The Wave | Through the Shattered Lens

(Thank you shout-out to my friend Mark for recommending this film!)

The 2008 German film, The Wave, opens with history teacher and water polo coach Rainer Wenger (Jurgen Vogel), driving to class while listening to the Ramones’s Rock and Roll High School.

Rainer may be a middle-aged authority figure who expects his water polo players to train hard and to always put winning above everything but he still considers himself to be a punk rock rebel, an anarchist who brags about all of the protests that he was involved with. Rainer is upset when he learns that he has been assigned to teach a week-long course on “autocracy.” He very much wanted to teach a class on “anarchy” but that class has been assigned to the most uptight and autocratic teacher in the school. Already feeling resentful, Rainer becomes even more annoyed when it becomes clear that the majority of his students are convinced that there will never be another dictatorship in Germany.

Rainer decides to show them how easily fascism can take root by becoming a dictator in his classroom. Rainer orders the students to call him “Mr. Wegner.” He tells them to all wear the same uniform of jeans and a white shirt to class and when his most intelligent student shows up for class wearing a red blouse because she “doesn’t look good in white,” Rainer refuses to call on her when she raises her hand in class. Mr. Wegner institutes assigned seating, controlling who can sit with who. Everyone is required to stand up if they want to speak. When one student says that he doesn’t want to do any of this, Rainer kicks him and his friends out of class. All three of them eventually return.

Rainer’s experiment works a bit too well. The students come to love being a part of the movement that they come to call The Wave. The Wave ostracizes outsiders, both in school and outside. The Wave covers the town in graffiti, announcing their presence. The Wave doesn’t really have a set goal but the students in Rainer’s class are now obsessed and fanatically loyal to it. One former outcast, Tim (Frederick Lau), becomes so devoted to the cause that he even starts carrying a gun to school so he can defend the other members of The Wave….

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because The Wave is based on the novelization of the American television special of the same name. The German version of The Wave, however, is far more cynical than the American version. Whereas the American version features Bruce Davison as a mild-mannered but always well-intentioned liberal who realizes that his classroom experiment had gone too far, the German version features a teacher who, despite his self-proclaimed radicalism, comes to enjoy the ego boost of being a dictator in the classroom. (Rainer, of course, puts his fascism in superficial left-wing terms, railing against the corporations that make expensive clothing and the individualism that he claims was keeping his class from coming together.) Rainer becomes willfully blind to what he has created. And if the American version of The Wave featured students who eventually learned a lesson and voluntarily walked away from the group they had previous celebrate, the German version presents students who are not willing to abandon their cause, even when their leader tells them that it is time to move on. If the American version featured students who were just play-acting as fascists, the German version features students who go from being blithely unconcerned with the prospect of dictatorship to being the enthusiastic foot soldiers in a cause that has no reason to exist outside of controlling the lives and thoughts of others. If The American version ended with hope for the future, the German version ends with tragedy.

It’s a dark film. Some might claim that The Wave is not a horror film but, by the end of the movie, Rainer’s students have become as relentless and destructive as the zombies from a Romero film or the fanatics who often showed up in Wes Craven’s pre-Scream movies. It takes just one week to transform them from being ordinary teenagers to being the shock troops in a directionless but destructive revolution. They are asked to surrender their individuality and their power to think for themselves and all of them do so without much hesitation, with the desire to belong suddenly superseding everything else about which they claimed to care. Consider this well-acted and disturbing film to be an example of the horror of everyday life.

First broadcast in 1981, The Wave stars Bruce Davison as Ben Ross, a high school social studies teacher who conducts a social experiment.

Frustrated by the fact that he can’t answer his students questions of how the German people could have allowed the Holocaust to occur, Ben decides to teach his students a lesson. He starts by introducing a bunch of seemingly arbitrary rules to his classroom, concerning the proper way for students to sit at their desks and to address the teacher. Ben is somewhat surprised to see how quickly his students adapt to the new rules, even taking pleasure in showing how quickly and efficiently they can follow orders. The next day, Ben tells his students that they are now members of The Wave, a national youth organization with membership cards and a secret salute.

And that is when all Hell breaks loose. Ben only meant to show his students what it’s like to be a member of a mass movement but the students take The Wave far more seriously than Ben was expecting. Soon, other students are joining The Wave. When the popular football players announce that they are a part of The Wave, others are quick to flock to the organization. The formerly likable David turns into a fanatic about bringing people into the organization. Robert, a formerly unpopular student, revels in his new job of reporting anyone who deviates from the rules of The Wave. When a student reporter writes an article that is critical of the organization, she and the school paper are targeted. Has Ben’s social experiment spiraled out of control?

42 years after it was originally produced, The Wave remains a powerful and sobering look at how people can be manipulated into doing things as a mob that they would never do as an individual. If anything, the film feels more relevant today than it probably did in 1981. The character of Robert, in particular, is a familiar one. He’s someone with no self-esteem who latches onto a movement and finds his identity by taking down others and accusing them of failing to follow the rules. One can find people like Robert all over social media, searching through old posts for any example of wrongthink that they can broadcast all through their social world. It’s tempting to smirk at how quickly the members of The Wave sacrificed their freedom and their ability to think for themselves but it’s no different from what we see happening in the real world every day. (Indeed, if the film had been made just two or three years ago, The Wave would probably be the people policing whether or not the rest of us were observing quarantine and wearing our facemasks correctly.) People like to feel that they belong to something, even if that means sacrificing their humanity in the process.

Featuring a good performance from Bruce Davison as the well-meaning teacher who is both fascinated and terrified by the experiment that he’s set in motion, The Wave can be viewed below: