In Istanbul Missing Istanbul: Thoughts on Netflix’s Ethos
Illustration: Sümeyra Yüce
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Tag yourself if you’re anything like me, that is, any or all of the following: a person who had the option of working from home this year (even as their particular industry pretty much ground to a standstill), who actually took lockdown seriously, or who was scared of passing the virus to a high-risk member of their pod. Chances are you had the same uniformly dull, mundanely comfortable affair as me no matter where you are in the world: the perils and occasional eureka moments of working from home, the creeping, unnoticeable decline of mood and motivation until you were daily suppressing the urge to open a window, lean out and howl wordlessly for several minutes. The equally creeping and sinister accumulation of chub, the stilted walks and outdoor meetups with friends, the occasional homicidal urge and last but not least, the Netflix benders. It was in this climate that I binged a lot of shows I would probably not have had time for otherwise. Case in point is Ethos, the TV show written and directed by Berkun Oya that premiered on Netflix on November 12th. I ended up watching it fairly late as it is, considering how often I heard about it from friends and social media. In regular times, it would have ended up as one of those “oh I kept meaning to but never got around to” situations. The reasons for that are too complicated to go into at length and maybe not entirely clear to me either - my reflex is to say it wasn’t because I avoid local productions, but the fact remains that I don’t actively seek them out either.
But a review of Ethos this is not. Rather, I was moved to write about it after a brief chat with a friend who lives in Rotterdam this past December. We have been passing back and forth TV show recommendations this entire year. We have our little pitches when we recommend them, she for Please Like Me, I for I May Destroy You, which should give you an idea of my own preferred type of TV for which Ethos is probably an unlikely candidate. So after I pitched it to my friend, not even entirely sure she would like it, I found myself wondering why and how I’d done it. It was definitely as if I had more skin in the game than usual. I believe I used the phrase “uncharacteristically proud” and made an almost apologetic disclaimer that the show is still not free of its faults (deadly sins, the way I made them sound)? No show need be perfect, and Ethos is far from it anyway. Yet as anyone who’s been presented or misrepresented in media can attest, you find yourself invested in a different way when it appears to be speaking for you but addressing a wider audience.
My previous essay provides a glimpse into my issues with the self-orientalizing and self-pity of the more globally disseminated culture of Turkey beginning in the ‘90s. This was shortly after Turkey tore down its economic walls against the world, after a prolonged period of resistance. What follows is a readthrough of how to do it right when you try to take a group of dense self-references and turn it outwards into something universal that others can understand, even if oversimplification cannot be avoided on some fronts. (Or can it?) I feel like the show’s relative success in this department is evident in the translation of its Turkish title Bir Başkadır, a song title that’s decidedly more romantic than its stoic English replacement. A translation choice I fully support, like wiping a board clean for newcomers.
The blurb on IMDB characterizes Ethos as follows: “A group of unique characters from dramatically different socio-cultural backgrounds meeting in startling circumstances in the vibrant and colorful city of Istanbul, - some by chance and some by force of will.” I’m grateful that we can thereby get the “force of will” part out of the way immediately, as it is more by force of will - that of the writer - than chance that these characters are brought together. Some of the ways they’re connected stretch the bounds of credulity, even in a city like Istanbul that has the type of borough-y quality, which means your world will often feel smaller than it should in a city of nearly sixteen million. Meryem, played by Öykü Karayel, is a young woman living with her older brother, his catatonically depressed wife (Funda Eryiğit) and her niece and nephew. The first episode cold opens on her walking through a misty, provincial landscape that turns out to be an inner-city neighborhood. She then finds the highway and crosses an overpass over a honking mass of traffic to board a bus. This scene merely reveals a morning routine with seemingly unconnected bits of information -- she enters an upscale highrise, where the concierge appears to know her. She rides up a soundless chrome elevator, unlocks an apartment door with a key and changes her sneakers for slippers. She tries to enter the bathroom, the door is locked; a man who is presumably her employer is weeping in the shower. Mood! While she waits in the kitchen (probably to change, it’s clear at least to the native viewer at this point that she’s a housekeeper), she rummages through her purse and finds something unexpected. We won’t know what it is until the last episode, but we do see that the shock is enough to make her pass out...
Flashback to one year ago. In a tidy cause-effect switcheroo, we now see Meryem sitting in the office of a psychotherapist, Peri, to whom she has been recommended for help with the seemingly random fainting spells that afflict her. She works as a housekeeper for Sinan, a monosyllabic dudebro living in an industrial concrete-finish bachelor pad (the one we saw earlier) who does something nocturnal and who, to hear Meryem describe it to Peri, has a rotating, filthy harem of harlots leaving a slime trail of decadence on their way through his apartment. (“What kind of lady forgets her underpants?”) Peri is triggered by Meryem’s veil (that’s “countertransference”, in her shrink terms), setting the tone for the show’s central duality and tension. That first layer of connections should suffice to establish that Meryem is the center of gravity that pulls all the characters and therefore the show together, but that’s not accidental. She’s also its beating heart. That’s in no small part owed to Karayel’s acting, which staunchly depends on conveying the emotion that goes unexpressed even from the character with the most dialogue in the entire script.
Her brother Yasin is another key character, played with conviction by Fatih Artman. The breadwinner of their household, high-strung Yasin is unnerving in his barely-restrained rage, kind of like a transformer unit virtually vibrating with toxic masculinity. His wife, Ruhiye, is decidedly more in need of psychotherapy than Meryem, and it’s not entirely clear why she isn’t in it. A long-ago trauma that becomes clearer as the show progresses has rendered her disconsolate. Yasin appears to think he can bully her back into not being depressed which on more than one occasion results in her abruptly, violently springing to life only to attempt suicide. To his credit, Artman is brilliant for not making us hate Yasin’s character, as with the rest of the cast, his part depends on conveying sadness and desperation that he is unable to express in any other way other than explosive anger.
Gülbin, played with amiable yet forceful calm by Tülin Özen – another kind of transformer unit – is, in turn, Peri’s psychotherapist. (I had to snort when Peri walked out of her session with Meryem and straight to her own therapist appointment, and waited to see if Gülbin would then go to her therapist since I personally would need to see mine after dealing with Peri. But, as I will discuss later, it was easy to forgive the campier moments in the show as nods to the older traditions of filmmaking in Turkey.) Here’s where the connections get more improbable: Gülbin turns out to be hooking up with Sinan, and then Peri meets a nosy girl, Melisa, in yoga class, who turns out to be an actress in a TV show Meryem religiously watches. (Melisa explains at some point that her show is just a piece of crap targeted towards “Anatolians, slum-dwellers,” allowing Ethos to have some self-reflexive fun.) Melisa, by the way, is also one of Sinan’s hook-ups. Like I said, possible but improbable, and even more so when you see so many of the characters as diametric opposites.
You might be tempted, for instance, to laugh off the himbo archetype of Sinan as mere comic relief, especially in a scene in which he overhears Gülbin in a gym they both frequent gossiping about him with two girlfriends, her characteristic reservation and calm manner making her savagery even funnier. But beyond that, he is a vehicle demonstrating how the masculine anger laced through society manifests differently in a man other than Yasin’s “type.” There is a religious leader, Meryem and Yasin’s local imam. He stands in gentle contrast to deeply conflicted (and bad) therapist Peri, although his analogies for the transience of life are old and tired, just like he himself after a lifetime of delivering spiritual guidance to his community through well-meaning yet oversimplified aphorizing. There’s a punky angry girl (Esma Madra, the personification of “staring daggers”), and also Gülan, Gülbin’s sister, providing a glimpse into her more traditional Kurdish background of origin. Gülan’s own explosive anger is mainly directed at Gülbin for having made a different sort of life for herself. Finally, there’s Hayrunnisa, the imam’s daughter, Meryem’s neighbor and peer. Gentle and introverted, Hayrunnisa also longs for something different. In her, however, it manifests not through neuroticism – as in the case of the repressed Meryem – but a tentative inching toward what she thinks she might want, encouraged by a family that seems to contain relatively more lenience and love than Meryem’s.
If all this so far sounds formulaic, that’s because it is. Most friends I’ve spoken to about the show had two main beefs with it: the two-dimensionality of the characters and the unbelievably mathematical precision of the show. Certainly, there are issues with the story itself too. The resolution to Ruhiye’s story is a particularly problematic one on several points (as well as one of the instances where the formulaic writing crosses over into carelessness). So that’s what I find interesting to explore: why I liked the show so much despite its faults. Why the formulaic nature did not grate on me as much as I expected, why I felt personally partial, like I had skin in the game. The characters are amalgams, sure, not unlike another much-hyped show of recent memory, Chernobyl. For that, I remember having much more trouble suspending my disbelief (which, combined with its pointed, almost gratuitous dreariness, its British Russians and my apprehension about the “dog liquidation” scene coming up, was enough to make me stop watching though I had been hugely invested in the subject matter going in). Some characters do border on caricature, like Madra’s angry punky girl who seems to have no purpose other than hurling rocks through Yasin’s windows because he kicked her out of a club once and to deliver a sudden, poignant deus ex machina piece of advice to Hayrunnisa. Or Hilmi, whose philosophical soliloquies and paraphrasing of Jung are only interrupted when he catches sight of Meryem, on whom he has developed such a crush that he stares, mouth hanging open like an oven door, whenever he does. Besides rather ham-handedly showcasing that yes, devout Muslims do exist who are well-read and analytical, he’s there as a symbol of the Jungian individuation that the show appears to be nudging some of its characters towards. Though this is more apparent in the character arc of Hayrunnisa, it will also come to be true of Meryem, who is more resistant than her counterpart to upending her entire world but maybe needs a gentle and thoughtful push to help explore her similarly inquisitive inner world.
Yes, it’s almost mathematical, but it’s precisely that a script so mathematical can turn into a show with so much heart - not to mention beautiful photography and great pacing - that I recommended it to a foreign friend using words like “uncharacteristically proud” as if I was involved in its making. Berkun Oya achieves it mainly through two means: first, the show is not trying to hide what it is. It’s a love letter to Istanbul (as in its people, not a rotary of picturesque panoramas) and 1980s Turkish cinematography. So assemble the cast of characters in any other world metropolis, tweaking denominations and political stances, etc. and what you have is the very same universal themes and human dramas – the struggle of identity and greater spirituality, the toxic dance of binary gender roles. I think we’ve established especially at this point in history that none of this is specific to the Middle East. The writing is unaffected, never straying too far from its basic formula, which in my view enhances the contrast between the show itself and the traditional tropes it is emulating. It’s not talky – the characters don’t go out of their way to explain anything and the sparsity of the dialogue is a helpful choice. The viewer is able to project so much onto these characters, but that seems deliberate and hardly makes it inauthentic but quite the opposite. I know Yasin, for example. I’ve been him, I’ve dated him, been his friend, argued with him in pubs. I’ve had foreigners describe his “time-bomb” type of rage to me as their experience with people from Turkey. I’ve known people who say the kind of stuff Peri says with just as straight a face.
Arguably, the main character in the show is Istanbul itself, but rather than the dolled-up version we’re used to being presented to Western audiences, there are plenty of shots of characters weaving through the unruly crowds or striding through a part of town recognizable only to the viewer who knows Istanbul. If I’m not mistaken, there was not a single shot of the strait or the silhouette across it, except in the codas marking the end of each episode with 1980s footage of Istanbul set to the music of Ferdi Özbeğen (it’s one of his tunes that gives the show its Turkish title). A non-trivial amount of people in Istanbul don’t get to glimpse a view of the sea even occasionally - let alone on a daily basis. There lies the fundamental appeal: the longed-for Istanbul of the past that now only exists in archival footage and in old movies, versus the eye-level smogfest and tesseract of boxy non-places in the show (and in reality).
Ultimately, though the women may be archetypes, they form the center of the narrative. “It’s only in the city-cum-metropolis that woman can step outside the preordained roles of spouse and mother,” writes screenwriter and film professor Feride Çiçekoğlu (translation my own) in her examination of the city in Turkish filmmaking and the collective unconscious, Vesikalı Şehir. “That’s why the shared pulse of the city and film beats in woman’s veins. That’s why the city’s temporality is simultaneously liberating, seductive, and frightening. In a word, the city’s temporality is uncanny, just like woman.” None of the characters become aggregate with their societal roles though it cannot be ignored – who they are is appended by what responsibilities they have and to whom, because society. But the women in Ethos are thankfully given issues more circumstantial than that.
One trope I’ve come across rather a lot recently in Turkish film, in particular from certain male filmmakers of my generation (i.e. ageing millennials), is what I assume to be the attempt to “subvert” gender roles by writing women whose only purpose in the script is to put on a drag show of traditional masculinity. Far from – actually deadass the opposite of – rejecting the gender binary, its effect is patronizing and abrasive: it’s like the writers are screaming at us, “Awww, look at it get plastered and start shit in a bar, just like us men!” That might be another aspect of my having skin in the game – I’ll take a formulaic yet authentic character over that kind of cringy laziness any day. (Just don’t write woman characters. I’m serious. Don’t sweat the Bechdel test – I’d rather watch a sausage fest that’s authentic.) Also, I’m thinking of this one time when, in spite of my own complaints of how tiresome it can get for a woman in the streets of Istanbul, I’d felt defensive when a German friend-of-a-friend I was chatting with told me she left Istanbul after living here for a little over a year because “it’s just so...male.” I was quick to disagree – I and most of the women close to me lived there and I didn’t recall us ceding the city to the men. Here in Ethos, as if to vindicate me, is the unmitigated identification of Istanbul with its women.
Ethos came almost a year into lockdown when I miss being in the city – the old, true city, the one starring in the show; grubby, crowded, unsightly and full of connections too incestuous for comfort – so much that my viewing was obviously tinged by cabin fever and nostalgia. Whatever the case, it will be interesting to give it a second view once the days of Netflix ‘n’ quarantine are over and see if it still feels as compelling.