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Valley of the Wolves: Or art deeply mired
in the Lexicon of Bigotry
3.3.2006
By Sabah Salih
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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.
www.kurdistanobserver.com
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