KurdistanObserver.com

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.