"Beam me up, Omer": transnational media flow and the cultural politics of the Turkish Star Trek remake.(G.O.R.A.)(Critical essay)(Cover story)

While subjected peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for.

--Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation

In the recent Turkish sci-fi comedy G.O.R.A. (2005), writer/star Cem Yilmaz thoroughly lampoons many of the Americentric traditions of Hollywood science fiction. After the film opens on a space station in which all the characters are speaking English, one character points out the anomaly, pleading, "Can we not have it in Turkish?" Indeed, Turkish turns out to be the galactic lingua franca in this narrative, with everyone--including the alien races--conversing in the Turkish language and using Turkish lira to trade. It is not America that has colonized the people's consciousness--to paraphrase those infamous words of Wire Wenders--but Turkey. This pointed inversion of the U.S. bias in Hollywood science fiction narratives, however, is balanced with an obvious affection for said films, with the film also offering loving homages to such iconic U.S. films as Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999).

This tension between oppositional critique and mimetic reverence illustrates one of the many layers of ambivalence that lie at the heart of transnational processes of cultural exchange. While the film undoubtedly offers a critique of the Americentrism in science fiction narratives, it also draws upon and imitates elements from those same cultural products. Indeed, this is a relationship that can be traced throughout much of Turkish cinematic history, most evidently in those cycles of popular cinema from the 1960s and 1970s that are known within Turkey as Yesilcam. Steeped within what Nezih Erdogan terms "mimicry beyond innocent inspiration" (166), these films self-consciously appropriated elements from U.S. popular culture, often taking characters, plots, and music and recontextualizing them within films produced in the local industry. These ranged from unlicensed remakes in which stories were translated for local audiences, such as in Seytan (Satan, 1974), which follows the basic premise of The Exorcist (1973), albeit with the Catholic iconography replaced with that of Islam, to films such as Dunyayi kurtaran adam (The Man Who Saves the World, 1982), in which footage from Star Wars (1977) was appropriated and used as special effects sequences in a wholly unrelated narrative.

These processes of cultural hybridization reflect what Marwan M. Kraidy describes in his recent Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization in that they represent globalization not as a unitary one-way process of cultural homogenization but as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with each other. Nevertheless, while these examples point to the hybridizing nature of cultural exchange, this does not mean that we should neglect the fact that these processes of hybridization are highly contingent on structural factors. As Kraidy argues, while most analyses of globalization that focus solely on cultural imperialism tend to overemphasize the structural factors of economic power and dominance, and most analyses that focus on processes of hybridization tend to offer a politically benign vision of diversity, an alternative framework that he terms "critical transculturalism" would pay attention to the hybridizing nature of cultural exchange and yet still retain the broader concerns of cultural imperialism around unequal power distribution (9). In this article I utilize this framework of critical transculturalism to explore Turkish appropriations of American popular culture, looking specifically at how Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda (Tourist Omer in Star Trek, 1974), the film more commonly referred to within Western fan culture as the "Turkish Star Trek" reconfigures and recontextualizes the world of Star Trek. (1) Rather than see this unlicensed remake as a derivative plagiarism of the earlier TV series, I position Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda within wider debates on the transnational flows of media and the overlapping, intersecting nature of cultural production. Opposing the essentialist positions that envision cultures as "pure" and under threat of being tainted by the "other" I intend this model of transcultural exchange to draw attention to the intricate processes of borrowing and exchange through which cultures adapt and evolve. It is necessary, however, to make clear at the outset that this will be a "relational, processual, and contextual approach to hybridity" (Kraidy xii) that explores this film as a particular localized practice. Therefore, it is necessary that we begin with the sociohistoric context in which this appropriation took place, paying careful attention to the ways in which Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda inflects the specific conditions of its production.

Yesilcam: The Golden Age of Turkish Popular Cinema

The modern nation of Turkey, formed as a democratic, secular republic in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is poised tentatively at the point where Europe meets Asia, a position that makes it something of a "liminal country par excellence" (Eleftheriotis 1). The history of Turkish culture has been marked by a series of governmental reform programs designed to move away from the Ottoman past and orient Turkey decidedly toward the West. While the predominant model for reform was Europe in the years preceding World War II, the subsequent years marked an increasing relationship with America, both politically and culturally. As Erdogan notes in "Institutional Intervention," while "[W]esternisation has always been considered as fundamental to Turkey's efforts for modernisation ... it is more appropriate to characterise the years after 1945, especially the 1950s and 1960s[,] with a more specific goal, namely Americanisation" (47). (2)