Televisual repatriation: an analysis of Börü (2018)
0r how to repatriate your military post-coup

by Sasha Dilan Krugman

On a Turkish Airlines flight from Boston to Istanbul, I watched a young couple from the UAE watch the Turkish Radio and Television Association (TRT) juggernaut and national favorite Diriliş Ertuğrul.[1] [open endnotes in new window] Like myself, they too were using Istanbul and, therefore, THY as a bridge between the two worlds they inhabit—the proverbial East and West. When they inevitably noticed my unabashed voyeurism, we got to talking and struck up a conversation about the local reception of some of their other favorite Turkish dizis. They could not fathom how Muhteşem Yüzyıl[2] had not gotten the same accolades as Diriliş Ertuğrul. After all, it was the first to introduce this young couple to the dizi universe. This discrepancy in local and transnational reception, transnational success, and the visual rhetoric of populist politics I had just identified for them had stunned them. But Muhteşem Yüzyıl was so well made, so good. In fact, it was just as good as Ertuğrul. They were just as stunned to hear that Turkish Airlines had removed Muhteşem Yüzyıl from its media database. They both looked distraught. I assured them that there were more than enough episodes of Ertuğrul to last them the twelve-hour flight. They were greatly relieved.

Given the increasing popularity of the dizi as a genre with transnational recognition and influence, this essay is interested in what can be learned by foregrounding a dizi’s local background. In fact, the dizi much like its other media counterparts straddles the local and the transnational stage. I argue that by taking television itself as a medium that flows and makes flows, a localized understanding of the dizi reveals its bifurcated nature, simultaneously mediating cultural differences and nationalistic tensions. As audiences, we find dizis so increasingly alluring precisely because the shows are not simply received but enacted in their local context. In short: what is presented to audiences “as history” is the same political imaginary the dizi reflects back to its audience. To demonstrate this, this essay uses the 2018 limited-series Börü[3]as a textual example of how the dizi’s local circulation and reception in the transnational works to ideologically re-patriate the Turkish military into societal consciousness in the aftermath of the July 15th crisis.[4] Ultimately, I argue that the series narrative and aesthetic choices realign the figure of the soldier-hero in relation to AKP politics.

As such, centering the soldier-hero figure, firstly locates the foundation of the Turkish Republic’s narrative of success—and therefore legitimacy—as reliant on the success of this figuration. Founded by a singular mythologized soldier-hero, the Turkish Republic’s rhetoric codes national heroism and “nation-building” as military. This revisionist narrative subsumes centuries-long political tensions within the region and then the Republic under the blanket and singular term of “Turk.” More specifically, how does a figure such as the soldier-hero regain its exalted status in the aftermath of a failed coup? Born from within a desire to construct a unilateral locality, the soldier-hero informs national rhetoric and encodes and recodes hegemonic citizenry, defining the margins of normative citizenship in Turkish civil society. As such, the soldier-hero figuration is an analytical device that complicates reading cinema and television in the contemporary media landscape. I am most interested in the heuristic possibilities of this figure, particularly as it relates to the changing landscape of Turkish politics and Turkish television, and what this can say about the broader relationship between reception and ‘global’ and ‘local’ television industries.

Televising the soldier-hero: a nexus for Turkification 

As Wazhmah Osman argues in the conclusion of her book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars, the mending of a broken or collapsed nation, to use the official language, “nation-building” and “reconstruction”—can happen only via a “mass venue for healing and purging, remembering and forgetting, debating and imagining. For that, there is no better—or worse—medium than television.”[5] What Osman argues is the “push and pull between national and ethnic, internal and external allegiances” in Afghan television highlights a crucial connection between broadcast television networks and their respective, and often outright political associations.[6]

 In the Turkish context, on-screen representations of exemplary or even everyday Turkish citizenship are similarly rooted in a nostalgic reconstruction of national history. This notion of an inherent 'Turkish' sentiment binds national productions to a localized visual language. This narrative grounding remains present across broadcast and ‘quality’ (often implied as SVOD) television. Much like other art forms, Turkish cinema and television have worked in tandem with “a thematic emphasis on type and typology instead of overt characterization."[7] Strategically selected from the nation’s cultural memory, the heroism seen in the hyper-masculine heroes of Turkish folklore present a profile for a militarized Turkish masculinity. Military film historian Hilmi Maktav argues that one example of this relation can be seen in famous director Muhsin Ertuğrul’s “War of Revolution films” made in the late 1940s. Arguably stronger when juxtaposed with early Republic era archival footage, the soldier hero became the epitome of the Yeşilçam soldier in the 1950s.[8]

Although Yeşilçam cinema would go on to make many “indirect” films about the military, even in genre films, militarism and the military were always valorized and aligned with strength, imbuing protagonists with traits such as honor, pride, and bravery. Narratives that relied on themes such as leaving, dying, and return (militarized acts in a nation with mandatory military conscription), naturalized service as a part of Turkish life, and a rite of passage into manhood. As the popular adage goes, “Every Turkish man is born a soldier.” Regardless of political affiliation, changing historical contexts, and times, the nation's creation myth has not been separated from the figure of the soldier-hero. In the Turkish context this myth is further contingent on the singular excellence of the soldier-hero, the lone-wolf, the father of all the Turks, or the Reis.[9]

While the term soldier-hero itself may be an oxymoron, its dual nature allows for constructing a narrative of success regarding the foundation of the Republic. Born from within a desire to build a unilateral Turkishness, the soldier-hero informs or defines ideal Turkish citizenship. Turkishness assumes filial loyalty on behalf of all citizens. This is first and foremost implied through the interchangeability of the word “er" as soldier or man.[10] The word er as a soldier[11] is derived from the Ottoman Turkish phrase “adam kişi”—a man in both personhood and configuration. The term was adopted as a low-ranking soldier in the aftermath of WWI. Similarly, the root word er implies unity, one that is whole. The words here not only imply a military masculinity but one that is representative of complete personhood as a result. 

On-screen, these products of mythic and historical masculinities—heroes based in folklore and collective myth such as Malkoçoğlu, Battal Gazi, and Tarkan—indicate a more significant tendency of militarizing onscreen masculinities.[12] In this context, we can argue that “the strongest of military ideologies are reworked into historical fantasies, and re-introduced into society” through its construction.[13] Coded as serial and typified, these figures suggest an almost militarized understanding of masculinity that is filtered through national ideology. The heroes may change but the narrative remains the same. Repeatedly, Yeşilçam films present us with a male hero from Central Asia, one that fights wars that have never existed, defeating morally corrupt (and ethnically “Other”), figures such as Byzantine, Macedonian and Chinese armies, returning to their hometowns victorious. The need to protect the nation at all costs is reiterated.

 Regardless, a dutiful soldier of the Turkish nation can always be seen promising that they will not rest until “the swamp” has been drained.”[14] In her extensive work on Turkish police procedural series and global genres, Ayse Kesirli Ünür correlates the history of Turkish television broadcasting with that of the national history of Turkey.[15] By doing so, Ünür bridges the nation and its cultural productions and highlights a relationship between what she refers to as “the foundational components of Turkish national identity” and “programming decisions made across different eras of Turkish media production.”[16] Ünür further posits that private TV channels originally “intended to challenge the taboos of republican ideals of national identity” and designed the contents of their programs accordingly. However: 

“[To] address as many people as possible and build beneficial business relations with governments in power, private TV channels tended towards reproducing and disseminating dominant nationalist discourses. Without hesitating to shape public opinion or cause controversies, they contributed to accelerating nationalism in Turkey. They offered a new televisual system, interwoven with commercial interests and hegemonic national symbols.”[17]

Inspired by “the implicit and banal markers of ‘Turkishness,’” Turkish television adopted a set of textual and stylistic national elements, specified by Ünür as “the reproduction of Turkishness as a supranational identity, the representation of Islamic identities and practices, the account on public morality, and the depiction of class dynamics as well as family and neighborhood values.”[18] With the rise of AKP (aka JDP Justice and Development Party) in 2002, “the newly established government vigorously appropriated this historical legacy with certain twists.”[19] This rhetorical move inadvertently re-orients the Turkish national narrative, blending “neo-Ottomanist, Islamic and neoliberal nationalist values with some residual attributes of official Turkish nationalism.”[20] By bringing these themes to the forefront, a new national stereotype was created, one that was predicated on the glorification of “neoliberal ideas and consumer culture.”[21]

Steeped within what Nezih Erdoğan terms "mimicry beyond innocent inspiration," Yeşilçam films self-consciously appropriated elements from U.S. popular culture, often taking characters, plots, and music and re-contextualizing them within films produced in the local industry.[22] I argue that we can read this co-option of these aesthetics in tandem with the visual and often generic excess of the Turkish film industry as now characteristic of the Turkish dizi. Out of the five major channels in Turkey, each one has a “zeitgeist-relevant” show in which there is a constant fight against an internal enemy or a foreign invader. It is hard not to think of the” scorpion traps” alluded to in a 2017 AKP referendum video.[23] Similar rhetoric can be found in nearly all episodes of the six-part limited series Börü.

Börü is set in the months leading up to the night of July 15th, 2016. By re-mediating contemporary historical events through the POV of its Special Forces members, this rendition of the dizi as nation-building/branding remains diligently in conversation with other state-supported genre series. What makes Börü unique is its repatriation of the soldier-hero through re-imagining contemporary history—a discursive act re-affirming the state-sanctioned narrative of historical events by re-creating them merely a few years later. Exported to Netflix, which I argue can be read as a compromise between the Turkish State and Netflix—for the sake of access to a broader audience base than ever before—Börü both repatriates the Turkish soldier on the transnational stage while subtly alluding to what this new paramilitary reality will look like.

Rewriting July 15th – repatriating the soldier.

Börü wasfirst screened on Turkish broadcast television in 2018 and ran as a six-episode miniseries on Star TV. Soon after the series aired, a companion film,[24] following the team into the last hours of July 15th, was released in theatres nationwide. The series and the consequent follow-up film operate across multiple genres, such as police procedural, action, drama, and war narratives. This cross-genre narrative style is endemic to the series and echoes creator Alper Çağlar's previous works,[25] which often examine internal and external paramilitary conflicts in modern-day Turkey. Çağlar bases his re-imagination of military heroes and political turmoil on the material realities of the nation, even working with the Turkish Armed Forces to accurately depict his heroes.

In the opening sequence of Börü, we see a series of close-ups of the team having a meal together, intercut with each member in uniform and superimposed in front of explosions or flames. As the camera returns us to the dinner table, a pan gently moves across the space, lingering on a picture of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the wall before cutting to black. The team members are seemingly indiscernible from any other uniformed soldier, down to the paramilitary equipment and camouflage uniforms. What distinguishes these exceptional police officers from the military is the badge on their shoulders, which is shaped like a wolf. The team refers to confrontations with terrorist cells or conflict zones as 'er meydanı,’ a term that directly translates to 'soldiers square.' Like the military, the team's success is predicated on its members' heroism; the team is only as strong as its weakest link. Starring Murat Arkın as the titular savant detective, the series and consequent film also connect the narrative to Turkish film history. Arkın's resemblance to his late father and Turkish film legend Cüneyt Arkın—the man who saved the World, Islam, and Turkey across Turkish populist genre filmmaking from the 60s into the mid-2000s—is not lost on Turkish audiences, nor the producers with Börü 2039[26] bringing father and son full circle, and into outer space. For centuries, space has been the most transnational stage of them all. 

The intertitle that opens every episode highlights some of the critical tenets of AKP’s neo-liberal Islam and politics. The death of the police officers in the aftermath of the July 15th coup was similarly coded as holy martyrdom, much like how fallen members of Börü are coded.

“Real heroes and real events inspire this series. Some names, circumstances, and locations concerning institutions and the individuals involved have been changed. Our story is dedicated to the holy memory of every selfless national security force member who selflessly serves their nation for the love of country.”[27]

This intertitle followed by a historical quote is intercut with the introductory sequence of the series. Such religious rhetoric remains consistent throughout the episodes. Episode 4, The Neighborhood, features a close-up of Ihsan Aladağ, the now-imprisoned former director of Börü, seated in the prison’s visiting room.  Much like Osman Alan, Aladağ is one of his time's last-standing Turkish heroes, labeled as the product of a 90s meritocracy that allowed for the unit's formation. In defining the radio code for the unit—"34-50”—Aladağ notes that the numbers coincide with the 34th sura and the 50th verse from the Quran. In Aladağ’s interpretation, the verse attributes the notion of fairness to God. Aladağ continues,

“A homeland doesn’t just consist of land; it’s the people living in that land that make it so, the innocent civilians do not know what they do; they burn so “the nation lives.”

Aladağ continues to explain that Turkey itself is a dream.

"The dream of millions willing to sacrifice their lives for it, Mustafa Kemal’s dream, the modern man’s dream, Fatih Sultan Mehmet’s (Fatih the Conqueror) dream, Alp Arslan’s dream… for us to have a homeland.”

Although the extreme close-up of his face does not reveal who he is speaking to, his bridging of the past Turkic peoples with contemporary Turkish politics is part of a singular militarized history. This rhetorical move signals a long-standing “Turkish” legacy once again. In repeating the language from AKP’s 2017 Referendum ad, Aladağ aligns the politics of his team with the state.

By distinguishing the team from everyday police officers and the military, the series places the team in an exceptional position of heroism. Over and over, their impenetrability by corrupt government officials and their determining rank based on prowess on the field are highlighted. They are often depicted in conjunction with police and military officers, even the maroon beret soldiers—the Turkish equivalent of the U.S. Navy Seals—yet the rhetoric surrounding the team is religiously coded, never truly severing them from contemporary Turkish politics. At best, the team can be described as para-military soldiers of the state—ones that can and will take on anyone for the state's safety. 

 The 5th episode of Börü opens with the words of Tonyukuk the Wise, appearing in white font on a black background: “We were not afraid, we fought.” He was the so-called kingmaker by historians,[28] and using the tarkhan of the Second Turkic Khaganate’s words date similar Turkish acts of heroism to the 7th century. This is not the first time a Turkish television series has made connections and allusions to ancient Turkic thought, language, or rulers.[29] Indeed, even the title, which translates to wolf, is derived from the proto-Turkic rather than the modern Turkish kurt.[30] As explained during the voiceover that opens the series' first episode, a börü is a singular wolf who protects the herd. They remain on the outside, sight unseen, protecting the flock at all costs. They are the outcasts who “burn” themselves for the good of the nation—their purpose is holy. While Netflix's subtitling does not translate the word kutsal as sacred, the religious implications of the term cannot be lost on Turkish audiences. The aptly named squadron of special forces officers that form Börü ascribe to two mottos, one of which is an ancient Turkic saying, “Aspanda Bürküt, Jerde Kökbörü ol”—Be an eagle in the skies and a wolf on land. 

We cut to the living room of General Osman Alan as he speaks to one of the series leads, Kemal. Kemal’s intellect is often discussed throughout the six episodes, mainly his PhD in Criminal Psychology from Harvard. As such, the aptly named and dangerously over-educated Kemal is selected as the only one capable of keeping the general safe. Kemal is tasked with protecting a dying breed of Turkish hero—the soldier. This emphasis on Kemal’s superior intellect legitimizes his position as the savior of the Turkish Republic. Not only is he Harvard educated, but his well-spoken and staunch demeanor mirrors that of the soldier-heroes of Yeşilçam. Exceptional men are depicted as bright and well-educated, reinforcing the role model of a brilliant/progressive Turkish soldier. Kemal may not be a soldier, but as the popular saying goes “We are Mustafa Kemal’s soldiers.”[31] Kemal, much like the man he is tasked to save, represents a “universal truth of governance.”[32]

The general, Osman Alan, is the last standing figurehead of a once glorious Turkish army, now infiltrated by “clerics” who seek the demise of the Turkish nation. His words once again echo AKP rhetoric in the aftermath of the July 15th event. As a plot to protect the once glorious and now ‘wanted’ soldiers of the Turkish military unfolds at the same time as the General’s impassioned speech, a nearly indecipherable musical staccato of the 1923 Izmir March[33] sets the tone for the rest of the episode. The insidious “they” Alan refers to is eventually apprehended, and the swelling orchestral rendition of the march nearly engulfs the entire soundscape of the sequence. This deployment of music isn’t just one that follows the tenets of melodrama; the soundscape alone imbues the episode with swelling nationalist sentiment—building tension as we move into the final episode and follow-up film. Having apprehended the terrorist, the team has roughly 7 hours before they must turn him in as an agent with the Turkish Secret Service. It is decided that Kemal will conduct the interrogation, and the team has been explicitly told not to act.

The interrogation room is set up like nearly every police-procedural on television. In a starkly lit room, two men sit across one another at a steel table. The savant detective partakes in a game of wits with the detainee, almost always triumphant. After some back and forth in which the men try to rile one another up with increasingly violent and insulting remarks, we see a complete tonal shift. Intercut with the interrogation, we see members of the team negotiate a hostage situation. The rapid cross-cutting between the stark interrogation room and the brightly lit office plaza being taken over evokes a sense of increasing tension and anticipation for the audience. When we return to the interrogation room, Kemal is framed at the table; behind him, an image of the nation’s founder and first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This mirroring is not lost on the audience or Kemal himself. The series uses images of Atatürk, especially in government buildings and prisons, as a visual symbol that indicates a character’s political alignment. Later, the series will use this doubling between Fetüllah-infiltrator Tolga’s upbringing and Kemal’s, the nearly identical orphans reflected on two increasingly divergent paths. The two men and their interests collide in the series penultimate episode and consequent follow-up film. 

Those associated with the image exhibit exceptional feats, sacrificing all for the nation. Staring down at the man across from him, Kemal defines his name as “mastery, perfection, absolute.” But this is not why he was given this name; he was named after a particular Kemal. Across English, Turkish, and German, Officer Kemal notes that his name brings peace to some while striking fear into the hearts of others. The Izmir march begins to swell in the background once more. Kemal continues—his name, he says, strikes fear in the heart of puppet masters “hiding in a manor in somebody else’s country.” Here, Kemal’s overt reference to Fethullah Gülen cannot be missed. This exceptional Kemal has drawn out an enemy of the state, an enemy of Turkey's national success and unity. As Kemal stands and rolls his sleeves, he begins to tell the detainee about the brilliant and sensitive mechanism of the human hand. As his fellow officers cut the video feed to the interrogation room, we watch Kemal pick up a hammer; the Izmir March overtakes the sound of the hammer and screams of the detainee for a moment before the scene fades to black. One exceptional man has made another exceptional decision for the nation's well-being. 

Conclusions and streaming potential

This notion of legacy steeped in Turkishness remains the central focus of Turkish nationalism. Flanked by the great soldier heroes of Turkish history, the nation's dream sits firmly in the hands of the exceptional men who lead it. For Aladağ, this dream--and therefore Börü--exists so that “one day Europe can covet us, the way we covet them.” His sentiments echo that of Netflix’s 2021 marketing campaign in Turkey, “Now, they will be watching our shows with subtitles.”[34] The ad campaign, much like the series, has less to do with a desire for internationalization and more with how the SVOD shapes and encodes its Turkish’ audiences’ experience of localization. Even though it is an international SVOD, Netflix Turkey ascribes to the same political notion of Turkishness that has shaped the nation since its inception.

Following the soldier-hero into the streaming era creates a space that allows for repatriation of different subject positions that do not align with this constructed ‘Turkishness.’ As such, the soldier-hero figuration serves as an analytical device that expands our understanding of what is precisely the “global” and the “local” in contemporary television. TV scholars Asli Ildir and Ipek Rappas ultimately argue that locality is a central juncture through which “audiences articulate their larger expectations from VODs” and “Neftlix’s localization attempts do not always correspond to audience demand.”[35] Ildir and Rappas’s work signals us towards the complexity of local taste, which is often lost within literature discussing Netflix’s localization efforts. As Ildir and Rappas note, series that have already screened on Turkish TV and then exported (Börü was initially circulated on Turkish broadcast network Star TV before moving to Netflix) “Netflix Turkey serves as an interface” for a broader range of international audiences interested in global content.[36] However, as Ildir and Rappas’s data confirms, Netflix originals from Turkey are registered by audiences as “by someone foreign for someone foreign.”[37] In contrast platforms such as BLU TV (a local SVOD platform that emerged the same year as Netflix Turkey) are received by audiences as "by us, for us.”[38] The discourse surrounding the arrival of the platform in different countries “revived some deep-seated tensions in international media policy” stemming from regulators, media companies, and audiences, and disagreements about “where video services should operate, which territories and markets they should be able to access, and whose rules they should obey.”[39]

Given that censorship bodies in Turkey have a critical impact on how and what is shown on Turkish screens, the Netflix debate, and ultimately RTÜK’s (Turkish Television Censorship Board) inability to censor content on Netflix, has produced a tertiary yet critical juncture regarding the proliferation of dizis in their various iterations. I hope to highlight that here a “if you cannot beat them, join them” attitude prevails, particularly in the context of a TV series published under the banner of “Turkish.” Indeed, as Lobato argues, although ‘zones of consumption’ have allowed for the relationship between television in how these “zones” are defined, television itself is “still bounded and “located” in all kinds of ways.”[40] Lobato posits that the arrival of the internet has complicated this media landscape, which ultimately requires a pronunciation of the different kinds of relationships that emerge between television’s fundamental spatial categories, such as “territory, market, nation, and signal area.”[41] It is then the need for particularity in discussions of the dizi that I wish to emphasize once more.

By taking up a series like Börü, I investigate how historical revisionism continues state practices that re-inscribe nationalist citizenry.[42] Approaches to the transnational popularity of Turkish series, or dizis in the broader sense, have often focused on theories of ‘cultural proximity,’ soft power, and even Neo-Ottoman Cool.[43] I build off of these works while acknowledging that such theories and approaches do not often account for the diversity of the markets in which dizis are exchanged. Arzu Öztürkmen’s work has partially inspired my approach, as her movement between two worlds reveals a difference in the use of specific themes and concepts, perhaps most notably the term ‘Turkish.’ [44] An elaboration of the term closely relates to the issue of ‘content,' which lies behind the global success of the dizi genre, as the term changes context and potency depending on its deployment in the industrial, academic, and cultural context.[45] Dizis (and cultural projects more broadly) must first be understood in their particularities. From this base, we can then look to the global or transnational explanation of the content itself. 

I see this methodology as one that aligns with Sevda Alankuş and Eylem Yanardağoğlu’s work approaching the success of Turkey’s global TV exports with a particular focus on the MENA region.[46] Complicating how such distribution practices are analyzed, Alankuş and Yanardağoğlu ask us to consider the dynamics of the contextual and contingent relations between economics, politics, culture, and ideology. Such an accounting reveals the global television market's transnational flexibility and articulatory power.[47] By offering an approach that accounts for the mutual influences of cultural proximity between Turkish and Arab cultures, we can remain attentive to the fact that economic and cultural transactions in the TV series market show sustainability and adaptability despite declining political will and popularity. 

When we look at Turkish television exports from this vantage point, we can see that “cultural flows” are intertwined with Turkey’s neoliberal values, patterns of economic consumption, and a hybrid (modern-traditional) outlook on daily life, which supersede the micro-politics (neo-Ottomanism) of the AKP government. Economic and cultural flows cannot always be attributed to audience admiration or considered solely consumption-driven. Instead, they depend on national and global television market dynamics and entrepreneurial initiatives. Hence, a fuller understanding of these market flows in the Turkish context—as well as transnational more broadly—requires a consideration of multiple factors. the changing political landscape of Turkey and the simultaneous changes that have occurred in Turkish television’s production and distribution sectors 2011 onwards require recognition when analyzing these works.

Faced with growing demand and the growing international legibility of TV genres—I refer to macro genres here, such as melodrama—the Turkish television industry has been incentivized by the impulse to produce “higher quality output and have a more transnational outlook.”[48] Much may have changed over the years of Turkish filmmaking, but the soldier-hero remains persistent across registers, generations, and platforms. By basing the narrative on a re-telling of the July 15th event from the vantage of a Turkish Armed Special Forces team, this rendition of the dizi as nation-building/branding remains diligently in conversation with texts of historical re-mediation by presenting a complimentary ideological composition and Turkey, just one that is temporally located within the ‘present-day.’ How convincing these texts are requires further study.

Notes