You gotta keep the Devil way down in the hole

THE WHITE RIBBON

THE WIRE

One is a beautiful, yet difficult and disturbing, black-and-white foreign film about strange events in a German village in the early twentieth century. The other is a gritty HBO series about crime, corruption, and culture in Baltimore in the early twenty-first century. They couldn't have less in common, right? (Other than the fact that I saw the former recently, and am watching the latter on DVD (currently beginning the fourth season).) Nevertheless, while watching The White Ribbon I couldn't help but be reminded of The Wire, noticing their shared thematic and structural elements.

(This post should lay to rest, gentle reader, any fears—or hopes—that this blog is going to be renamed "Owen and Matt Talk Lost," despite what recent posting activity might indicate.)

The White Ribbon (trailer), directed by Austrian filmmaker Michale Haneke (Funny Games (both the 1997 Austrian original and the 2008 American shot-for-shot remake), The Piano Teacher, Caché) and winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, depicts life in a quiet German village in 1913 and 1914, on the eve of the First World War. Despite the narration—from his perspective decades later in old age—by the young school teacher (Christian Friedel), the perspective is almost clinically observational (though its supposed objectivity is naturally problematic); he describes events simply and matter-of-factly, as if in a journal. Starting with the village doctor's being hurt when his horse trips over a wire tied between two trees near his house, strange and unexplained acts of violence and destruction begin occurring. However, these events, and the investigation into their causes, very much take a back seat to a depiction of the seemingly mundane lives of the villagers: farm work; religious services; children going to school, playing with one another, and interacting with their families; harvesttime festivities; the budding relationship between the school teacher and Eva (Leonie Benesch), the local landowner's young nanny. But once we get beneath the tranquil surface, we begin to see the hidden, darker side of this community, full of violence, fear, pettiness, cruelty, and selfishness, and the cause of the destructive acts becomes much more evident. It may occasionally not be very pleasurable to watch, but it is very fascinating and rewarding throughout.

The five seasons of The Wire, which ran on HBO from 2002 to 2008, are based on the experiences of former crime reporter David Simon and former policeman Ed Burns, who then fictionalized those experiences in creating a series that explores, from a variety of perspectives, the life, culture, and institutions of contemporary Baltimore. Though it primarily follows a group of city police officers, it's far, far more than just a police procedural: The cast comes to include the drug dealers and traffickers they're investigating, local politicians, junkies, union leaders, journalists, and public school administrators, teachers, and students. What's most refreshing about The Wire is that it doesn't seem to over-dramatize or "sex up" its subject matter. For example, when a special police detail is formed to investigate a local drug organization, far from being the elite squad you'd expect on other shows, at least half of its members are dead weight, officers merely looking to punch out at the end of the day, start collecting a pension in a few years, and maybe bust a few heads for kicks along the way. At every turn, the detail has to struggle against indifference, interference, and outright hostility from their superiors and colleagues; police politics is at least as great a challenge as the investigation itself.

What emerges through the cases the detail works on, the various people they deal with, and the lives they themselves lead, is a portrait of a community, one that in many ways is profoundly sick beneath its surface. While decay and despair in The White Ribbon's village are much less obvious than in The Wire's Baltimore, that really makes it all the more startling and disturbing once Haneke scratches the peaceful, well mannered, pious surface. While watching The White Ribbon, I couldn't help but think that Haneke was doing for that German village what Simon and Burns did for Baltimore: using a variety of characters, settings, and situations to dig into a community and see what makes it tick, and getting some pretty unsettling answers. Simon's community slowly decays from corruption, apathy, and failed institutions; Haneke's community is suddenly, seemingly inexplicably shaken as generations of repression, cruelty, and hypocrisy lash out.