather watchfully outside doorways and windows to enquire ever-so politely about the well-being of the individuals hurt in the film's mysterious accidents and brutalised in its off-screen beatings.  There is something insincere about the children's sincerity, something too knowing about their curiosity, their demeanour reminiscent almost of scientists coming back to observe dispassionately the outcome of inhumane experiments.  Of course, this may ultimately be an example of Haneke's game-play, in that the audience is tempted by the director to foreclose on further discussion and apportion blame - and in so doing make issue of our intolerance for incertitude and preference for scapegoats.  

I'm not alone in coming to fear the children of remote, rural Eichwald.  The school teacher, who narrates the events of the film, comes finally to suspect the children of the village of unwholesome activities.  His hypothesis is met with indignation and disavowal.  Hardly surprising: the idea that children can be so wilfully malign always elicits public outcry - especially in cases where children abuse or kill other children (and children are victims of violence in The White Ribbon). One need only namecheck Mary Bell and James Bulger to know that children who kill present society with an idea almost too unpalatable.

Mary Bell at the time of her arrest. 

James Patrick Bulger being lead away to his death.

It is Eichwald's pastor with whom the school teacher shares his misgivings, who reacts predictably with horror. There is, however, something too strident about this puritan's refutation.  The pastor is appalled by the premise that the village children (his own among them) could be responsible for the violence, but not, I suspect, because he finds the school teacher's theory unimaginable, but rather because he can imagine it perfectly well. Author William Golding evidences no such squeamishness.  Golding's novel 1954 Lord Of The Flies, in which a community of English schoolboys stranded on an island descend into savagery, is a celebrated reposte to the idea that children are wired more benignly than adults.  

A school boy savage.

Whereas Golding suggests that none of us are beyond the thrall of atavism - children especially - Mervyn LeRoy's The Bad Seed (1956) makes the case that evil derives from specific genes or 'bad seeds'. Rhoda Penmark, aged eight, is the bad seed of the film's title, a child-killer and sociopath, and as a subplot reveals, the granddaughter of a female serial killer.

Rhoda Penmark

LeRoy's film is an adaptation of a 1954 novel by William March. The novel's original ending - in which Rhoda's mother attempts to kill her daughter with sleeping pills and then shoots herself, only for Rhoda to survive, free to kill again - was much too nihilistic for the censors. The spectacle of a child psychopath going unpunished contravened the Hays Code, which insisted films had a solemn moral duty to show that 'crime didn't pay.' The film's ending was duly revised, with the mother now surviving her suicide attempt and Rhoda being dealt a lethal blow by a bolt of lightning. Ultimately then, Rhoda is given the mother of all spankings by the father of all fathers. Not content with this sledgehammer-subtle deus-ex-machina, a post-ending coda now shows the mother spanking Rhoda too so as to further reassure audiences and restore too in the minds of worried moms and pops the efficacy of their own parenting. I can only wonder what changes the Hays Code would have demanded of Haneke's The White Ribbon - a film in which children are violent, crimes go unpunished, motives remain elliptical, parenting is largely abusive and bolts of cleansing lightning are in conspicuously short supply?

Rhoda gets spanked by her mother.

If the children of Eichwald have a ring-leader, it is the passive-aggressive Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus), whose resemblance to  Rhoda Penmark might encourage us to believe in the existence of genetic templates for evil after all.  Klara is as blonde and outwardly wholesome as LeRoy's sociopath, but as dead-pan as Wednesday Adams, whose morbid fascination with injury and accident Klara may also share.

Klara is confronted by the suspicious school teacher.

It is Klara who is responsible for one of the film's acts of violence that is attributed without equivocation.  Klara is the pastor's eldest daughter who, in falling short of her father's puritanical expectations, has been made by way of punishment to wear the titular white ribbon on her arm.  While the white ribbon itself is symbolic of purity, the wearing of it announces moral deficit and failure.  Following further public humiliation by her father, Klara kills the pastor's pet bird in reprisal and revolt.  That the bird itself is caged is surely significant, for Klara is likewise denied the full expression of her nature by the repressive structures of her father's world.  As significant is the means by which Klara first mutilates and then displays the pastor's bird, making from its corpse a mockery of a crucifix.  Fathers of all kinds are punished in Eichwald.


Klara's revenge.

The White Ribbon's temporal and geographical context encourages us to lend chilling significance to the idea of a generation of children learning to flex their muscles with impunity and address their resentments with violence. The school teacher's opening narration suggests plainly that, like him, we might seek to connect the social microcosm of the troubled village and the macrocosm of twentieth century European history:

"I don't know if the story I want to tell you is entirely true. Some of it I only know by hearsay. After so many years a lot of it is still obscure and many questions remain unanswered. But I think I must tell you of the strange events that occurred in our village. They could perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country."

If The White Ribbon is 'about' the incubation of fascism in Germany, then Klara and her tribe are not simply bad apples, but bitter little acorns from which something truly monstrous will grow.  The film's title may, of itself, be an example of grim foreshadowing, as Ian Johnston suggests, "The shaming white ribbons worn on Martin and Klara's arms project associations into the Nazi future, both the Nazis' armbands and the badges of shame (yellow for Jews, pink for homosexuals, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.) used in the camps." (Johnston, 2010) Of Klara and her cohorts, Alan Nothnagle makes this grim prediction: "These terrorists in waiting are around ten or twelve years old, and as such are too young to participate in World War I. No, instead of experiencing the disillusioning meat grinder of attrition warfare, this lot will instead soak up the dying Empire's "victory" propaganda and later join the Freikorps, the Storm Troopers, and the Nazi Party. In 1933 they will be around thirty years old and will form the backbone of the new regime." (Nothnagle, 2009)

Klara's progeny? Hitler Youth Propoganda Poster

In Bob Fosse's Oscar-winning Cabaret (1972), we encounter another beautiful blonde child whose implacable resolve gives us one of cinema's most truly chilling scenes. For all its apparent ambiguity, The White Ribbon is no less clear in its message: we should fear for our children, in so much as they are manipulated easily, controlled and abused, and we should be in fear of our children for the self-same reason - or as singer-song writer Tracy Chapman puts it more simply, 'Bang Bang Bang.'




The afterimage of Hitler's youth permeates another peadophobic classic, The Village of The Damned (1960), based on John Wyndam's science-fiction 1957 novel, The Midwich Cuckoos.  Here too, we encounter a tribe of precocious moppets all with startlingly blonde hair and glacial, impeccable manners with scant disregard for the feelings of others. 

The 'cuckoo' children from The Village of the Damned (1960)

Hitler Youth propaganda poster

A Midwich 'cuckoo' and his parents

At least the mums and dads of Midwich have got aliens to blame for their wayward offspring - and not a serial-killing encoded gene. In this instance, their creepy kids are the hive-minded, telepathic progeny of an extra-terrestial intelligence. Likewise, when their sullen five year old starts acting-up in Richard Donner's The Omen (1976) Richard and Katherine Thorn can at least take comfort from the fact of finding themselves at the heart of a global conspiracy plotting to see the antichrist installed on his earthly throne. 

Damien Thorn - the antichrist.

In these peadophobic fright-fests, the parents are squarely not at fault - external forces are at work.  These children are monsters of (super)nature not nurture.  Not so in The White Ribbon.  Haneke's children are Larkin's children - fucked up by their mums and dads and by the alienating ideologies of adulthood. As Ryan Gilbey observes, "If the children are the perpetrators of the violence, it is their elders who have nurtured these dubious talents. The villagers' child-rearing techniques, based on instilling guilt and inflicting pain, are shown to be incendiary" (Gilbey, 2009)  It's even possible to see the acts of violence perpetrated against the village as projections of the adults' otherwise unexpressed resentment.  The village is festering with grown-up grievances, unvoiced, neutered by puritan restraint and the tugging of forelocks.  Haneke's refusal to name and shame gives the various attacks and accidents a near-supernatural quality, as if they're being visited upon the village like portents, which is further encouraged by the inclusion of a child character who appears able to prophecise the episodes of violence in her dreams.  Notice Gilbey's choice of the word 'incendiary', which seems particularly apposite considering the way in which The White Ribbon's cruelties ignite without warning - as if the pent-up negative energies building up in the village have found an 'out', striking people down like the lightning that incinerated poor Rhoda Penmark.  

The notion of children expressing or acting out the repressed rage and frustration of their parents surely finds its apotheosis in David Cronenberg's 1979 body-horror chiller, The Brood.  In what can only be described as Freudian tour-de-force, Cronenberg introduces us to a monstrous mother figure capable of giving birth to 'rage babies' from a cancerous womb appended to her stomach.  Like the monster from Forbidden Planet (1956), the mother's snarling off-spring are the progeny of her id.  They are hatred and jealousies made flesh.  Springing from the mother's own repressed feelings of resentment, her vengeful brood act upon her most violent fantasies, committing brutal acts of murder about which the mother herself remains unaware. 


The Brood's romper-suited 'rage babies'

At a time when the likes of Honey Boo Boo and Jimmy Saville compete queasily for our collective incredulity, the non-synonymous issues of childhood sexuality and the sexualisation of children by adults have never been more freighted, confused or conflated.  This is another way in which children have come to terrify us - something the Chapman Brothers, for example, know well and are keen for us to confront and interrogate.

Jake and Dinos Chapman, Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-sublimated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000), 1995

Haneke's The White Ribbon is as unflinching in exploring our disquiet around children and sex. In one acutely disquieting scene, Klara's brother admits reluctantly to his father that he's been masturbating.  In response, the pastor tells his son an appalling lie about another boy in another village who died a horrible malingering death as a direct result of the same nocturnal activity.  If this sounds far-fetched, consider this: according to the Journal of Religion and Health at one point, "two thirds of all human diseases, medical and mental, were attributed to masturbation" (Patton, 1986). 

The pastor's son wears the white ribbon during his cross-examination.


As a further deterrant, the boy's hands are tied with knotted ropes to his bed so he might sleep through the night without succumbing to the evils of onanism. Here, what is normal, healthy and ubiquitous about childhood sexuality is equated with pestilence and moral decay, the prospect of a 'sexual child' so unseemly, so immoral, that the physical abuse and enforced incarceration of a boy by his father is deemed preferable, curative, and 'more proper'.

Another child tied to a bed by religious men in an effort to prohibit further 'self abuse' is Regan MacNeil in William Freidkin's The Exorcist (1973). True, twelve year old Regan is possessed by an ancient, foul-mouthed demon, but that the abject corruption of her soul should manifest as an episode of female masturbation leads some to interpret The Exorcist as resonating so powerfully with audiences, less because of how it depicts an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil for a young girl's soul, and rather more because it twangs parental anxiety in regard to the secret sex lives of their pubescent children.


Meanwhile, back in Haneke's bleak little village, the doctor is abusing his daughter without conscience, even going so far as making a gift to her of his dead wife's earrings so that his moral trespass might be elided still further.  In Eichwald, the sexuality of its children is both refused and exploited.  It becomes a thing of horror - for them, for us.  Hypocrisy abounds; a man alienates his son from the province and pleasures of his own body in an obvious act of guilt and self-loathing (are we seriously meant to believe that the pastor has never masturbated?), while another adult with responsibilities of care and rehabilitation abuses his daughter with breathtaking indifference to his crime.

The doctor abusing his daughter.

Another peadophobic film shot through with peadophiliac disquiet  is Jack Clayton's masterful adaptation of Henry James 1898 ghost story novella The Turn Of The Screw. In common with The White Ribbon, Clayton's The Innocents (1961) is a strange and ambiguous film and shares too a narrative predicated upon the spectacle of precocious, implacable children intent seemingly on out-manoeuvring their adult wards.  A very prim and proper governess, played by Deborah Kerr, is charged with looking after Miles and Flora, siblings who may - or may not - have fallen under the malign influence of two dead former employees, who, while living, were locked into a darkly passionate and notably indiscrete love affair.  Ostensibly, The Innocents is a film about creepy country houses, restless ghosts and possession, but don't be fooled; this isn't the cosy stuff of fireside yarns.  For all its billowing curtains and gothic trappings, The Innocents is as discomforting about the issue of children, sex and sexualisation as any Chapman Brothers mutant (and a good deal more elegant).

Miles.

Flora.

Supernatural possession aside, the film hints that the two children have anyway witnessed sex-acts between the two lovers.  The governess fears the two children 'know too much.'  Certainly, Miles is a little too mature for his years and even flirtatious towards his governess. In a scene more lastingly shocking than Regan MacNeil masturbating with a crucifix, Miles kisses his governess on the lips.  This isn't a goodnight kiss.  This isn't a wholesome kiss.  No, this kiss between a male child and a grown woman is something else entirely. Kate Bush's suitably spooky song The Infant Kiss, inspired directly by this scene, has lyrics that make explicit the lingering suspicion that the Governess herself - and not a ghost - has developed her own unnatural obsession with Miles. 

I say good night-night
I tuck him in tight. 

But things are not right.

What is this? An infant kiss 
That sends my body tingling?


I've never fallen for 
A little boy before. 
No control. 

Just a kid and just at school. 

Back home they'd call me dirty. 

His little hand is on my heart. 

He's got me where it hurts me. 

Knock, knock. Who's there in this baby? 

You know how to work me. 

All my barriers are going. 
It's starting to show. 
Let go. Let go. Let go.


In the film's final scene, which earned The Innocents its otherwise  heavy-handed x-certificate, the over-wrought governess kisses the dead boy on the lips.  Clayton's The Innocents is as mischievous as Haneke's film in refusing to coalesce in terms of 'what happened' or 'why'. The innocence or otherwise of Miles and Flora is left undecided, while the culpability of the various adult characters in so influencing them is held up for enquiry.  All theories are kept in play and so it is that The Innocents, like The White Ribbon is free to unsettle audiences indefinitely.

The infant kiss.

So what finally do I think of Eichwald's children above and beyond the film's exquisite unheimlich effect that situates Klara and her cronies alongside the likes of Miles, Rhoda and those Midwich cuckoos?  What can I conclude from the peadophobic trend explored here of which The White Ribbon is another example, which in different ways seems to prove that we are, at best, ambivalent about children, and at worst, afraid of them?

If you watched all the way to the end of that scene from Bob Fosse's Cabaret, you would have heard one character say to another ominously, 'You still think you can control them?'  Strictly, he's referring to the rise and rise of the Nazi party as exemplified by the angelic fascist and his hymn to radicalisation, but this character's doubt applies to children more generally.  This could be Haneke's pastor, admitting finally (if only to himself, if not to the school teacher) that for all his teachings, Klara and her brother are consolidating their own identities in spite of him - without him.  Stripped of its socio-historical meaning, Cabaret's Tomorrow Belongs To Me is the anthem of all children.  Tomorrow is theirs. Children know we're only so much dust given momentary breath and that power, control, judgement and influence will be theirs in time.  This is what Klara knows when she's saying nothing.  This is what the children of Eichwald know.  This is their secret and it's a simple one; time is on their side, not ours.  All children have to do is wait for the ruling class of adults to grow old, lose traction, and die. This, of course, makes them our next bright hope for the future - and our enemy.


The children of Eichwald.


Johnston, Ian, The Children Are Watching You, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, http://brightlightsfilm.com/68/68whiteribbon.php#.Ug9dykJsjdk

Nothnagle, Alan, Horror film of the decade - "The White Ribbon", http://open.salon.com/blog/lost_in_berlin/2009/12/27/horror_film_of_the_decade_-_the_white_ribbon

Patton, Michael S., Twentieth Century Attitudes Toward Masturbation, Journal of Religion and Health, Vol 25. No 4, 1986 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01534067#page-1

Gilbey, Ryan, The White Ribbon, http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2009/11/white-ribbon-haneke-european

Comments

  1. This is a brilliant article Phil. So perfect for the blog and so deep with information and discussion.

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    Replies
    1. That's kind of you, Jordan. I started off just writing about a few examples, and then more lightbulbs kept popping on. Might be the beginnings here of a CGAA film series maybe next term? 'The Bad Seed' collection?

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