“The White Ribbon had to be in German because of the subject matter, that was clear.”
— Michael Haneke
“For love is ever filled with fear.”
— Letter from Penelope to Odysseus in Ovid’s Heroides
In an interview with Alexander Kluge, Michael Haneke said “the real topic” of his film, The White Ribbon, was “how people under pressure become receptive for ideology, i.e. how they even create their own ideology, how they absolutize an idea— and then, with the help of this absolutized idea, punish those who preached this idea to them— but who lived differently from the way demanded by that idea.”
The white ribbon isn’t a static figure in the film: it recurs and adapts to disciplinary tools (the riding crops used to whip the children) as well as the tools of violence and rupture (the rope the farmer uses to strangle himself, the wire that makes the doctor fall, etc.) so that the ribbon itself becomes a being of velocity, a particular kind of symbol or iconography linked to this idea of designating as as well as the possibility of protecting.
To designate and to protect: these are active verbs.
The father ties his son to the bed at night with white ribbons to protect him from masturbating.
Haneke took the white ribbon from Johann Gottlieb Heusinger's early 19th century text where a pastor ties white ribbons in his children’s hair or around their arms to remind them of “Umfeld und Reinhot,” as Martin Blumenthal-Barry observed. This didacticism at the level of symbol invokes the role of talismans and religious ritual, as well as the chosenness of being marked by signs that are exclusively legible. You can see this in the wrenching seventh scene, where the symbols are being established and explained:
The “wrongdoers”— this word that holds so much silence inside it — situates itself near the confession, or creates a longing for confession and expiation. There is an aura of moral hygiene that hovers, cloud-like, over the scene, where the awareness of such hygiene is internalized as feeling dirty.
Blumenthal-Barby’s interest in “aprioric state of guilt" of the children and parents meets us on the screen, as spectators of Haneke's film, where we are encouraged to ask about the nature of responsibility under conditions where guilt is inexorable and close to a first cause. Even sincerity is implicated in it, as Blumenthal-Barby points out: the father’s idea of the son telling the truth assumes his son’s guilt. To lie is to say you are not guilty, where the registers converge to make communication void.
The psychological degradation and suggestivity of the white ribbon are the tools used by the pastor to control his children. These sorts of disciplinary regimes resemble the gaze of the Panopticon that reports to be nonviolent, a technology of continuous surveillance and control through internalization of the gaze. This is what we call a modern education, and to learn it involves internalizing the jargon of particular discourses, becoming a subject of these discursive practices which the film presents as an instructive violence behind closed doors, rendered unavailable to the spectator.
The closed doors haunt me. I am referring to the scene in The White Ribbon where Haneke reasserts the border between the public and private (a border he collapses in other films) to leave us outside the door, in that 83-second acoustic rehearsal of pain, cries, and humiliation by the boy. Anyone who has stood outside the door hearing a sibling or nephew or friend being spanked will recognize the horror, the absolute helplessness, established by the authoritative exclusion from visibility.
In the interview with Kluge, Haneke said he initially thought to name the film “The Right Hand of God," playing on how the kids come to believe, as socialized, that they are representatives of divine authority to judge and to punish. Those absolute standards absorb the panopticon's ontology and provide meaning and stability, a continuity of family life, through this act of assuming something like responsibility for disciplining those who fall short of propriety.
Judgement doesn't liberate so much as it commits one to standards that require continuous enforcement, defense, justification, and explication.
All value, as socialized, depends on this ability to judge and to protect— to act as a God would act in a metaphysics of presence. The long-take that fixes us to that bedroom door imprints this moment on our minds as a sort of unspeakable terror, activating our imaginations in relation to what is visible. Because all parts of the visual field are rendered equal in this sort of take, we are forced to decide how to signify the relations and dimensions that are present. There is a particular cruelty to this, a nausea in in the way Haneke leads us to imagine the beating. And this is more horrible in some ways than the films where he forces us to reckon with our complicity as consumers of the violence displayed—- here, in this scene before the door, we are active in creating it. Or imagining it. I am rarely sure there is a difference.