Midnight Return, a new documentary by Sally Sussman, looks at the the long, complicated legacy of Midnight Express, paying particular attention to the strain that the film put on American-Turkish relations.
There are certain films so powerful that they fundamentally change the way we experience reality. Jaws famously made oceanside bathers skittish. A Nightmare on Elm Street turned bedtime into a trial for generations of impressionable teens. Mrs. Doubtfire made it impossible to order a simple jambalaya supper without exclaiming, "Hot jambalaya!" And 1978's Midnight Express, in which an American college student is busted smuggling two kilos of premium hashish out of Istanbul, is responsible for introducing the very concept of a "Turkish prison" into the popular lexicon.
The film was referenced on Seinfeld, on The Simpsons and on a Nine Inch Nails record. At least until 1999's Brokedown Palace, which saw Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale locked up in a Thai prison under similar suspicions of drug muling, it was pretty much taken for granted that, as far as prisons go, a Turkish prison was the absolute worst.
Midnight Return, a new documentary by Sally Sussman, looks at the the long, complicated legacy of Midnight Express, paying particular attention to the strain that the film put on American-Turkish relations. As written by Oliver Stone (who won an Oscar for his Scared Straight!-style screenplay) and directed by the Brit Alan Parker, the story of Billy Hayes's arrest, trial and escape was taken to task for its uncharitable depiction of Turkish government functionaries, Turkish jailers and the Turkish people more generally.
As figured in Midnight Express, Turkey constitutes little more than an ambiguous, foreign Bad Guy. "Who wants to defend the Turks?" asked critic Pauline Kael, lambasting Midnight Express in The New Yorker in late 1978. "They don't even constitute enough of a movie market for Columbia Pictures to be concerned about how they're represented."
For their part, Stone and Parker defend their decision in Midnight Return, insisting that plunking a sympathetic Turkish character into the script would have amounted to mere tokenizing. They simultaneously maintain that the idea of a "Good Turk" character never occurred to them.
Whatever the case, the film was banned in Turkey for its "anti-Turk rhetoric," with global embassies releasing statements encouraging the protest of the film. For a nation finagling its way into an increasingly globalized West, Midnight Express was a public-relations disaster. Midnight Return tracks something of this fallout, following Hayes's recent attempts to broker a truce between America (or at least himself) and the Turkish government.
It's a fine idea for a doc: gauging the geopolitical consequences of a cult film best known to contemporary audiences for its screeching hysterics and driving Giorgio Moroder synth score. Other recent documentaries have done tremendous work prodding the larger, often toxic imprint of famous films; Rodney Ascher's doc Room 237, recalling Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, comes to mind, as does Alexandre O. Philippe's 78/52: Hitchcock's Shower Scene, a feature-length deconstruction of Psycho's infamous shower scene. A movie about the post-Midnight Express political boondoggle has the potential to accomplish something similar.
But Sussman crams in way too much. Return looks at Hayes's original escape (rendered, for some reason, in sketchy animation), the film's rushed production and reception, and Hayes's hesitant return to Turkey. In trying to be so many things – a biopic about Billy Hayes, a Midnight Express making-of doc, a reflection on Turkish-American political relations – Midnight Return rambles and meanders, losing the plot along the way.
Worse, the film does little to actually interrogate Hayes himself, who is something of a narcissistic, self-aggrandizing figure. Granted, a life sentence in a dank foreign prison for drug smuggling may seem excessively harsh by any standard. But why should anyone believe that Hayes was strapping whole bricks of hash to his body for "personal use"? Sussman flirts with such questions but never presses them. Hayes's quasi-sympathetic image as abused innocent abroad feels as unearned in Sussman's doc as it does in Parker's original film. It's a case of a documentarian seeming so enamoured with their subject, and their access to it, that they never bother to sufficiently cross-examine that subject.
Whatever work Midnight Return does to examine the film's controversy also feels undone by the way in which it extends its cult cachet. Instead of complicating its legacy as a hysterical nightmare for gallivanting foreign tourists, Sussman merely consolidates that legacy. And just when you thought it was safe to smuggle hash across the tarmac of a Turkish airport.