إبراهيم
20-04-2009, 11:36 PM
Dr. Hanan Al-Ghafari
PhD in English and Comparative Studies/ Leeds University
Associate Professor/ Damascus University
Ottoman Occupation is Back to Arabs in the Form of Turkish Soap Opera
Current Turkish soap operas basically appeal to a non-intellectual section of Arab societies, including children, adolescents and commoners. Their favorable reception by unenlightened viewers is, ironically speaking, an indication of their blemishes, for a close study of the nature of the audience reveals that it lacks professional criticism and would, therefore, quickly and indiscriminately accept anything that comes in the way. The average spectator reception is conditioned by many factors that can be grouped here into one representative factor, ****ly obedience, which – consolidated during ages of colonialism, religious manipulation and other repressive events – molds society into a uniform collectivity of consenting citizens whose function in the machinery of life is more receptive than creative.
It is only in this con**** that we can comprehend the phenomenon of Turkish soap operas. Any credit given on the basis of popularity, appeal and audience response is often of doubtful validity not only because the response so unsophisticated as to be inarticulate, but also because it often stems from a point of ignorance and bad taste. The Egyptian writer Tawfiq Al-Hakim disregards average spectator's opinion of his plays as "worthless", and Yousif Idris admits that his understanding of the audience's psychology and mentality prompts him to make concessions in order to reach a wide public (without this affecting the artistic qualities of his plays). In the light of the above, Turkish ****** writers/producers and Arab audiences are, in fact, entangled in a self-fulfilling- prophecy relationship.
Turkish episodes manifest all the features of the early nineteenth-century melodramas that appealed to a Victorian audience: black villains, too-good-to-be-true heroes and heroines, violence, seduction, murder, conventional moralizing, sentimentality and sensationalism. The lengthy episodes can easily be summed up into one plot that is deliberately extended , or one idea that is monotonously exhausted until it is drained of any significance. The far-fetched and naïve plots often suffer from oversimplification, exaggerations, and moralizing. Repetitions and slow tempo not only triumph over the desperate attempt to create suspense but also cover up for the lack of ideas, serving no purpose other than killing the time of a lazy audience. The exaggerated emotions and events are expressed through rhetorical speeches, crude surprises and coincidences, together with improbably and superficially drawn and stereotyped characters with no psychological depth. Of this type of melodrama, Emile Zola (who is supposed to have given birth to the Naturalistic philosophy) once wrote in the preface to Therese Raquin:
Melodrama, that middle class offspring of the romantic drama, is even more dead and no one wants it anymore. Its false sentimentality, its complication of stolen children, recovered ********s, its brazen improbabilities, have all brought it into such scorn that our attempt to revive it would be greeted with laughter.
The damage of Turkish soap operas becomes more obvious when we examine how they promote and reinforce unhealthy mental patterns and dysfunctional strategies in the viewers. Sick-minded and mentally disturbed characters, who in reality need psychotherapy, are sometimes presented as "carriers of great ideas". Unhealthy patterns of behavior, that would in real life be avoided by healthy-minded individuals, are presented as the norm and the right path to be followed. Briefly, speaking, such episodes are written by unenlightened ******-writers for unenlightened viewers. (Misery loves company). What has so far saved Turkish soap operas from demise, or from becoming a term of abuse, is the unquestionably distinguished technical aspect of film production: camera work, cinematography, editing, lighting, ****** supervising, film continuity, or, generally speaking, the aesthetics of the screen, including the skills of attractive actors and actresses.
When we compare Turkish soap operas with Syrian soap operas we find that Turkish directors and producers' mastery of their craft has obviously been aided by a richer production environment than the one available for directors and producers in Syria. Although Turkish soap operas surpass their *****alent Syrian soap operas as far as the technical aspect is concerned, they come close to Syrian operas in so many ways, especially when we know that both derive their existence and survival from the ignorance of an audience that is hostile to reading, that is averse to libraries and bookstores and that is, therefore, prepared to swallow any bitter tablets disguised as medication, and sold mainly for commercial purposes. An example of a Syrian soap opera is the popular 30-episode-drama (Bab al-Hara) which, in the **** of tradition and romance, revives and reinforces a remote oppressive and repressive past that was somehow responsible for the backwardness of the Arabs. However, more serious realistic television series have recently found their way to the Syrian screen, such as Lail wa Rijal, for example, which (instead of falsely glorifying an idealized past) exposes the abuse of religion at the hands of quacks and hypocrites who thrive upon the naivety of and blind faith commoners, and objectively shows characters attempting to come to terms with a relentlessly changing environment, through sophisticated experimental modes of a high artistic quality.
In terms of some story-lines and character types, there might be slight similarities between Turkish soap operas and classical Arabic literature: the poor villager who is married off to a rich man, or is prevented from marrying the man she loves - further examples can be found in the novels of the Egyptian writers Naguib Mahfouz and Ihsan Abdel-Qudud. However, the treatment of such themes by those authors is actually incomparable with that in soap operas. In fact, the stories of Turkish soap operas are not familiar to Muslims, nor to Syrians, for that matter: Young women sleeping with boy friends, women falling pregnant before marriage, illegitimate children attending their parents' wedding, married men keeping mistresses, married women cheating husbands, young women leaving parents' houses to live with boyfriends, two women sharing the love of one man, two men sharing the love of one woman, mothers leaving husbands and children to escape with lovers, pregnant women being uncertain about the identity of the father. Such stories are not only uncommon in classical Arabic literature but do not occur in real life in Arab societies either - when they do, they are often condemned or kept hidden from the public eye. Therefore, the popularity of Turkish soap operas does not emerge from their "familiarity" but from their ability to arouse excitement in the imagination of a helpless, hopeless audience that has turned into a puppet in the hands of any**** who appears to offer some taste of hope or freedom - even if this is mixed with a bitter and poisonous drink.
Such a phenomenon in the media, i.e, promoting bad taste as entertainment, is not peculiar to Turkey or to Syria, but is actually world wide. This is succinctly captured by Ekhart Tolle, in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose when he writes:
If you were not familiar with our contemporary civilization, if you had come here from another age or another planet, one of the things that would amaze you is that millions of people love and pay money to watch humans kill and inflict pain on each other and call it "entertainment"…There is an entire industry, a large part of which fuels the human addiction to unhappiness. People obviously watch those films because they want to feel bad. What is it in humans that loves to feel bad and calls it good? The pain-****, of course. A large part of the entertainment industry caters to it. So, in addition to reactivity, negative thinking, and personal drama, the pain-**** also renews itself vicariously through the cinema and television screen. Pain-bodies write and produce these films, and pain-bodies pay to watch them. (A New Earth, p.153)
According to Tolle, the pain-**** is the accumulation of old emotional pain that humans carry each in his/her energy field because of the human tendency to perpetuate old emotion. "This pain lives in the collective psyche of humanity and is being added to on daily basis, as you verify when you watch the news tonight or look at the drama in people's relationships." Therefore, a profound transformation of human consciousness has become a matter of urgency. Freedom from enslavement to pain-**** can only happen upon entering an enlightened state of consciousness and sustaining it in everyday life. Ekhart Tolle explains in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment:
Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being "at one" and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested – at one with Being. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking. What an incredible liberation this is!
Certainly, an audience experiencing such an enlightened state would find something more meaningful and purposeful to do than to watch Turkish soap operas!
PhD in English and Comparative Studies/ Leeds University
Associate Professor/ Damascus University
Ottoman Occupation is Back to Arabs in the Form of Turkish Soap Opera
Current Turkish soap operas basically appeal to a non-intellectual section of Arab societies, including children, adolescents and commoners. Their favorable reception by unenlightened viewers is, ironically speaking, an indication of their blemishes, for a close study of the nature of the audience reveals that it lacks professional criticism and would, therefore, quickly and indiscriminately accept anything that comes in the way. The average spectator reception is conditioned by many factors that can be grouped here into one representative factor, ****ly obedience, which – consolidated during ages of colonialism, religious manipulation and other repressive events – molds society into a uniform collectivity of consenting citizens whose function in the machinery of life is more receptive than creative.
It is only in this con**** that we can comprehend the phenomenon of Turkish soap operas. Any credit given on the basis of popularity, appeal and audience response is often of doubtful validity not only because the response so unsophisticated as to be inarticulate, but also because it often stems from a point of ignorance and bad taste. The Egyptian writer Tawfiq Al-Hakim disregards average spectator's opinion of his plays as "worthless", and Yousif Idris admits that his understanding of the audience's psychology and mentality prompts him to make concessions in order to reach a wide public (without this affecting the artistic qualities of his plays). In the light of the above, Turkish ****** writers/producers and Arab audiences are, in fact, entangled in a self-fulfilling- prophecy relationship.
Turkish episodes manifest all the features of the early nineteenth-century melodramas that appealed to a Victorian audience: black villains, too-good-to-be-true heroes and heroines, violence, seduction, murder, conventional moralizing, sentimentality and sensationalism. The lengthy episodes can easily be summed up into one plot that is deliberately extended , or one idea that is monotonously exhausted until it is drained of any significance. The far-fetched and naïve plots often suffer from oversimplification, exaggerations, and moralizing. Repetitions and slow tempo not only triumph over the desperate attempt to create suspense but also cover up for the lack of ideas, serving no purpose other than killing the time of a lazy audience. The exaggerated emotions and events are expressed through rhetorical speeches, crude surprises and coincidences, together with improbably and superficially drawn and stereotyped characters with no psychological depth. Of this type of melodrama, Emile Zola (who is supposed to have given birth to the Naturalistic philosophy) once wrote in the preface to Therese Raquin:
Melodrama, that middle class offspring of the romantic drama, is even more dead and no one wants it anymore. Its false sentimentality, its complication of stolen children, recovered ********s, its brazen improbabilities, have all brought it into such scorn that our attempt to revive it would be greeted with laughter.
The damage of Turkish soap operas becomes more obvious when we examine how they promote and reinforce unhealthy mental patterns and dysfunctional strategies in the viewers. Sick-minded and mentally disturbed characters, who in reality need psychotherapy, are sometimes presented as "carriers of great ideas". Unhealthy patterns of behavior, that would in real life be avoided by healthy-minded individuals, are presented as the norm and the right path to be followed. Briefly, speaking, such episodes are written by unenlightened ******-writers for unenlightened viewers. (Misery loves company). What has so far saved Turkish soap operas from demise, or from becoming a term of abuse, is the unquestionably distinguished technical aspect of film production: camera work, cinematography, editing, lighting, ****** supervising, film continuity, or, generally speaking, the aesthetics of the screen, including the skills of attractive actors and actresses.
When we compare Turkish soap operas with Syrian soap operas we find that Turkish directors and producers' mastery of their craft has obviously been aided by a richer production environment than the one available for directors and producers in Syria. Although Turkish soap operas surpass their *****alent Syrian soap operas as far as the technical aspect is concerned, they come close to Syrian operas in so many ways, especially when we know that both derive their existence and survival from the ignorance of an audience that is hostile to reading, that is averse to libraries and bookstores and that is, therefore, prepared to swallow any bitter tablets disguised as medication, and sold mainly for commercial purposes. An example of a Syrian soap opera is the popular 30-episode-drama (Bab al-Hara) which, in the **** of tradition and romance, revives and reinforces a remote oppressive and repressive past that was somehow responsible for the backwardness of the Arabs. However, more serious realistic television series have recently found their way to the Syrian screen, such as Lail wa Rijal, for example, which (instead of falsely glorifying an idealized past) exposes the abuse of religion at the hands of quacks and hypocrites who thrive upon the naivety of and blind faith commoners, and objectively shows characters attempting to come to terms with a relentlessly changing environment, through sophisticated experimental modes of a high artistic quality.
In terms of some story-lines and character types, there might be slight similarities between Turkish soap operas and classical Arabic literature: the poor villager who is married off to a rich man, or is prevented from marrying the man she loves - further examples can be found in the novels of the Egyptian writers Naguib Mahfouz and Ihsan Abdel-Qudud. However, the treatment of such themes by those authors is actually incomparable with that in soap operas. In fact, the stories of Turkish soap operas are not familiar to Muslims, nor to Syrians, for that matter: Young women sleeping with boy friends, women falling pregnant before marriage, illegitimate children attending their parents' wedding, married men keeping mistresses, married women cheating husbands, young women leaving parents' houses to live with boyfriends, two women sharing the love of one man, two men sharing the love of one woman, mothers leaving husbands and children to escape with lovers, pregnant women being uncertain about the identity of the father. Such stories are not only uncommon in classical Arabic literature but do not occur in real life in Arab societies either - when they do, they are often condemned or kept hidden from the public eye. Therefore, the popularity of Turkish soap operas does not emerge from their "familiarity" but from their ability to arouse excitement in the imagination of a helpless, hopeless audience that has turned into a puppet in the hands of any**** who appears to offer some taste of hope or freedom - even if this is mixed with a bitter and poisonous drink.
Such a phenomenon in the media, i.e, promoting bad taste as entertainment, is not peculiar to Turkey or to Syria, but is actually world wide. This is succinctly captured by Ekhart Tolle, in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose when he writes:
If you were not familiar with our contemporary civilization, if you had come here from another age or another planet, one of the things that would amaze you is that millions of people love and pay money to watch humans kill and inflict pain on each other and call it "entertainment"…There is an entire industry, a large part of which fuels the human addiction to unhappiness. People obviously watch those films because they want to feel bad. What is it in humans that loves to feel bad and calls it good? The pain-****, of course. A large part of the entertainment industry caters to it. So, in addition to reactivity, negative thinking, and personal drama, the pain-**** also renews itself vicariously through the cinema and television screen. Pain-bodies write and produce these films, and pain-bodies pay to watch them. (A New Earth, p.153)
According to Tolle, the pain-**** is the accumulation of old emotional pain that humans carry each in his/her energy field because of the human tendency to perpetuate old emotion. "This pain lives in the collective psyche of humanity and is being added to on daily basis, as you verify when you watch the news tonight or look at the drama in people's relationships." Therefore, a profound transformation of human consciousness has become a matter of urgency. Freedom from enslavement to pain-**** can only happen upon entering an enlightened state of consciousness and sustaining it in everyday life. Ekhart Tolle explains in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment:
Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being "at one" and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested – at one with Being. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking. What an incredible liberation this is!
Certainly, an audience experiencing such an enlightened state would find something more meaningful and purposeful to do than to watch Turkish soap operas!