Netflix's long-awaited adaptation of Museum of Innocence has finally hit the screens. Zeynep Günay's direction presents Istanbul in the 1970s like a painting, while the performances of Selahattin Paşalı and Eylül Lize Kandemir take the story beyond a period drama and turn it into a psychological thriller. However, the success of the series does not distract us from the ancient and disturbing question: Is it love that Kemal feels, or is it class arrogance woven with a passion for property?
An Engaged Bourgeois and a Distant Relative
Based on Orhan Pamuk's cult novel, the film begins in 1975, when Kemal Basmacı, the son of a wealthy family, is about to get engaged to Sibel, a member of his own class, when he meets his distant and poor relative Füsun. The forbidden and passionate relationship between Kemal and 18-year-old Füsun, who works as a clerk in a boutique, culminates in Kemal breaking off the engagement. However, Füsun disappears. Finding Füsun eight years later as a married woman, Kemal goes to the house for eight years to see her and builds a “museum” by collecting every object belonging to Füsun (from cigarette butts to salt shakers).
The question of whether Füsun is an object in Kemal's labyrinth is also on the viewer's mind. Although Kemal Basmacı seems to be a modern bourgeois with a Western upbringing, he acts with a “collector” instinct from the moment his interest in Füsun begins. The mesmerizing use of light and space in the series perfectly reflects how Kemal transforms Füsun into a “museum piece” at the point where he finds her unattainable. Are the stolen objects a memento of a love affair, or is it Kemal's domination over objects because he cannot confine Füsun to his own world?
To put it critically, we can say that Kemal does not love Füsun, but he loves the effect of “innocence” that Füsun has left on him and appropriates her as a collector's item.
What about Fusun's equation for skipping class?
Let's come to the most debated question: Was Füsun's emotion really love? How effective was the desire to “move up in class” in the bond between an 18-year-old girl with dreams and Kemal, her rich relative who was about to get married? In the rigid class divisions of the 1970s, was Füsun's attraction to Kemal only a matter of the heart? If Kemal had not been rich, would Füsun have taken the social pressure of virginity so easily? The fact that Füsun's mother is aware of this situation and remains silent can be read as the silent approval of a lower middle class family's hope of climbing to the ’upper league“ through their daughter. For Füsun, Kemal had the potential to be both an object of desire and a ticket to class salvation.
The show's approach to bold scenes is a real bar-raising for the Turkish TV series industry. However, what draws attention here is not only the aesthetic success of these scenes, but also the perspective on women. While in Turkey, such scenes are usually discussed by bashing the female actor, the performance in this series serves the dramatic structure of the story (the taboo of virginity and the class difference at the time). Füsun's surrender in those scenes is actually proof that she took the biggest gamble of her life. While the man (Kemal) can always return to his status, the fact that the woman (Füsun) invests her entire existence in this relationship is a mirror held up to the social hypocrisy of that day and today.
What we are left with after watching the series is not only a sad love story, but also how the sense of ownership eats away at love. Kemal is in love not with Füsun, but with the “lack” in Füsun's life. And Füsun is perhaps not in love with Kemal, but with the unattainable and glittering world that Kemal represents. The Museum of Innocence shows us not the purest form of love, but the wounds inflicted on the human soul by class difference, the taboo of virginity and the desire to possess.
Zeynep Günay and the entire team should be congratulated for translating this difficult text into cinematic language so successfully. The increase in the number of such quality works in Turkey is the most concrete proof of how far the industry has come.
Is it successful in the end? Yes, absolutely.
I have a few more sentences that I don't want to end without adding. Another topic on the agenda is that book sales have exploded in Google searches since the series went on air, stocks are sold out, and Orhan Pamuk is “trending” again.
“The fact that digital searches peaked with the release of the series and bookshelves started to be filled with the Museum of Innocence once again proved the ‘reminder’ power of popular culture over literature. ”
However, a comment should be made on this picture: How healthy is it for literature to be “remembered” only when it becomes an object of visual consumption?
Does the modern reader have to wait for an approval from the Netflix library to dive into a 600-page text? The fact that movies and TV series feed literature is an industrial success, yes; but the fact that the value of the book is tied to an algorithm leap is proof that the culture of in-depth reading has succumbed to the speed of “watch and pass”.
With love