pop culture cuts both ways

That pop culture thing I was talking about has inherent dangers.

In Slate, Richard Morgan remarks on “a new wave of anti-American pop culture.” He focuses on one Turkish film, Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, “a military thriller about an elite Turkish intelligence officer who near-single-handedly smites a group of reckless U.S. soldiers who make Abu Ghraib look like a Sunday picnic.”

As the flick takes a sharp turn toward fiction, one of the 11 Turks in the 2003 debacle commits suicide to regain his warrior honor. His suicide note is sent to Polat Alemdar, the Turkish intelligence officer who stars in the Valley of the Wolves television show. Alemdar heads to Iraq to find U.S. Special Forces Cmdr. Sam William Marshall (played by Billy Zane), who, in his role as a self-described “peacekeeper of God,” is busy leading a massacre of machine-gun fire on unsuspecting civilians at an Iraqi wedding. Survivors are sent to a facility where a Jewish-American doctor (played by Gary Busey) pulls out human hearts with Mengelian apathy and sells them to aristocrats in London, New York, and Tel Aviv. When one of the American soldiers expresses concern that a truckful of Iraqi civilians are packed in too tight to breathe, a fellow soldier stops the car and bullet-soaks the trailer and its human cargo. “I was making sure they could breathe,” he quips, pointing to the holes in the truck.

Sounds like Rambo. Here’s how one of the screenwriters describes the context—it’s payback:

“For years, we, the people of this area, Turks, Arabs, Iranians, Russians, or people further away, such as Vietnamese and Chinese, were always characterized as bad in Hollywood movies,” Bahadir Ozdener, one of the writers for Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, told me. “We are accustomed to this, we do not show any social reactions to this, and we just watch them as movies and place them in our movie archives. We think that democratic societies should get accustomed to being shown as bad people because of what they have done.”

On the other hand, as Charles Paul Freund reminded us when a reality TV war broke out in the Middle East in the summer of 2003 (over the contestants on the show Superstar), the overall effect of pop culture is to lower the temperature under simmering conflicts.

as fan-based cultural identity grows in the region, it expresses itself in terms of the area’s traditional nationalist or sectarian divisions, engendering group enmity and suspicion. The effect of commercial culture, however, is to dissipate conflict by lowering the stakes. Modernist identities (drawing on such influences as fandom) are fluid and changeable; the resulting communities of interest are numerous and temporary.