I have a love-hate relationship with Michael Haneke. Correction, it's a one-way love-hate relationship, since he doesn't know I exist ;) I found his films contemptuous towards the audience, bordering on misanthropy and intellectualism for intellectualism's sake. But The White Ribbon cemented my respect for him as a filmmaker. It is a brilliant masterpiece, one of the few films that truly deserved the Palm d'Or in recent years. As with all Haneke films, I left the theater in a bad mood but I could not shake off the implications and the puzzles presented by this film. This is probably Haneke's most hopeful and redeeming film, which is probably something fans were never expecting from him.
In The White Ribbon, director Haneke says it's the "mental preconditions" that led to a group of people who become susceptible and vulnerable to extreme ideologies and behaviors. In this virtual horror film, every frame is saturated with unrelenting sadness as well as haunting sinister. It's not classified as a horror film, but the most effective horror films usually have an element of desperate sadness that overwhelm the characters, and you can see that same desperate sadness and anger boiling in the characters' eyes. The children in the film suffer from this desperate sadness that they cannot trust themselves to reveal to the adult authorities in their lives. And it's completely understandable - the moral and spiritual guardian of the village is a tyrannical, hypocritical Lutheran who cares more about the appearance of protocol rather than substance of his children. The physical guardian of the village, the doctor, is a pedophile, a sadist, a molester, and again, a hypocrite. This is a study in which the oppressed become the oppressors.
Since Haneke says that the film can be logically explained, it doesn't mean there's one universal answer, like in a teacher's manual. If I try to look at this as logically as possible, I would say that Karli's injuries were caused by Klara and her gang. Klara and her brother are particularly disturbed, as their father's Lutheran teachings have been indoctrinated into them to the point of extremist distortions.
Since they are still developing, they most have likely absorbed the worst of Lutheran predestination. As they feel oppressed and cannot vent their anger and discontent, they prey on those who are perceived to be weaker and below the "elect." Klara and her brother are probably the leaders of the gang, who also include the Steward's older sons and the doctor's daughter Anna.
Anna must have let on to her gang, deliberately or unwittingly, that her father has been molesting her. That would explain her doctor father's tripping over a deliberately placed and removed wire. Furthermore, Anna was also watching the "accident" from the window and was already out the door the moment her father fell off the horse, implying she would have known that this "accident" was going to take place. Later on, knocking on the window is heard, and Anna hesitantly walks over to the window and reluctantly opens it. It's Klara and her gang, looking sinister and asking if they can help her with anything. It's most likely that they were demanding her to remain silent, and they removed the wire afterwards. Anna seems to be rather weak-willed and the "nicer kid" around, so she might have been bullied to allow her father's accident to happen.
As for the rumors that Karli is the illegitimate son of the doctor and the midwife - it is entirely possible even these rumors were started by the villagers in attempt to save their children from being apprehended. The midwife was clearly introduced to the audience as a single woman, but she had a son which would be quite taboo in a small religious town. With no other dating prospects around, I suppose the only man she could have gotten close to was the doctor, whom she probably worked with during the village health visits throughout the years. We don't know how Karli came to the world, but an affair between the doctor and the midwife is highly likely. They probably had their affair even while the doctor's wife was around, as Karli is probably more than 5 years-old, which is the age of the doctor's youngest son Rudi whose birth contributed to his mother's death. The doctor's late wife died in childbirth, and the midwife certainly had the skill, access, and motive to kill her out of spite and jealousy. It could be said that the entire doctor's family was mired in sin, something Klara and her fanatical gang could target, hate, and aim to annihilate. It goes without saying that poor Karli's injuries were inflicted by these kids, as Karli represents the "unholy union" of the midwife and doctor. Even Anna, though a victim, may be considered to be "impure."
The Steward's daughter told the schoolteacher that she dreamed of Karli suffering from a horrible accident; the schoolteacher and the subsequent policemen interrogating her didn't think it was simply a dream but actual knowledge that she knew from the plotters. Perhaps, she's really psychic, and maybe Haneke is just throwing this in to test our minds. Whether the girl is psychic or not is irrelevant - she wants to warn people of the powerful evil that has descended upon the village but cannot out of fear. You want to say something but you can't because doing so would hurt you - how many of us have felt this way? Just as God is supposedly omniscient, so is evil all-powerful and watchful in this village. These kids felt they were the moral police, but in fact, they were really just finding a way to terrorize others out of self-loathing.
The possibility that Klara and her gang was aiming to destroy the doctor's family explains the disappearance of the doctor, daugther, son, Karli, and the midwife. Perhaps they were killed off by the gang, some say. Perhaps, they left as soon as they discovered the motive behind Karli's attack and the attackers' identities, knowing that the intention to destroy his "sinful" family is in the works. We only know the midwife was the last one to go. She claimed was she going to the police to report on the attackers, but there were no repercussions, no police coming to the village to apprehend the criminals. We are told no one in the village has heard from this family, including the midwife, ever again. The note discovered on Karli shows that the writer(s) believed in their roles as the arbitrators of justice on those they deem immoral and sinful, especially the sins of parents, figures that Klara and her gang hate with full prepubescent fury.
The Steward's son hates privileged younger boys for whatever reason, perhaps jealousy, feeling as though his parents don't give him enough attention and love - he hates his younger newly born brother and Sigi, the Baron's son. Sigi's injuries were clearly probably his mastermind with the assistance of Klara and other gang members. He tried to freeze his newly born brother to death and that scene was not so much a puzzle to solve but a matter of connecting the dots that Haneke masterfully showed us.
Most viewers tend to agree that the Farmer's wife died in a true accident. But she died in the conditions of what today would be considered employer negligence. So in this context, her death signifies the Baron's economic and social tyranny over his underlings. Such social injustice brews a sense of resent and bitterness which of course escalated in the dead woman's son destroying the Baroness' precious cabbage in an act of subversion. Why do some people have more than others, why do others have the power over others - these are eternal questions that have never been solved. There is no solution, no right that can make a wrong go right. Examples of these human attempts to equalize human beings ended up in the fiascoes of Communism. In any case, all I know if we're supposed to work with what we have - that may be little, a lot, or somewhere in between.
It's not all sadness and cruelty. The story is narrated by a young schoolteacher who falls in love with a girl, gets engaged to her, and presumably later married. The pastor's youngest son gives his unsmiling father the bird he rescued, when his father's bird was stabbed to death by his daughter Klara. It is such a sweet moment when a young child comprehends the complexities and intense emotions of the adult and attempts to console the parent with his giving and caring nature. These beautiful moments are just foreign to the suffocating cruelty of previous films by Haneke I've seen. Is Haneke mellowing down? I hope so. There is only so much ugliness I can stomach. In the theater, I kept hoping that he wasn't going to ruin the young boy with the bird or the schoolteacher's romance. I was relieved when that didn't happen, as I already had a handful of crap to figure out with Klara, the bestial kids, and the rotten Doctor's tale. Perhaps, even go to sleep without being too haunted.
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