Midnight Express (dir. Alan Parker, 1978) — Review

"The message of Midnight Express isn't 'Don't go to Turkey’. It's 'Don't be an idiot like I was, and try to smuggle drugs.'"

Three and a half decades after the arrest which would ultimately send Turkey’s human rights reputation back to the medieval period, Billy Hayes embarked on a string of public apologies which continue to this day. In 1970, the 23-year-old Hayes was caught trying to bring four and a half pounds of hash onto his flight home to the US. Initially sentenced to four years, his sentence was extended to life weeks before his release date. After escaping in 1975, Hayes published a book detailing the brutality and hopelessness of his experience, which was billed as ‘the American Papillon’ and snapped up by then-unknown screenwriter Oliver Stone.

Midnight Express established Stone’s characteristic mode of controversial, lurid storytelling about real world events — a style sometimes described as ‘unflinching’ in a time before provocation became the ubiquitous currency of social narrative. Casting Hayes as the ‘hero’ in a barbaric and, in Stone’s words, “very Ottoman” hellscape rewrote not only individual events but Turkey’s global image to an incredible extent, for which even Stone — notoriously recalcitrant — has since apologised. Justifiably criticized for its racist portrayal of Turkey, Midnight Express nonetheless expresses its delusional worldview with total conviction, effecting the same fairy-tale unreality which sustained the fantastical image of ‘Turkey’ and the Orient for hundreds of years before.

Sound plays a key part in the suspension of disbelief. The film opens with the thud of Billy’s heartbeat as he makes his way through the airport, in a mostly-wordless opening sequence; its hammering gives him away as he prepares to board the plane, the security officer’s hands finding the tell-tale heart before the packages of hash. In its opening minutes, the film establishes itself in a primitive mode where the only common language is brute physicality. On one level, this marks the start of all-American boy Billy’s descent into a hideous underworld with no reason or justice, which eventually pulls him into its madness and depravity. On another level, however, it is not Billy who is the victim. The constant, unsubtitled floods of angry Turkish which signify the descent into insanity to Western ears are, of course, perceived as such only due to the listener’s ignorance of the language.

Midnight Express was filmed in Malta, with a crew of diverse nationalities, races and ethnicities — white American, Italian, Greek, Armenian, and an Israeli as the most sadistic Turkish guard-standing in as ersatz Turks. The pedestrian reality of Turkey, a near-European metropolis, is colourfully reimagined as a third world slum of violence and squalor, whose people are constantly characterised as “pigs.” This convenient substitute for the truth, or the real Turkey, was naturally difficult to perceive for non-Turks, let alone the American audiences drawn by the tagline: “The story of Billy Hayes’ unbelievable courage… it couldn’t happen, but it did!” Stone and Parker’s revisionist fantasy, bookended with just enough real-life detail to reel the audience in, pursues that ethos with gusto.