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Perhaps we've grown to accustomed to instantly polarizing those things in life we encounter that run opposite of our world view or experience. Godson's Law gives a good realization of this, seeking to formulize how long any online conversation can exist before someone calls someone, “Hitler.†We tend to pick the single largest wrong and identify the smallest with that, aggrandizing rather than seeking any level of understanding, in our current social discourse.
But perhaps it's been that way for a while or, perhaps more specifically, there was a point you could single out as noting that the greater evil wasn't the singular embodiment of someone like Adolf Hitler - rather, it was something shared, a deep-seated evil grown in your own garden and leaving you unable to eradicate it. Instead, one is left in the ruins to try and understand where things went wrong and why they did so irrevocably.
This theme is what's explored in Michael Haneke's 2009 The White Ribbon. The setting is pre-WWI in a small German village. The narrator, the schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) has some small possession of power but is fairly unconnected to the existing power structure in the village. So he's privy to much of the conversations that occur in the film between the two focal groups, the adults and their children. The former group are a mix of the traditional and the manic, the repressed and the judgemental. The roles occupied by these adults - priest, doctor, baron and baroness, farmer and schoolteacher - symbolize the power structure at work at the time in German society and so their weaknesses of character are held to the fore as all playing a communal or aggregate part in the world they create for that second group, the children. The group of children have no clear leadership as they all seem to be on equal footing. They are, however, resolute in their subversion of what they are taught/told/forced to do by the adults. That becomes important as a series of tragic events begin to slowly occur over time in the village. The suspects are clear but the existing power structure is too entrenched, blinded by its own ignorance, to see it all for what it is until it's far too late.
The White Ribbon is really a story about how evil starts, usually in reaction to an arrogant and overbearing power forcing others to do or be something that is contrary or lacking freedom of choice. The title comes from the symbolic emblem that the priest ties around the arms of his two eldest, most disobedient children, to remind them of their purity. (Again, if viewing this film solely as a story of the nascent beginnings of fascism in German, it's easy to see the roots well exposed.) The problem, though, that the film is pointing out is that stern reminders without any moral backing are just that - pieces of ribbon that serve ultimately serve no purpose except to express the ignorance of those in power over those they subjugate.
Shot in gorgeous black and white that further identifies that way in which the ignorant powerful see their world, it could be Haneke's statement for the viewer, that you, too, are seeing this in black and white but be careful - it's clearly not meant to be that clear-cut.
Rating: A
