Televisual repatriation:
an analysis of Börü (2018)
or how to repatriate your
military post-coup
On a Turkish Airlines flight from Boston to Istanbul, I watched a young couple from the UAE watch the Turkish Radio and Television Association (TRT) juggernaut and national favorite Diriliş Ertuğrul.[1] [open endnotes in new window] Like myself, they too were using Istanbul and, therefore, THY as a bridge between the two worlds they inhabit—the proverbial East and West. When they inevitably noticed my unabashed voyeurism, we got to talking and struck up a conversation about the local reception of some of their other favorite Turkish dizis. They could not fathom how Muhteşem Yüzyıl[2] had not gotten the same accolades as Diriliş Ertuğrul. After all, it was the first to introduce this young couple to the dizi universe. This discrepancy in local and transnational reception, transnational success, and the visual rhetoric of populist politics I had just identified for them had stunned them. But Muhteşem Yüzyıl was so well made, so good. In fact, it was just as good as Ertuğrul. They were just as stunned to hear that Turkish Airlines had removed Muhteşem Yüzyıl from its media database. They both looked distraught. I assured them that there were more than enough episodes of Ertuğrul to last them the twelve-hour flight. They were greatly relieved.
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| Suleiman the Magnificent with main love-interest Hürrem Sultan. | Ertuğrul and his love interest Halime Hatun. |
Given the increasing popularity of the dizi as a genre with transnational recognition and influence, this essay is interested in what can be learned by foregrounding a dizi’s local background. In fact, the dizi much like its other media counterparts straddles the local and the transnational stage. I argue that by taking television itself as a medium that flows and makes flows, a localized understanding of the dizi reveals its bifurcated nature, simultaneously mediating cultural differences and nationalistic tensions. As audiences, we find dizis so increasingly alluring precisely because the shows are not simply received but enacted in their local context. In short: what is presented to audiences “as history” is the same political imaginary the dizi reflects back to its audience. To demonstrate this, this essay uses the 2018 limited-series Börü[3]as a textual example of how the dizi’s local circulation and reception in the transnational works to ideologically re-patriate the Turkish military into societal consciousness in the aftermath of the July 15th crisis.[4] Ultimately, I argue that the series narrative and aesthetic choices realign the figure of the soldier-hero in relation to AKP politics.
As such, centering the soldier-hero figure, firstly locates the foundation of the Turkish Republic’s narrative of success—and therefore legitimacy—as reliant on the success of this figuration. Founded by a singular mythologized soldier-hero, the Turkish Republic’s rhetoric codes national heroism and “nation-building” as military. This revisionist narrative subsumes centuries-long political tensions within the region and then the Republic under the blanket and singular term of “Turk.” More specifically, how does a figure such as the soldier-hero regain its exalted status in the aftermath of a failed coup? Born from within a desire to construct a unilateral locality, the soldier-hero informs national rhetoric and encodes and recodes hegemonic citizenry, defining the margins of normative citizenship in Turkish civil society. As such, the soldier-hero figuration is an analytical device that complicates reading cinema and television in the contemporary media landscape. I am most interested in the heuristic possibilities of this figure, particularly as it relates to the changing landscape of Turkish politics and Turkish television, and what this can say about the broader relationship between reception and ‘global’ and ‘local’ television industries.
Televising the soldier-hero: a nexus for Turkification
As Wazhmah Osman argues in the conclusion of her book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars, the mending of a broken or collapsed nation, to use the official language, “nation-building” and “reconstruction”—can happen only via a “mass venue for healing and purging, remembering and forgetting, debating and imagining. For that, there is no better—or worse—medium than television.”[5] What Osman argues is the “push and pull between national and ethnic, internal and external allegiances” in Afghan television highlights a crucial connection between broadcast television networks and their respective, and often outright political associations.[6]
In the Turkish context, on-screen representations of exemplary or even everyday Turkish citizenship are similarly rooted in a nostalgic reconstruction of national history. This notion of an inherent 'Turkish' sentiment binds national productions to a localized visual language. This narrative grounding remains present across broadcast and ‘quality’ (often implied as SVOD) television. Much like other art forms, Turkish cinema and television have worked in tandem with “a thematic emphasis on type and typology instead of overt characterization."[7] Strategically selected from the nation’s cultural memory, the heroism seen in the hyper-masculine heroes of Turkish folklore present a profile for a militarized Turkish masculinity. Military film historian Hilmi Maktav argues that one example of this relation can be seen in famous director Muhsin Ertuğrul’s “War of Revolution films” made in the late 1940s. Arguably stronger when juxtaposed with early Republic era archival footage, the soldier hero became the epitome of the Yeşilçam soldier in the 1950s.[8]
Although Yeşilçam cinema would go on to make many “indirect” films about the military, even in genre films, militarism and the military were always valorized and aligned with strength, imbuing protagonists with traits such as honor, pride, and bravery. Narratives that relied on themes such as leaving, dying, and return (militarized acts in a nation with mandatory military conscription), naturalized service as a part of Turkish life, and a rite of passage into manhood. As the popular adage goes, “Every Turkish man is born a soldier.” Regardless of political affiliation, changing historical contexts, and times, the nation's creation myth has not been separated from the figure of the soldier-hero. In the Turkish context this myth is further contingent on the singular excellence of the soldier-hero, the lone-wolf, the father of all the Turks, or the Reis.[9]
While the term soldier-hero itself may be an oxymoron, its dual nature allows for constructing a narrative of success regarding the foundation of the Republic. Born from within a desire to build a unilateral Turkishness, the soldier-hero informs or defines ideal Turkish citizenship. Turkishness assumes filial loyalty on behalf of all citizens. This is first and foremost implied through the interchangeability of the word “er" as soldier or man.[10] The word er as a soldier[11] is derived from the Ottoman Turkish phrase “adam kişi”—a man in both personhood and configuration. The term was adopted as a low-ranking soldier in the aftermath of WWI. Similarly, the root word er implies unity, one that is whole. The words here not only imply a military masculinity but one that is representative of complete personhood as a result.
On-screen, these products of mythic and historical masculinities—heroes based in folklore and collective myth such as Malkoçoğlu, Battal Gazi, and Tarkan—indicate a more significant tendency of militarizing onscreen masculinities.[12] In this context, we can argue that “the strongest of military ideologies are reworked into historical fantasies, and re-introduced into society” through its construction.[13] Coded as serial and typified, these figures suggest an almost militarized understanding of masculinity that is filtered through national ideology. The heroes may change but the narrative remains the same. Repeatedly, Yeşilçam films present us with a male hero from Central Asia, one that fights wars that have never existed, defeating morally corrupt (and ethnically “Other”), figures such as Byzantine, Macedonian and Chinese armies, returning to their hometowns victorious. The need to protect the nation at all costs is reiterated.
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| Poster for Battal Gazi (Atıf Yılmaz, 1970). Later, it became a popularized series of films through the 1970s. | Promotional poster for Kartal Tibet’s 1973 Tarkan. |
Regardless, a dutiful soldier of the Turkish nation can always be seen promising that they will not rest until “the swamp” has been drained.”[14] In her extensive work on Turkish police procedural series and global genres, Ayse Kesirli Ünür correlates the history of Turkish television broadcasting with that of the national history of Turkey.[15] By doing so, Ünür bridges the nation and its cultural productions and highlights a relationship between what she refers to as “the foundational components of Turkish national identity” and “programming decisions made across different eras of Turkish media production.”[16] Ünür further posits that private TV channels originally “intended to challenge the taboos of republican ideals of national identity” and designed the contents of their programs accordingly. However:
“[To] address as many people as possible and build beneficial business relations with governments in power, private TV channels tended towards reproducing and disseminating dominant nationalist discourses. Without hesitating to shape public opinion or cause controversies, they contributed to accelerating nationalism in Turkey. They offered a new televisual system, interwoven with commercial interests and hegemonic national symbols.”[17]
Inspired by “the implicit and banal markers of ‘Turkishness,’” Turkish television adopted a set of textual and stylistic national elements, specified by Ünür as “the reproduction of Turkishness as a supranational identity, the representation of Islamic identities and practices, the account on public morality, and the depiction of class dynamics as well as family and neighborhood values.”[18] With the rise of AKP (aka JDP Justice and Development Party) in 2002, “the newly established government vigorously appropriated this historical legacy with certain twists.”[19] This rhetorical move inadvertently re-orients the Turkish national narrative, blending “neo-Ottomanist, Islamic and neoliberal nationalist values with some residual attributes of official Turkish nationalism.”[20] By bringing these themes to the forefront, a new national stereotype was created, one that was predicated on the glorification of “neoliberal ideas and consumer culture.”[21]
Steeped within what Nezih Erdoğan terms "mimicry beyond innocent inspiration," Yeşilçam films self-consciously appropriated elements from U.S. popular culture, often taking characters, plots, and music and re-contextualizing them within films produced in the local industry.[22] I argue that we can read this co-option of these aesthetics in tandem with the visual and often generic excess of the Turkish film industry as now characteristic of the Turkish dizi. Out of the five major channels in Turkey, each one has a “zeitgeist-relevant” show in which there is a constant fight against an internal enemy or a foreign invader. It is hard not to think of the” scorpion traps” alluded to in a 2017 AKP referendum video.[23] Similar rhetoric can be found in nearly all episodes of the six-part limited series Börü.
Börü is set in the months leading up to the night of July 15th, 2016. By re-mediating contemporary historical events through the POV of its Special Forces members, this rendition of the dizi as nation-building/branding remains diligently in conversation with other state-supported genre series. What makes Börü unique is its repatriation of the soldier-hero through re-imagining contemporary history—a discursive act re-affirming the state-sanctioned narrative of historical events by re-creating them merely a few years later. Exported to Netflix, which I argue can be read as a compromise between the Turkish State and Netflix—for the sake of access to a broader audience base than ever before—Börü both repatriates the Turkish soldier on the transnational stage while subtly alluding to what this new paramilitary reality will look like.
