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Posted by Ali Asker on 09/26/88 11:41
Valley of the Wolves: Or Art Deeply Mired in the Lexicon of Bigotry
By: Sabah Salih
April 2, 2006
A political culture that produces and consumes a movie like Valley of the
Wolves is still a long way from realizing how deeply mired its lexicon is in
bigotry.
Movies, like advertising, are essentially social texts. Advertising does
not just sell a product; it also promotes a style of living. Movies,
likewise, do not just tell a story; they also play an important role in
shaping a national identity. Like advertising, they do so through a process
of promotion and demotion, or what Robert Scholes calls in The Protocols of
Reading "cultural reinforcement," that is, reassuring the viewers that the
values and beliefs they hold are superior to those held by others. For
movies, as for advertising, there is also the question of timing, or the
historical moment: both tend to respond to key political or social
developments in the life of a culture. Furthermore, because movies promise
to satisfy our craving for stories the way mythology did for the ancients,
we willingly allow our thinking to be saturated by them. Movies, thus,
become a big player in the way today's humans think about themselves and
their world.
For all these reasons, and also because movies can be quite good at
packaging complicated events as simple stories, movies can play a major role
in shaping and policing the national culture, especially when they operate
with an easily identifiable ideological bent. The aim of such movies is to
turn a lie into a fact, or a stereotype into a piece of coveted wisdom, or
racism into a love for one's homeland. To that end, the viewer is bombarded
with images, close-ups, and narrative bits and ends at an alarming rate.
Such is the case with the recently released Turkish movie, aggressively and
suggestively titled Valley of the Wolves. Here propaganda crudely and
nakedly masquerades as artistic material. This much is given to us right
from the start by the title and then reinforced by the plot. The word
"wolf" has been one of the key terms of self-definition in the racist
vocabulary of Turkish ultra-nationalism. The wolf's appeal to this
nationalism stems from the beast's legendary ability for strength, stamina,
and ruthlessness; this is exactly how this nationalism sees and promotes
itself, and it is exactly with opposite terms that this nationalism defines
and demotes its opponents: in this case, the Kurds, the Jews, and the
Americans. By demonizing these three, the movie confirms for its Turkish
viewers the righteousness of the racist belief implanted into their heads by
years and years of ideological indoctrination at school, at home, and at the
workplace, namely, that to be a Turk is to be racially superior to others.
For the movie, the Kurds are the easiest of the three to be trashed. One
reason is because the Kurds traditionally have had little power to define
themselves by themselves; their enemies have done that for them in order to
damage them, of course. Another is because Kurdish nationalism has been
resolute in refusing to bow down to the Turkish state's notion of
Turkishness as a national ideology. Still another is because Turkish
nationalism has yet to even admit the word Kurdistan into its vocabulary.
In other words, within the Turkish national discourse the green light to say
and believe in some of the most loathsome things about the Kurd is already
there. As one fellow student years ago ruefully told me, "Growing up in
Turkey as a Turk, it never occurred to me, even when I was in college, to
stop and examine my racist thoughts about the Kurd; I grew up believing,
like every one else, that the Kurd was really subhuman. Sadly, the
situation is not all that different today."
In its portrayal of the Kurd, therefore, the movie takes its cue from the
storehouse of the national culture itself. The main reason why the Turks
continue to be so strongly opposed to the American project in Iraq is
because they are painfully aware that, whatever the outcome, Kurdistan in
the end will be its biggest beneficiary. That this was not in the planning
makes little difference to them. They view every American-Kurdish handshake
as a move against them, and see in the dramatic rise of Southern Kurdistan
as the mother of all conspiracies against them. Then came the shocking blow
to their national pride early in the war when Turkish paratroopers were
shown on television being arrested and humiliated by American troops near
Slemani with the Kurds looking on in joyful disbelief.
So, not surprisingly, in trying to erase this national dishonor, Valley of
the Wolves takes its revenge first and foremost on Kurdistan. The method of
attack is the standard one, portraying the legitimate struggle of an
oppressed people against their oppressors as a mercenary act. But the movie
goes much further than just insulting the Kurd. The movie strips the Kurd of
nationhood by imposing an embargo on its cultural and political narrative.
The only approved Kurdish voice in the movie is the one certified to be
politically acceptable by the Turks. Trashing the Kurd thus becomes the Turk's
way of feeling good about himself and is one reason for the movie's huge
popularity at home and among the two-million-plus Turks living in Germany.
The movie, in short, gives voice to an anti-Kurd feeling already embedded in
the culture, and in doing so the movie becomes both the endorser and the
enforcer of that feeling. Is it any wonder then that even many in the
Turkish political and military hierarchy have spoken approvingly of the
movie?
In targeting America for abuse, the movie, likewise, taps into the
anti-American feeling that has been brewing and intensifying in the country
by the day since the Iraq invasion. Here too the movie works with the same
set of stereotypes making the rounds all over the world: Americans are
arrogant, Americans are stupid, Americans want to take over the world,
America is anti-Muslim, America is anti-Europe. You know the rest. Such
group thinking or stereotypes are, of course, the most common forms of
thinking. Their simplicity makes them very appealing to the masses and the
intellectually lazy. That is why demagogues love them; they know that such
thinking, coupled with cinematic images, can be an effective tool of
ideological manipulation, as was recently demonstrated by the Danish cartoon
portrayal of Mohammed. (The cartoons offered an opportunity for liberating
language from the tyranny of the sacred; Islamists responded with the
tyranny of fatwas and blind rage, thus confirming once again that under them
language will continue to be a prisoner.) The movie's reliance on stock
anti-American images is, therefore, calculated to have a similar effect:
turning gross simplifications, prejudice, even falsehood into a blueprint
for national thinking. But, with political Islam also lurking ominously in
the background, America's demonization will remain incomplete without the
Jew. Here, again, there is no shortage of stock images to draw upon; the
national culture endorses and openly circulates some of the most vicious
ones. They all portray the Jew as the archetypal figure of deceit and greed
responsible for everything from sucking children's blood, to the horrific
events of 9/11, to even epidemics and natural disasters.
In the end, Valley of the Wolves becomes the source of its own undoing: it
never stops drawing attention to itself as a project devoted solely to
ideological manipulation; and, as a consequence, the movie reveals a strong
bond between itself and its many Turkish viewers. What easily emerges from
this is that the movie and the people are actually of the same mind and are
nourished by the same pattern of thinking.
Dr. Sabah Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University.
http://www.kurdistanobserver.com/
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