Love and yearning in los barrios
There are no prizes for guessing which country tops the charts in worldwide TV distribution.
But it may come as a surprise to know that no.2 in the global list is Turkey.
Over the past couple of decades they’ve been slowly rising to global pre-eminence in TV with their very own brand of series, known as dizi. Dizi are emphatically not soap operas; they’re a genre with their own themes and style. Yes, like the best Brazilian telenovelas, there are love triangles (and in some cases, veritable love polygons), but it’s all far more nuanced than that. They deal with themes of yearning, conflict and duty. They’re often fantastically long, with scores of episodes, each of two hours or more.
And they’re phenomenally popular, from Latin America to the sub-continent to the Middle East. We westerners tend to believe we’re the only ones spreading our culture around the globe through our TV and film output. But Fatima Bhutto, author of a fantastic new book, New Kings of the World paints an altogether different picture. Her work explores the profound global resonance of these stories, and other creative outputs like Bollywood and K-Pop, to new, unexpected audiences far beyond their home countries.
At the heart of it all is urbanisation. In 2008, the world’s population became, for the first time, more urban than rural; and the great migration continues. In 2015, 1 billion left their rural homes to look for a better life in the city. Bhutto brings thought-provoking insights into the human stories behind the demography. “The psychological disorientation caused by these shifts cannot be underestimated. The journey from tradition to modernity is neither inevitable or painless. […] It is a geography without anchors, full of sexual and material deprivations, injustices and inequalities […] Men find ostensibly liberated women difficult to take and are humiliated by the alien codes of desire that determine romance in the metropolis. Women are vulnerable, deprived of protection and easily preyed upon and exploited by the rich and powerful. […] How does one thrive in a modern, competitive environment while still retaining traditional values? ”
The exuberantly promiscuous ladies of Sex and the City and the sarcastic room-mates of Friends have little resonance, she reckons, to these latecomers to modernity; rather, it’s the new cultural outputs like dizi that offer temporary but comforting resolutions to the human conflicts experienced in these new, burgeoning urban contexts all around the globe.
Dizi almost all share a set of tropes: the centre of drama is the family, the heartthrob has had his heart broken and is tragically closed to love, and – intriguingly in our urbanising world – an outsider will always journey into a socioeconomic setting that is the polar opposite of their own. Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century),with 500m viewers worldwide and exported to over 100 countries, was the trailblazer. It featured the 16thCentury Sultan Suleiman’s love affair with a concubine from his harem. Hurrem, the Ukrainian village girl enslaved by the marauding Tartars and sold across the Black Sea to the Ottoman empire to be a concubine, is one such outsider. Her odyssey sees her, eventually, rise to be queen. Halit Ergenç, who plays the Sultan, explains the declining relevance of American TV to these new global export markets: US shows entertain yet “They don’t touch the feelings that make us human.”
A later global dizi blockbuster, Fatmagül features a country girl who faces every possible travail of urban life – she endures a forced marriage, negotiates tense family relations and struggles against the violent and suffocating power of the rich. By the story’s conclusion – and her triumph – tradition is left intact, in ways that must surely sit uneasily with Western audiences. (See this synopsis.) These stories are, of course, also about love and yearning, but their heroes always have values. The grand themes are of romance, not sex; of desire, not the fulfillment of the desire. It’s all very slow burn. The couple in Fatmagül don’t kiss until the 58th episode.
There are surely lessons here. The world’s new urbanites find themselves thrust into urban modernity. And yet it would be a mistake to assume that the transition ineluctibly produces aspirations to Western values.
Connecting with the next billion requires, more than ever, empathy with the values and traditions that continue to shape their lives and desires.