The Answer Is The Question Is The Answer

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(very minor spoilers ahead) In the Q&A that I attended last evening between Michael Haneke and Darren Aronofsky, the topic that kept being returned to, that Aronofsky and audience members who'd already seen Haneke's new film The White Ribbon (I saw it after the Q&A) kept pushing, was the search for clues as to who held the guilt in the film. Who did what to whom, when and where and what were their motives. Aronofsky, having just seen the film the day before, said he hadn't been able to stop thinking about these questions ever since the film ended, and was especially insistent with his probing for clues in his questions, and the Q&A session ended with an old lady (obnoxiously, I might add) letting us all know that she has now, on her second viewing, solved the film's riddle of wrong-doing. Bravo, old lady!

I'm not going to argue that there isn't fun to be had in these sorts of puzzles; I am not above enjoying trotting out my own theories. Hell, I spent months after Haneke's Cache doing the same thing - how excited were you when you realized that the two young boys were standing there chatting in that film's final shot? But what does that mean? All it does is open up a thousand new, endless questions. In the Q&A Haneke brought this scene up in response to a question about whether he himself knew the answers to the riddles he shows us - if he knows, basically, whodunit. Haneke said that when he shot that final shot in Cache he had to write dialogue for the two actors to speak to each other and that the dialogue, if heard, actually would have answered all of our questions. So naturally we don't hear what they say to each other and he had the actors burn their scripts for the scene once they were finished filming, just in case.

So yes, this is fun to debate, and I have my own ideas who did what to whom in The White Ribbon. But in the end, it don't matter a damn. It's part of what draws us in and keeps us enthralled in the film - and I sat rapt from first to last shot with this movie, completely and totally engulfed in this world - but if it were what mattered, if it was what the movie's true purpose were, then Haneke would have given us the answers. But no. The answers are the questions. The answer is the ambiguity, the lack of resolution. That is what he wants out of us; he's taking Hitchcock's notion of the "red herring" even further and making it nothing and everything all at once. Where Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman's quest for uranium in wine bottles in Hitch's Notorious is really just an excuse for them to alternately romance and debase each other against this luscious back-drop, the terrible crimes that occur in The White Ribbon are both a start and end unto themselves. We can make games trying to find out the answers but there are no answers to be had. The videotapes in Cache and the killers in Funny Games and the crimes in The White Ribbon are not the point. It is what these forces unravel, what they bring out in the characters, that are where we have got to look.


So what is there to be had with Ribbon? There is the vision of a small, quiet community unknowingly on the cusp of the first World War playing out the horrors to come writ small. The next generation is upending the previous for their crimes against their own rigid beliefs, and the old are confronting a new century with a piety even they can hardly pretend to hold onto any longer. Everyone's sinning behind their closed doors, and everyone's putting on their harshest sternest most religious faces in Church. And the children... the children are watching, and being scarred the worst by it. What will these children bring? Think about Germany in the next couple of decades following this movie's time-frame and let me know.

But as always with Haneke's films it's about a specific, here this community's disintegration, reflecting outward to something larger, the path to the entire country's coming horrors, but then branches out from there towards the universal - for one, the hypocrisy of not practicing what you preach in any time or any place is savaged pretty mercilessly, and I couldn't help but think of the current Religious Right, the Evangelicals that I grew up among, and their misplaced rage at a world they no longer want to understand or engage in any meaningful manner. Do as I say, not as I do. One child murders a bird and makes a gruesome display of it while the other child nurses a different bird to health and gifts it as a replacement for the one lost. They both live under the pastor's roof. And the pastor saves his most strident defense for the killer. What else could he do?

The pastor isn't even the worst man in this town. Religion is a symptom, but not the disease. The people are boarded up in their individual homes enacting their own horrible personal vengeances on one another, and it's spilling into the streets. Fires are burning and the children are tied into their beds to keep themselves from finding any joy anywhere. Farmers lie dead in their barns and horses lay twitching in the dirt. The song of a flute stutters out sharply and signals nothing but rage.

I make this all sound so terribly bleak, but the shock is that A) it's so pretty to look at that I was hypnotized by every stark black-on-white frame, and B) it is full of humor as well. Of the dark sort of course - if you can appreciate the edit that leads the sound of supper music being played cutting directly into the squealing of a pig in a barnyard then you'll find the fun in the film. And the romance between the school teacher and the nanny is wholly charming. These two characters reside somewhere in between the rest age-wise (although she's younger than he is), and I assume that allows them to escape the rigidity of the old versus young themes the film is preoccupied with. While the old generation abuses the young and the young strikes out at the old, these two lovers drift through in the middle, observing, only tangentially being affected. And when the schoolteacher attempts to solve the riddle of what's happening in town, much like us in the audience he and his theories are soundly and furiously rejected. How dare he, we, interfere? This is not a world for lovers or for those actually seeking answers or real, tangible justice. This land of stark blacks and whites is built upon a towering base of alternating grays. The stacks of non-answers have suffocated it all. The light is too sharp to look at and the darkness is too deep to fathom.
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