the big crime
by Douglas Messerli
Oliver Stone (screenplay, based on the book by
Billy Hayes and William Hoffer), Alan Parker (director) Midnight Express /
1978
Alan Parker’s 1978 prison film Midnight
Express is not an LGBTQ movie in the least, but it is of interest within
this context precisely for what is missing in the film. If there was ever a
work of cinema that, despite its many homoerotic images, was created within the
umbrella of violent xenophobia and homophobia it is this film.
In
the film screenwriter Oliver Stone winnowed down the true adventure story into
a fictional, uninspiring series of events in which the character of Hayes
(played by Brad Davis) attempts to bribe the brutal head guard Hamidou (Paul L.
Smith) to free him, but is instead taken to an empty attached building in which
the guard intends to rape him but, when Hayes pushes him off, falls back into a
rack of wall hangers, impaling himself. (In truth, the figure upon which
Hamidou is based was shot and killed at an Istanbul café by an ex-prisoner
weeks earlier). Dressing up as a guard, Hayes grabs up the outer door key and
walks into freedom, even doing a little victory leap as he realizes he has
finally escaped.
It’s truly odd that the film creates a possible fictional homosexual
incident at film’s end while utterly refusing to depict the actual gay
relationship between Hayes and his fellow prisoner, the young Swedish man Erich
(Norbert Weisser) that perhaps helped him retain his sanity throughout much of
his prison stay. But I’ll return to this issue later.
It
is, in fact, fascinating for how Stone and others involved in this film chose
to exclude so much of the truly revelatory events of Hayes horrific Turkish
adventure to replace them with violent, xenophobic, and homophobic incidents.
You might almost say that the filmmakers went out of their way to create of
hate film out of what might have been a truly inspirational and spiritually
uplifting LGBTQ-friendly adventure saga, even if personally I’m far more
interested in the internal prison scenes than in any portrayal of escape the
movie might have depicted.
But
let us start from beginning. In the film, the young, willfully naïve American
student Billy Hayes, traveling with his girlfriend, Susan (Irene Miracle) on
holiday in Istanbul, Turkey in 1970,
straps 2 kilograms of hashish bricks to his
chest, without telling Susan. Despite his quite evident nervousness and, at one
point, his determination to almost back out on his smuggling intentions, he
makes it through the terminal check. But this was a time in Turkey of several
outside terrorist threats and airplane bombings, and as they approach the
actual plane, he is met with another check as they board the plane on the
tarmac. Patted down by guards, he is immediately arrested and detained.
Despite Billy’s understandable fears as he undergoes further body and
luggage checks, Parker infuses the events with a somewhat comic putdown of
Turkish forces as Billy is interrogated again and again by Turkish guards who
speak little if any English as they, in turn, are upbraided by their superiors
for their incompetence when they find, during the final compete strip-search,
that the prisoner has also hidden a couple of bricks in his boots.
Soon after, Hayes is whisked away by a supposed, English-speaking ally,
whom he nicknames "Tex” (Bo Hopkins) who asks him to point out the cabbie
who sold him the stuff; but after attempting and failing at a fairly exciting
early escape, Billy discovers what he will relearn again and again throughout
the narrative: he can trust no one. The English-speaking figure who may be
connected to the consul is, in fact, a Turkish liaison, who is just as ready to
kill the kid as see to help him get a lesser sentence. And we realize at that
moment, as does Billy, that his situation is far more serious than he
previously might have imagined.
But before we proceed to the internecine battles and complexities of the
Turkish justice system, let us back up for a moment and reconsider the truth as
expressed in the book upon which this film is based.
First of all Billy Hayes was not some naïve kid who had, almost on a
lark, determined to take home some hashish to sell only to his best friends. In
fact, Hayes had made three previous successful smuggling trips before the one
in which he was caught in 1970, and he was not traveling with his girlfriend at
the time. He was, however, obviously naïve about what being caught might
represent. Even today is a strong advocate of drug legalization. As Hayes
himself expresses it: “I was smuggling drugs. I'm from the '60s, I don't think
people should be arrested for it. Don't put people in jail—teach your kids
about it.”
You can hardly blame Stone for not incorporating this into his script,
however, since that fact had not been included in the Hayes-Hoffer book or was
mentioned by Hayes during the filming, since, as he expressed it in a later Variety
interview, “My lawyer informed me I would be opening myself up to arrest in
the U.S. by admitting prior smuggling trips. We were also concerned that the
Turkish government would ask for my extradition, so it was clear to us I needed
to protect myself.” In fact, Stone has claimed on at least one occasion that
had he known the truth he would not have signed on to write the script.
As we can easily perceive, moreover, there are a great many benefits to
representing Billy as a first-time innocent since it makes his imprisonment and
the extreme punishment doled out by the Turkish justice system seem absurd,
while positioning the character as a slightly delinquent 23-year-old with whom
we can empathize and about whom we can feel a great deal of sympathy.
Certainly, it justifies his later furious outbursts when, after having served
three years as a basically model prisoner, his punishment is suddenly extended
to life.
It
might have been fascinating, however, to see what might happen in a film in
which the handsome and likeable Billy had actually smuggled out hashish (known
in the US mostly as cannabis and marijuana) several times. Would the audience
of the day immediately have turned upon him, or even felt that the outrageous
sentences he received were justified? Or might we have begun to become a bit
enlightened on the ridiculousness of arresting and imprisoning men and women
for possession and use of a drug which today is increasingly recognized as
relatively mild and, in numerous cases, even beneficial in helping certain
medical conditions. It truly might have been fascinating if Stone had further
explored the ideas which Billy expresses in the first part of his final words
to the judge after he has been re-sentenced to life imprisonment—a sentence
rendered, in part, because of the Turkish attempts to show the world,
particularly with pressure from the US, that they were serious about outlawing
drugs—in the context of knowing about that character’s earlier behavior. Today
the character’s beginning argument in that scene—at a time when many states and
nations have reconsidered and totally altered their attitudes toward
cannabis—resonates with new meaning:
When I’m finished you’ll
sentence me for my crime. So let me ask
you now. What is a crime? What
is punishment? It seems to vary
from time to time, from place
to place. What’s legal today is suddenly
illegal tomorrow because some
society says it’s so. And what was
illegal yesterday is legal
because everybody is doing it, and you can’t
put everybody in jail. I’m not
saying this is right or wrong. I’m just
saying that’s the way it is.
I’ve spent three and a
half years of my life in your prison, and I
think I’ve paid for my error.
And if it’s your decision today to sentence
me to more years then I’m....
Had
we had the same perspective then as we do today, we might have realized that
the absurdity of his arrestment and the impossibly long sentences might as well
have been applied to US prisons as it was directed in this film upon the
Turkish prison system and their confused sense of justice. Indeed, what if the
Billy in the film was not a beautiful white kid from New York who had been attending
school at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (in the very same year,
incidentally, when I was attending the University of Wisconsin in that same
city) but an unemployed black man from Alabama or Texas? It might have meant
for a truly profound statement about prisons and injustice internationally.
Unfortunately, Stone’s script suddenly goes berserk, launching a
diatribe through is character of the Turkish people in general:
I’ve been playing it cool. And I’ve been good. And now I’m
damn tired of being good. Because you people gave me the belief
that I had 53 days left. You hung 53 days in front of my face and then
you just took those days away. ...The concept of a society is based
on the quality of that mercy, its sense of fair play, its sense of
justice.
But I guess that’s asking a bear to shit in a toilet. For a nation of
pigs
it sure is funny you don’t eat them. Jesus Christ forgave the bastards,
but I can’t. I hate. I hate you, I hate your nation, and I hate your
people.
I fuck your sons and daughters because they’re pigs. You’re a pig.
You’re all pigs.
When you have a “hero” whose qualifications for that role might seem a
little bit tainted, you need, evidently Stone and Parker feel, to paint all the
others around him as horrific monsters. As critic David Denby correctly argued,
Midnight Express is “merely anti-Turkish, and hardly a defense of
prisoners’ rights or a protest against prison conditions.” In her book Turkish
Reflections: A Biography of Place writer Mary Lee Settle wrote: "The
Turks I saw in Lawrence of Arabia and Midnight Express were like
cartoon caricatures, compared to the people I had known and lived among for
three of the happiest years of my life." In her New Yorker review
Pauline Kael quite sarcastically observed: "This story could have happened
in almost any country, but if Billy Hayes had planned to be arrested to get the
maximum commercial benefit from it, where else could he get the advantages of a
Turkish jail? Who wants to defend Turks? (They don’t even constitute enough of
a movie market for Columbia Pictures to be concerned about how they are
represented.)"
After the release of this film, Turkish
tourism fell off nearly 95%, making Hayes one of the most hated people in
modern Turkish history.
Hayes has repeatedly said that not only did he not curse out the judge
who sent down the life-time sentence, but that, outside of his experiences in
Sagmalcilar jail, he loved Turkey and its people; and after the movie he put
himself in danger by returning to Turkey to proclaim his admiration of the
country and its people.
In
the film, the character’s now justified anger results in his attacking his
fellow Turkish inmate who, in revealing their attempts to escape through the
catacombs below, caused the arrestment and torture of his friend, Jimmy (Randy
Quaid), who had already lost a testicle due to a previous beating. In the movie
Billy goes on a rampage, insanely pulling out a station of sinks in order to
beat and bite off the tongue of the hated snitch, Rifki (Paolo Bonacelli)—all
which land him in the criminally insane ward from which he finally escapes.
But in truth. nothing like that ever happened. He did have a temporary
mental breakdown and was locked away for a while in the prison sanitorium, but
no violence was involved he claims. And basically he was treated well in the
prison, spending most of his time in utter boredom. Even the seemingly brutal
foot-beating he received on his first day in prison after stealing a blanket,
he recalls, was “an example of falaka, a light beating, and there was no
sex attack. They cane your feet and to outsiders it seems like a horrible thing
but it’s not that bad. At the time, I thought it was killing me, but I soon
discovered that it wasn't a bad beating. Later on, I discovered what a bad
beating was—they would break bones if they thought you had hash or information
they wanted.”
Clearly, the years have softened Hayes’
perspective of his prison life, although it still sounds rather horrific.
Yet the violence and xenophobic hatred of the film was apparently
created in the studio, not in the bowels of Sagmalcilar. By this time, however,
the director and his writer had invested so much love into their central figure
that they were nearly desperate to show him suffering as a nearly Christ-like
figure.
Perhaps the very best decision Parker made was to cast Brad Davis in the
part of Billy. Davis, a bisexual who later died of a suicide as he neared the
last stages of AIDS in 1991, was so extremely photogenic that cinematographer
Michael Seresin and Parker can hardly keep their hand-held camera off of him.
When they are not showing the ballooned-headed faces of rotund Turks who all
look like they were painted by the Columbian artist Fernando Botero, Davis’
sculpted face appears at the center of nearly every group frame, his hairy
pectorals accentuated whenever possible, and his rear fully displayed when
permissible.
If
someone told me that British director Parker, who was married twice to women
and fathered five children was secretly gay and had the hots for Davis, I
wouldn’t bat an eye in surprise. Clearly, Rainer Werner Fassbinder saw Davis as
the perfect gay Genet figure for his last film, Querelle, his camera
picking out the same body parts while allowing his actor to use them.
The
trouble of focusing on Davis’ beauty in Midnight Express is that, for
the most part, it was not “permissible.” Columbia studio head Daniel
Melnick proclaimed that there would be no sexual
Fortunately, the scene remains, but instead of continuing with the
expected moment of sexual release, Billy turns away, vaguely shaking his head
in the negative. That small gesture says almost everything about this film,
which rejects not only the truth of the actual events—in Hayes’ book he does
not shake his head but becomes Erich’s lover—but with the way this film
rejected all the important truths it might have explored instead of the
violence and hatred upon which it is centered: the need to question the very
reasons for imprisonment, the importance of challenging racial hatreds, and the
necessity of maintaining personal identity and the expression of sexuality in
order to survive. Even the failed prison movie of 1971, Fortune and Men’s
Eyes handles these concerns better, and as early as 1928 Sex in Chains had
very well expressed the love that develops between male prisoners. And finally,
one must ask if in court he claims to have been fucking all Turkey’s men and
women, when and how did this ever occur? Even Stone’s writing seems to be
telling a lie.
By
1978, moreover, in a decade that had seen major works of LGBTQ cinema by the
likes of Fassbinder, Luchino Visconti, Rosa von Praunheim, Sidney Lumet, Lino
Brocka, Lasse Nielsen, Derek Jarman, Ron Peck, Wolfgang Petersen, and others,
to say nothing of Andy Warhol of a decade earlier there was no longer any
excuse to refuse to express homosexual relationships on film, especially in
prison. Midnight Express appeared, it is important to remember, a full 8
years after Stonewall. Americans should no longer have had to been told only
half-truths of such important stories.
The
irony of Hayes’ statement as expressed in the film itself might easily be
applied to the blinkers put on this movie by its writer, director, and studio
head: “'Homosexuality ... is a big crime here, but most of them do it every
chance they get.” The hypocrisy of that observation was not simply about the
Turks, it turns out, but about the US filmmakers who refused to show what they
allowed their character to put into language.
Los Angeles, May 13, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (May 2021).
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