Reading, Watching, Listening #10

The Wild Pear Tree, criminal influencers, reading holy books, Süleyman Demirel

Hi folks,

I’m still slaving away at my book. Meanwhile, politics in Turkey is as eventful as ever. I’ll cover some of that in a future post.

Today I thought I’d go over some of the things I’ve been reading and watching the past few weeks. Enjoy!

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The Wild Pear Tree, by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Ceylan is comfortably the most famous director in Turkey today, and for good reason. His films sparkle with life. Characters have immense depth to them, and I especially like how dialogues contain little worlds of their own. These are definitely films that reward repeated viewings. For all that, I hadn’t seen The Wild Pear Tree (Ahlat Ağacı), his 2018 film, up until a couple of weeks ago.

It’s the story of Sinan (Doğu Demirkol), who just graduated university in Istanbul to become a teacher, and now returns to his family home in the small town of Çan, in Çanakkale province. Sinan is supposed to prepare to take state exams and get placed as a teacher, but his heart isn’t in it. What he really wants is to get his novel published.

So we get to look over Sinan’s shoulder as he tries to get his bearings back home. He’s trying to scrape together money to get his manuscript printed (typical of that business), deal with his father’s gambling debts, and make sense of his place as a would-be writer from a provincial background. The movie’s core though, is Sinan’s relationship with his father (Murat Cemcir). There is a silent push and pull between the two characters that’s masterfully portrayed by Demirkol and Cemcir. It’s beyond my powers of summary at this point, but do go and watch it!

What’s perhaps more pertinent to the politically oriented is the center-periphery theme running through the movie, not just in terms of location, but ambition as well. Sinan has high standards for himself. He has the soul of an artist. He yearns for a life as a writer, to examine the folds of his life, but his circumstances as a poor, unemployed holder of a teaching degree is pulling him in a different direction.

People who complete training as teachers in Turkey are a notoriously frustrated demographic. Teaching is a relatively sought-after career path because it’s a steady paycheck, low risk, and has long, built-in vacation time. That’s why far more people train to be teachers than can be employed. Would-be teachers graduate from university, take placement exams, then wait for appointments. That wait can take months, even years, and is often extremely frustrating. No good comes from people in their early-to-mid 20s living in their parents’ house and waiting for a letter from the government.

The problem of the teachers who can’t be appointed (“atanamayan öğretmen”) has long been the subject of political discussion. That’s why the government will often arrange for big a big batch of teacher appointments right before elections, but it’s still not nearly enough to unclog the bottleneck of people waiting for their appointments.

Young men who get sick of the wait will often just sign up for the police academy. Sinan is thinking about it too, at one point calling the police academy, “the meeting point of teachers who can’t be appointed.” In another scene, he has a long conversation with a friend from college who’s now a cop. The tenor of the conversation is pitch perfect. The guys are frustrated, cynical and slightly sadistic, yet also somehow empathetic and relaxed. Here it is:

Part of the movie’s charm is that Doğu Demirkol, who plays Sinan, wasn’t actually much of a “serious actor” before this. He did some comedies and standup, but that’s it. The movie seems to have raised his profile, which he’s using to energize his comedy. In Doğu, a show on BluTV, he plays a sarcastic young man from a conservative family, bumbling about with a stubborn Anatolian accent. It’s good stuff.

I’ll leave you with this clip from that show: