Aşk-ı Memnu: A recent hype of glamour, love and deception

My mother at the other end of the phone lowered her voice as if she was sharing a secret: “I am watching Aşk-ı Memnu’s last episode on the Internet.” I thought this popular culture craze was over the other night. But apparently being in Canada for a family visit and 7-hour time difference had not prevented her to keep up with this lame television drama.

Let’s face it, turning a 400 page novel into a 7,200 minute weekly drama in a contemporary setting should be considered an adaptation success. As we all know, Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil wrote Aşk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love) 110 years ago. Its plot is quite simple. Ambitious widow Firdevs has her eyes set on marriage with the wealthy Adnan bey but Adnan, a widower with two children, Nihal and Bülent, chooses to marry Bihter, Firdevs’ younger daughter. In the meantime, Bihter falls in love with Adnan’s nephew, Behlül. But the young man, after having an affair with Bihter, decides to marry her cousin, Nihal. At the end, Bihter commits suicide. The whole drama has been revolving around this plot for almost 2 years.

Turkish television scene, even there was only a single channel, showed great interest in adapting the book. At the time, one of the most famous actresses in Turkey, Müjde Ar played Bihter in a seductive and daring way on TRT, public broadcaster. That version was totally loyal to the book. The new version, on the other hand, is total stretch to 79 episodes showing high-society Istanbul life in luxurious settings with a strong emphasis on class division and including many turns and twists in the story.
During the last episode of Aşk-ı Memnu, the streets were literally empty, there was no phone ring yet there were lots of tweets on the Twitter. Twitter was full of hilarious comments about the plot. For instance, Ahmet Hakan, a columnist and a talk-show presenter tweeted saying that he tried to throw a party for non-Aşk-ı Memnu watchers yet only one person showed up. That person ended up watching the show.

What made Aşk-ı Memnu so irresistible to so many people? At the end of the day, it was an extremely cheesy soap opera with bad acting, unrealistic lines and two-dimensional characters. Haven’t we already moved beyond the series like Dallas or Dynasty years ago? Obviously not. Now we have our own wealthy people in misery. Besides, those good looking people wear classy designer clothes, carry expensive jewellery and ride fast convertible cars. Although the success of many domestically-produced series comes from not being sexually explicit or offensive to the Turkish family structure, Aşk-ı Memnu was not one of them. The regulatory board, RTÜK (Higher Board of Radio and Television) has never been happy about the script. The board gave a warning to Kanal D, the television station for acting against the Turkish family values. RTÜK, as the guardian of our family structure also fined and wrote a long report on the love making scene in Aşk-ı Memnu which caused a hype that boosted the ratings on that week. What actually seemed to bother RTÜK was a woman’s having an affair with a nephew of her husband. This could have set a very bad example for our happily married people with no word such as cheating in their dictionary.

In any way, every three out of four people with a television on watched Aşk-ı Memnu the other night in Turkey. Millions of people glued to television screen, mesmerized. The ones who were abroad like my mother watched it on the Internet the next day. For three hours, millions of people collectively believed once again that money did not bring happiness and lived in a fantasy world. We can easily blame the popular culture for offering people false escape from the realities of life. In the midst of coverage of terror, death, and despair, it seems like we needed that escape after all.