Interrupted happiness: class boundaries and the 'impossible love' in turkish melodrama

Abstract

Social classes in Turkey, the existence of which is often denied in dominant political discourses, are nevertheless apparent in a wide range of cultural forms including the cinema, particularly the melodrama of the 1960s and the 1970s. The specific nature of the Turkish melodrama puts this genre quite apart from other filmic genres existing in Turkish cinema. An axiomatic representation of love and the unchanging formulas typically exemplified in the classic Turkish melodrama have been so popular that even in the non-melodramatic genres this kind of romance was ubiquitous. Class difference between lovers is a typical melodramatic mode in Turkish film; classes constitute boundaries for love and they delay, interrupt or inhibit happiness. In these melodramas upper classes are typically portrayed by means of negative conventions (immorality, decadence, ruthlessness), while various positive qualities are attributed to the members of lower classes (innocence, altruism, humanism). In this paper, we explore the use of class phenomenon in the Turkish melodrama of the 1960s and the 1970s as a way of creating a societal background for the ‘impossible love’.