E-Revista de Estudos Interculturais do CEI – ISCAP

N.º 6, maio de 2018

Midnight Express as a Product of Hollywood Orientalism

Goksu Akkan
Blanquerna – Universitat Ramon Llull

Abstract
The concept of Orientalism has been a forthcoming issue in film studies, be it the
(mis)representation of minority groups in Hollywood, or white-washing people of color
characters in remakes of films from ‘the Orient’, or through a complete omission of
representation of these characters. Ideology is a great aspect in shaping the views of the
masses, and as they become more embedded in cultural devices such as films, the more soft
power they deploy and the more problematic they become. In Foucauldian terms,
knowledge about the Orient is produced through films made by the Occident, and thanks to
their infinite capital and wide distribution networks, the West, particularly America, is far
more successful in retaining a cross-cultural dominance through this power/knowledge
structure.

This paper aims to deconstruct the motives behind Oliver Stone & Alan Parker’s 1978 film
Midnight Express, in terms of putting Turkey and Turkish people in the Oriental position
and putting Western and White characters in the Occidental epistemological positions.
Some questions this paper tackles include “How does Orientalism work in the context of
Film Studies? Does the Gaze grant a monolithic and unidirectional look at the Orient
instead of the Occident? How does the “based on a true story” tagline serves as a
marketing tactic in order to augment the “horror” of being stuck in a Turkish prison, while
the actual true facts were differing from the facts represented in the film? What affects do
these misrepresentations have?
Keywords: Film studies, Edward Said, Orientalism, Occidentalism, representation

Midnight Express as a product of Hollywood Orientalism

By arguing that Orientalism is not just a product of the West, but a construct that
affects both the East and the West equally, Mrinalini Sinha offers an alternative to Edward
Said’s take on post-colonial theory. Although what Sinha argues can be applicable to some
cases such as specific political discourses, in the entertainment industry, all products
regarding ‘the East’ are almost always exclusively both monolithic and unidirectional. This
is why I will take the film Midnight Express (1978) as a case study to elaborate on how
Hollywood seeks to replicate representations of the Orient as degenerate and incapable

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compared to the West. By depicting the Turks in Midnight Express as evil, masochistic and
ignorant, the film rationalizes the Western characters as good-natured, clever people, who
just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. As a result, the dichotomization of
Turkey as ‘the Other’ inferior counterpart of the Western civilization is just another banal
repackaging of ‘the idea of the Orient’ by Hollywood, which serves to preserve the West’s
global cultural hegemony established through the entertainment industry.
To solidify my thesis, first the idea of Orientalism according to Edward Said will be
discussed. This will give the reader a sense of how the Occident (Western civilizations)
tries to define the Orient (Eastern civilizations) in order to protect its hegemony. Secondly,
I will elaborate on how Said’s idea of Orientalism operates within films made by the West,
in which they maintain and reinforce these stereotypes about the East through a
power/knowledge relationship. While doing this, I will be referring to my case study
Midnight Express in order to illustrate Said’s ideas with examples. Following this, I will try
to acknowledge who or what legitimizes Orientalist films, which are overtly reminiscent of
each other that aid the West’s cultural hegemony. How some critics approach such
repackaged stereotypes will also be touched on.
Before we move on to analyze how Hollywood studios exaggerate the differences
between the East and the West to accumulate capital and spread Western ideology, first we
must look at why Edward Said’s, instead of Sinha’s, version of Orientalism, is more useful
to study cultural products made by the West. In an attempt to identify how Western thought
shaped the discourse outside of the Occident, Said argues:

“The imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less

The storyline of Midnight Express replicates exactly what Said emphasizes in terms
of constructing the Orient, and combines it with the idea of ‘the Western gaze’ in cinema. It
is this gaze that “reduces the non-European to the not-yet being of underdevelopment;
lacking presence and agency.” (Venn 2000 p. 148) As a result, the protagonist of the
controversionally based on a ‘true story’ film is American Billy Hayes, who is trapped in a
jail in Istanbul in the early 1970s for trying to smuggle drugs back into the United States.
He is depicted not as a guilty immoral drug trafficker, but as an unfortunate young White
male who is stuck in the ‘middle of nowhere’, because he is in the ‘mystical’ and
‘unreliable’ East. The White, American man of European origins, is thus the only vantage
point of the film. The story is told from his point of view, with the cinematic lens that films
the whole experience symbolically becoming Billy’s own eyes. On a broader level, Billy’s
perception becomes the Western ‘gaze’ that Venn underlines. In this regard, encounters are
never evaluated from the Oriental or Turkish side, which eschews the East’s presence and
agency as a legitimate form of existence. This precisely debunks Sinha’s argument about
Orientalist discourse affecting both the East and the West in a heterogeneous way, because
the Oriental subjects are never given a chance in the first place to express themselves.
However, although the film opens with the lines “these events were based on a true
story starting on October 6, 1970”, in a recent interview even Billy Hayes himself has

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accepted the fact that the screenwriter Oliver Stone and director Alan Parker had “made up
a great chunk of it because of cinematic reasons.” (Marnell 2010) In fact, Hayes admits to
the fact that he never was sexually abused as depicted in the film, and the beatings were not
as violent. Additionally, in contrast to the ending of the film, Hayes admits that he never
killed the sadistic head guard, but another inmate outside the prison shot him once he was
released. At the end of the interview, Hayes comes to terms with the reality that the
stereotypes in Midnight Express have casted on Turkey’s reputation: “it creates an overall
impression that Turkey is this terrible place and Turks are a terrible people. Which is not
valid or true, both to my own experience and to reality.” (Marnell 2010) It is arguable
whether he says he likes Turkey because he wants to make peace with this nation, but in
any regard he still acknowledges the fact that Oliver Stone and Alan Parker had added
scenes of no solid accountable background. He names ‘cinematic reasons’ as being the
source of distortions, however I think it is evident that these scenes are added in order to
submit Turkey, as a part of the East, into the grand narrative of the Orient, which is inferior,
untimely, and passive compared to the West.
Thus, ‘based on a true story’ tagline is used as an effective marketing technique for
the film, even though most of the script is not based on the autobiographical account of
Hayes. Therefore, Parker and Stone are projecting a myth about Turkey through the
medium of cinema with the help of unscientific imprecision about this foreign country, and
circumstances of interpretations of encounters (Said 1997, p. 163) with Eastern subjects
that fill the plot with banal stereotypes.
Said also stresses that “while the West was modern, civilized, and progressive, the
Orient remained, at least from a Western perspective, a static and backward society.” (Said
1979, p.3) In this sense, Midnight Express seeks only to represent the Oriental identity as
inferior and incompatible to the West, without giving the Orient a chance to express its
individuality. Cinematically, this degradation is achieved through the music and lightening,
as well as casting and costume choices. The opening scene of the film is sunrise over
Topkapi, the historic peninsula of Istanbul, with the prayer voice hailing from the minarets
of the mosques, and a lazy, yellow light, that immediately directs the audience to feel that
the context is Middle Eastern. This peculiar yellow light and Oriental music is reused in
many other scenes of the film to come, in order to underline the ‘strangeness’ of the setting.
Additionally, prison guards, who, with their exaggerated Turkish accents, are
depicted as evil people who don’t miss out on a chance of verbally and physically abusing
the inmates for no apparent reason. Alongside with the barbarian traits of the fellow
Turkish cellmates, who love to snitch on the foreign inmates just to sadistically watch them
getting beaten, collectively the Turkish characters are depicted as ‘backwards and
uncivilized’ through the casting choice. On another note, although the film is set in the
1970’s, the Turks are still seen wearing fez caps and ridiculous Ottoman outfits from the
19th century, which again highlights how ‘oriental’ Turkey is, even though that fashion was
abandoned more than a hundred years ago. Thus, representation of the Turks in this film is
in perfect resonance with what Said offers about Eastern stereotypes, since they are
continually projected as ignorant and dirty people with no solid historicity.
In contrast to the barbarian, inhumane and passive Turks, Billy and his other foreign
cellmates are busy making plans to ‘catch the Midnight Express’, which is a term used to
describe an attempt to escape. This is another cliché reinforced by Hollywood in such
movies as The Mummy and Indiana Jones as well, where the Western protagonist is trying
to ‘solve the mystery’ of the static East by using maps and other devices to get around
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mazes and pyramids, or in this case, an old sketch of sewer tunnels to run away. As Albert
Memmi advocates, this stereotype also exemplifies the ‘active agent’ role of the Western
man, in which the protagonist is the conqueror and the colonizer ready to take over the
treasures of the passive East, which is in Billy’s case, his own freedom. (Memmi 2003, p.
172)
These stereotypes are so casually reproduced that as a result, they lead to a
dichotomizing process vis-à-vis to the Western gaze and audience in which the West is
‘us’, and the East is ‘them’. In this dichotomy, the East and the West are differentiated in
terms of being incompatible civilizations, where the West has the upper hand. Moreover,
in this dichotomizing process, Hollywood in general is influenced by potent racial and
cultural stereotypes that seek to represent the Oriental way of being as “as decadent and
inferior… tends to dismiss Muslim aspirations for self-determination as politically
primitive, economically suspect, and ideologically absurd.” (Little 2008, p. 11) To
exemplify, in Midnight Express, Billy’s foreign friends in jail mention this ‘ideological
absurdity’ quite explicitly while talking about his prison sentence: “This ain’t the good old
USA. This is Turkey, man. It’s an accident if you are innocent!” which suggests that even
though drug smuggling is pretty much a crime in almost every country around the world,
because the White protagonist is likeable and identifiable to the Western gaze, it is
unlawful and unfair for the Turks to sentence him to prison.
On the other hand, the Western values and beliefs are attributed to such qualities as
being rational, fair, and as the core aspect of Christianity, merciful. Billy’s monologue in
court when he finds out that he is sentenced to 30 years is such a typical display of the ‘fair
and just Western ideology’, in which the White subject rationally questions the value
system of what is not his own culture. He cries: “Concept of a society is based on that
mercy, fair-play sense of justice, but it’s a ton of shit to you. For a nation of pigs, its funny
because you don’t eat them!” Here, Billy does not only act the part as the ‘rational’
conscience of the Colonizer, but also as a White subject driven by banal stereotypes of
Islam, such as not eating pigs, who is ‘witty’ enough to make ironic jokes about it. The fact
that he is ‘witty’ and able to make fun of this cultural aspect further elevates his position in
the Western auidence’s eye as a White character with whom they could identify with if they
were to be in the same situation instead of the evil Turks. Through this Western gaze, that
is ‘rational’ and ‘normal’, the audience feels safe in regard to the Turkish subject, because
the West is ‘powerful’ enough to question and decide what is right or wrong in this foreign
civilization.
Through this power structure, Orientalism operates as a cinematic optic legitimized
by the Western gaze in films like Midnight Express, because it is “an accepted grid for
filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness.” (Said 1979, p. 6) Although Billy
is physically ‘victimized’ by the evil Turks, the power of the White subject comes from his
mentality and ability ‘to be rational’, which is historically affiliated with the West
(Kennedy and Danks, 2001). As a result, since they are viewing Turkey from an Orientalist
lens of the director Alan Parker, the audience is most likely to adopt these negative
stereotypes and affiliations with Turkey. Due to the economic dominance Hollywood holds
over other national film capitals, American values, expectations, norms, or in Althusserian
terms, ideology, is enforced upon anybody who is subjected to Orientalist films such as
Midnight Express.
In Foucauldian terms, knowledge about the Orient is produced through films made
by the Occident, and thanks to their infinite capital and wide distribution networks, the
4
West, particularly America, is far more successful in retaining a cross-cultural dominance
through this power/knowledge structure. (Little 2008, p.310) Although he does not directly
mention Foucault, Said also acknowledges the importance of power relations in Orientalist
discourse: “unbroken arc of knowledge and power connects the European or Western
statesman and the Western Orientalists” (Said 1979, p.104), which brings us to the question
of the legitimizing forces of such Orientalist films as producing ‘true’ knowledge about the
East.
The Academy Awards is seen as the authority in selecting the best motion pictures
of the year, and the films that are lucky enough to get an Oscar are almost always huge box
office successes. Midnight Express is no exception to this, with two wins in the year 1979,
as well as an astonishing six wins in Golden Globes that same year, including the best
picture award. Anthony Appiah identifies Orientalist directors such as Alan Parker as a part
of a ‘comprador intelligentsia’, who are constituted “of relatively small, Western style,
Western-trained, group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural
commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.” (Appiah 1992, p. 5) Thus, to combine
Appiah with Said’s argument about the ‘inbroken arc of knowledge and power’, the
Western statesmen institutionalize the film industry in such a way that by crowning
Orientalist directors like Alan Parker with awards, the West legitimizes its source of
hegemony, and engrains it within the Western culture, thanks to extensive press and
coverage these events accumulate.
As a result of this legitimization process, the viewer is highly likely to regard
Orientalist films such as Midnight Express as true representations of the East, and take how
Turkey is projected in the film as granted, which is exactly where the hegemonic power of
the West is most succinct. These stereotypes are so recycled and reused that the Western
audience does not even question them anymore, but just accept images of the East as
depicted on silver screen as truth. Thus, what Lewis offers about the operational
distinctiveness of stereotyping the East is verified: “it is the hegemonic ability of Orientalist
discourse to retain the upper hand even whilst it accepts and incorporates challenges that
accounts for its longevity.” (Lewis 1996, p. 20) Potentially, to take such representations of
Middle East as granted could be dangerous in the sense that it can feed feelings of
xenophobia and intolerance against foreign people among the people of the West.
On the other hand, as a response to the global achievement of the film, several
critics recognized the monolithic gaze evident in Midnight Express and how problematic
such projections can be. Mary Lee Settle states that “The Turks I saw in Lawrence of
Arabia and Midnight Express were like cartoon caricatures” (Settle 1991, p. 8) In this
sense, she verifies that this Western gaze directed at Turks is common in Hollywood, and
equally ridiculous. In resonance with her, David Robinson observes Midnight Express as
being a “more violent, as a national hate-film than anything I can remember- a cultural
form that narrows horizons, confirming the audience’s meanest fears and prejudices and
resentments.” (Wakeman 1988, p. 741) His insight verifies what Said had to say about the
Western consciousness, which can only project and imagine investments about the East,
which can lead on to more serious problems such as racism or xenophobia.
However, what famed film critic Pauline Kael has to note just hits the Orientalist
spot of both Oliver Stone and Alan Parker. She writes: “this story could have happened in
almost any country, but if Billy Hayes had planned to be arrested to get the maximum
commercial benefit from it, where else could he get the advantages of a Turkish Jail? Who
wants to defend Turks? They don’t even constitute enough of a movie market for
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Columbia Pictures to be concerned about how they are represented.” (Kael 1980, p. 499)
Due to its Oriental position, that is, as Little argues, politically primitive and economically
suspect, Turkey is not even seen ‘worthy enough’ to be worried about its representation in
such Orientalist films. As a result, Turkishness is used as a stepping stone to accumulate
capital and reinforce Eastern stereotypes in order to preserve Western hegemony by the
way of ‘entertaining’ people around the world.
To sum up, Midnight Express is just another Hollywood product that’s main aim is
to display an Oriental civilization as monolithically different from the Occident. The clearly
Orientalist storyline is justified by offering that it is ‘based on a true story’, even though
many events are imagined by the screenwriter to make the film more dramatic.
Additionally, the awards the film had acquired repute the film as a rightful account of
Turkey, which has destroyed the country’s reputation back in the 1970s, and can still act as
a source of ‘true knowledge’ about the country since its depiction is legitimized by Western
institutions that help to maintain their cultural hegemony.

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