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They eerily display the values that the AKP has instilled in Turkish society: an unwavering focus on self-interest and personal enrichment, a blindness to the pain of others, and a constant contempt for anyone who seeks to live a life along ethical lines.
Over the past three decades, 22 years under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has transformed from a secular society in search of its spiritual identity into an increasingly self-confident, self-interested, and self-aggrandizing one. The old republican, Europeanizing, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Turkey has given way to what the ruling party has dubbed the “New Turkey.”
There has been no better chronicler of this transformation than Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The Turkish auteur, a longtime darling of the Cannes Film Festival, has never openly mentioned politics in his films, but taken together, his work constitutes one of the most compelling accounts available of what Turkey has become under Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).
In his films, Ceylan asks what it means to live an ethical life in today's Turkey. But his protagonists provide uncomfortable answers, suggesting that this may no longer be possible in this transformed country.
Instead, they eerily display the values that the AKP has instilled in Turkish society: an unwavering focus on self-interest and personal enrichment, a blindness to the pain of others, and a constant contempt for anyone who seeks to live a life along ethical lines.
Ceylan's debut short film, Cocoon (1995), was released a little over a year after Erdogan was elected mayor of Istanbul. A former semi-professional soccer player, Erdogan made a name for himself as mayor by cleaning up the Golden Horn canal and solving some of the city's long-standing problems: water, transportation, air pollution, and waste management.
His effectiveness on these issues provided him with enough political capital to begin a broader project of eroding Turkey’s secular foundations. The seemingly devout leader quietly banned alcohol from city-run public spaces and peppered his speeches with anti-Western messages, promising to make Turkey Islamic again.
-“Cocoon” is set in a rapidly Islamizing Turkey in the 1990s. It opens with photographs from the 1940s of a married couple, played by Ceylan’s parents. At the time, they were living in the secular, republican nation-state that Ataturk’s decades of rigorous political and cultural reforms had built.
Seen 50 years later, they seemed young and hopeful, the remnants of a culture on its last legs. Ceylan explored this shift in a four-part series. His first feature film, The Small Town (1997), tells the story of a town in the mid-1990s through the eyes of children who often delight in the death and pain of others. In one scene, a young boy flips a turtle over on its back, believing that no one is watching. The boy, in a way, foreshadows the ethos of the New Turkey: He lacks guilt or the recognition of moral failure.
Ceylan’s characters, preoccupied with self-interest and personal gain, embody the homo economicus behavioral model that spread during Turgut Ozal’s era of neoliberalism. As prime minister (1983-1989) and president (1989-1993), Ozal sought to bring Turkey into the global economy, a legacy that Erdogan inherited and radically expanded.
As Reaganism and Thatcherism swept through the United States and the United Kingdom, Ozal implemented similar reforms geared toward privatization, deregulation, and market liberalization. The measures created rapid economic growth in the short term, but came at the cost of increasing inequality and suppressing unions. It soon became clear that to succeed in this harsh economy, Turks would have to embrace extractive, profit-oriented means of making a living.
-The main tension at play in "The Small Town," and in the rest of the quartet, is between cynicism and idealism. Ceylan's nephew, Mehmet Emin Toprak, plays the role of an idealistic young man named Saffet, who dreams of leaving for Istanbul because of the widespread unemployment in rural Anatolia. In "The Clouds of May" (1999), we see Saffet learn that he has failed the college entrance exams, his only chance to leave provincial Turkey. Saffet's cousin, Muzaffer, who returns to make a film about his hometown of Çanakkale, exploits Saffet's desperation, over-promises, and broken promises to get what he wants. In Ceylan's world, dreamers like Saffet are objects to be extracted, used, and discarded by cynics who know what it takes to survive in difficult economic conditions.
-Cynics and dreamers return in Distant (2002), Ceylan’s first film set in Istanbul, where Erdogan built his networks before rising to national prominence in that year’s general elections. In Ceylan’s films, Istanbul is a metonym for the selfish heart of the New Turkey. It attracts dreamers hoping to find better job opportunities, which comes at a moral price.
-The quartet's latest film, Climates (2006), offers a glimpse into Turkey's rapidly changing cultural scene in the mid-2000s. The film's protagonist wanders through the bohemian neighborhood, along the rich, bustling streets and well-stocked bookstores, and visits the sets where his partner works in the booming television drama industry. Everywhere he goes, he is permeated by an infectious optimism and desire for democratic awakening.
At the time, Turkey was truly modernizing. The early 2000s, under Prime Minister Erdogan, were an era of individual success stories, epitomized and glamorized by cultural firsts, such as Sertab Erener, Turkey’s first Eurovision Song Contest winner (2003), and Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s first Nobel Prize laureate (2006). Famous architects and artists were plentiful. Turkey’s first modern art museum opened in 2004, in the neighborhood where Climates is located.
This burgeoning culture was largely funded and publicized by the Turkish government as part of its strategy to promote tourism. It was the New Turkey that Erdogan had promised: Broken from its foundations as a secular welfare state, the country was increasingly defined by entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency. Having a good education and strong ethical values would no longer count as they did in Ataturk’s old Turkey.
In the late 2000s, Turkey’s rapid economic growth and relative prosperity emboldened Erdogan to ignore his democratic promises and imprison his opponents. Social protests followed the high-profile “Ergenekon” trials, in which 275 people, including journalists, military officers and opposition lawmakers, were accused of membership in a clandestine secular organization.
Soon, cynicism about the integrity and values of Ataturk's old Turkey gave way to a deeper moral decay. As the state suppressed dissent, more and more people invented ways to deceive others, as well as themselves, to further legitimize and enrich their selfish lives.
-The central figure of the film “Winter Sleep” (2014), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is Aydin, a former actor who spends his days walking past ancient ruins and picking mushrooms in Cappadocia, but in private is a despot. One day, the child of the tenant he is trying to evict deliberately throws a stone at Aydin’s Land Rover, shattering the windshield. The disadvantaged boy is one of those who reveals the truth about Ceylan: equally feared and hated by the cynical Aydin for his refusal to play by Aydin’s rules. In another scene, the boy’s father throws stacks of banknotes that Aydin’s wife has given him as charity into a fire to show how little he cares about money and its power./ Adapted from “Pamphlet” by “ForeignPolicy”
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