VALLEY OF THE WOLVES
Oct 17, 2008
The story in short: a Turkish officer commits suicide after the humiliation that Americans arrest and hood his unit at the Iraqi border. His police special-forces brother (taken from a TV series in which he fights the Turkish mafia) goes to Iraq to do the same to the American officer, but instead gets embroiled in the bloody mess there. After almost all characters die, the Good wins over the Evil.
Having watched the film, the more I think of it, the more it appears to me that the film is neither of the extremes, but an almost perfect rotation of a typical Hollywood action movie into another people's viewpoint. Like a Turkish James Bond entering an American North Korea or something.
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SPOILER WARNING: IF YOU WANT TO WATCH THE FILM, DON'T READ BEYOND THE INTRO!
That the American characters (above all the local proconsul played by American Billy Zane) are evil and the Turkish characters patriotic heroes is obvious, I guess. Also the not too flattering image of (Iraqi) Kurds -- which includes crude ethnic stereotypes like a not too underhand reference to their uneducatedness -- and the martyr status of Turkomans. So far very much like Hollywood.
But then there are some scenes bordering on anti-semitism: the evil doctor of Abu Ghraib (played by American Gary Busey) had to be Jewish, the unsympathetic guests of a hotel in Iraqi Kurdistan had to include an Orthodox Jew. On the other hand, if I think back of all the suspicious-at-first-sight Arabs, Germans, Chinese, Columbians or Russians in Hollywood flicks, maybe I should take the latters' bigotry more seriously.
But parallels with Western action movies go beyond such stereotyping.
For example, the tradition that the chief evil character of the film can have a more complex character and gets to say some "uneasy truths" (even if using it as basis for some evil deed). The evil American is at the same time a Christian fundie and a cynical war-profiter, petty and not fearful of death, criticises Turkey, criticises the division of the Iraqis.
There is also the element of inserting the 'evil ones on our side who spoil our cause' as deviants stopped by the positive characters. The most positive character of the movie is a Shi'a sheikh (played by Ghassan Massoud, the Saladin of Kingdom of Heaven) who is respected by Arabs, Turkomans and Kurds alike, who gives a passionate plea against suicide bombing to a survivor of a massacre, and who saves a journalist from beheading as even the terrorists don't dare to disobey him. While the "the terrorists are Their creation" meme does appear, only as murmuring by some character, while the one suicide bomber is an Iraqi Arab (what's more an originally 'good' one, misled by vengeance -- at this point the film is surprisingly non-black-and-white).
What's more, there is also a parallel to the 'good Germans' and 'good Arabs' with whom action films try to balance their stereotyping. The local Kurdish leader doesn't want to go along with the Americans once they want to get the sheikh. In the final fight, the two Turkish companions of the main character turn out to be a bigoted Turkish Turk who'd blame everything on the Kurds, and his partner a Turkish Kurd. There is one American soldier who wants to arrest his trigger-happy colleague, but is killed.
Finally, there is also the inclusion and exaggeration of real-life atrocities. They show the arrest of Turkish border guards (it happened in 2003), a massacre at a wedding (but with guns instead of bombs), a suicide bombing of Americans with many civilian casualties, containers boxes of death for prisoners (though in reality that happened in Afghanistan), ethnic cleansing by expulsion, and the making of the Abu Ghraib photos, but add organ trade to it.
I have mixed feelings about the last -- they really showed what no Western director will dare to show with such consequence, but if that was the goal, it would have been enough without action-flick magnified add-ons. (I also had mixed feelings about the storming of the illegal immigrant detention city scene in Children of Men -- great that the Mexican director dares to show scenes reminiscent of the razing of Fallujah, but why transplanted to a fantasy Britain
