The film depiction of a young American incarcerated in a Turkish prison following his conviction on charges relating to drug trafficking was controversial at the time of its release, and remains so today. But does the film have any merits as a portrayal of prison? Sean O'Sullivan investigates the status and worth of the prison-movie classic Midnight Express.
I have a vague memory of seeing the film Midnight Express (1978) at sometime back in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Strangely, I can't remember if I saw it in a cinema on its initial release, or when it was first shown on television sometime after. But, many years later, I could, at best, only vaguely remember one or two of the film's more memorable scenes - something about a tongue being bitten out and spat across a room.
Midnight Express was a ‘must see movie', one which enjoyed a reputation ahead of its viewing as being a harrowing portrayal of one man's descent into the nightmarish hell of a Turkish prison. At the time, to have seen the film was deserving of some school-boy kudos. But, despite this, my recollection is that I didn't like the film, and thought it somewhat over-rated. Now, more than 25 years after its initial release, Midnight Express has recently been reissued on DVD, and the debate as to its merits continues to rage, on internet film review sites and message boards. So, when recently asked by the editor of PSJ to contribute a piece on a prison-film 'classic', I was happy to take on the task of appraising Midnight Express. What might we learn from re-visiting the film today?
Courting Controversy?
The controversy surrounding Midnight Express is relatively easy to understand. The film is based on the 'true story' of Billy Hayes, who in 1970 was arrested at Istanbul Airport attempting to smuggle two kilos of hashish out of Turkey. Hayes subsequently documented his Turkish prison experiences in his book 'Midnight Express'. The film is an adaptation of the book, with Oliver Stone providing the screenplay, (Brit) Alan Parker, directing, and with Hayes acting as advisor.
The resulting film showed a fairly unflattering portrayal of Turkish prisons. Its release outraged the Turkish government, who protested the showing of the film at the Cannes Film festival, and attempted to prevent it being screened in Europe. The film showed Hayes, and other non-Turkish nationals, receiving brutal beatings at the hands of their Turkish captors, their health and sanity deteriorating dangerously under the conditions of their captivity. The entire film is set up to imply that prison conditions in Turkey are so bad, and the justice system so capricious and unreliable, that Hayes had no option but to, catch 'the midnight express' - i.e. organise his own escape.
The case against Midnight Express is that it advanced a racist / ethnocentric portrayal of the Turkish people, and provided a sensationalist and inaccurate depiction of Turkish prison conditions. Much of the available comment and analysis relating to the film charges that Stone and Parker (aided and abetted by Hayes), presided over a badly mishandled process of adaptation, in which events in the book are composited and embellished with dramatic license, to the extent that the resulting film is gross distortion of the experience it purports to describe.
Influence Today.... and Does It Matter?
Despite the controversy and criticism it has attracted over the years, the film remains popular and significant today. A new generation of film fans can view the film on DVD, or on its occasional television screenings, and the film generates a healthy stream of comments posted to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and other film review websites. Midnight Express scores a more than respectable 7.6 out of 10 rating on the IMDb - which is perhaps surprising given that that an identifiable section of the audience loath and detest the film, and so presumably vote low on it!
The film and book have undoubtedly exerted a wider influence. So much so, that there is now a whole sub-genre of books and films addressing the experience of the drug-trafficking-'innocent'-incarcerated-abroad, all of which in someway nod in the direction of Midnight Express as the founding instance of the genre. So for example, the Australian Warren Fellows (1998) authored his account of his prison experiences as: The Damage Done: Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison. The book is emblazoned on its front cover with an endorsement that it is ‘A gruelling cautionary tale reminiscent of Midnight Express'. A host of other books cover similar ground, and the 'innocent' who is imprisoned abroad on drugs-related charges, receives screen portrayal in the films Return to Paradise (Malaysia) and Brokedown Palace (Thailand), and in the Australian TV mini-series Bangkok Hilton (Nicole Kidman in Thailand) - all of which are currently available on DVD.
The existence of this sub-genre of books / films poses a challenge for the theorist who wishes to champion prison movies. In a recent issue of this journal, Jamie Bennett argued that prison is a topic relatively neglected by news media, and that the prison film is one of the few spaces in society where the institution of prison is held up for scrutiny and examination (Bennett, 2005).Wilson and O'Sullivan (2004) have gone further, arguing that prison is a relatively underdramatised topic, and that all screen portrayals of prison are to be welcomed! If we see a prison film with a message in that we don't like, then rather than wish that the film had never been made, we should instead critique the portrayal, and attempt to influence the way in which it is consumed and understood. Given that Midnight Express (the film) can quite justifiably be accused of putting a sensationalised view of prison that provides little real insight into 'the pains of incarceration', it would seem to provide a significant test case for the arguments of the 'prison film optimists'. Is it possible to salvage any 'good' out of the 'bad' that was the screen portrayal of Midnight Express?
A Case of Maladaptation...Guilty As Charged!
It is probably the case that no film could adapt any book faithfully. The differences between the two media are such that the production of a film will most likely require a compositing of events or characters, etc. More than this, a film will require a narrative structure that works as a film. Film adaptations are usually attempting to do something different to the book they are based on - in this instance to 'popularise' rather than to 'document'. The suggestion that 'the film wasn't the book', can sometimes amount to a fairly empty criticism in film analysis. However, in the case of Midnight Express, it is worth examining the significant differences which arise between the film and book.
Firstly, Billy Hayes was incarcerated in Istanbul's Sagmalcilar prison which was of modern design, having only recently been built in the mid 1960s. The film was shot in a disused army barracks in Malta, giving the prison a distinct 'olde worlde' look and feel. In the book events take place in three locations, Sagmalcilar prison, a separate lunatic asylum at Bakirkoy, and the Prison Island of Imrali, from which Hayes eventually escaped. The compositing of these to one location in the film might in part be for reasons of economy and 'technical necessity‘, but equally the compositing decision heightens Billy's prison experience as a nightmare journey in to hell.
In the film, Billy is implied to be at risk of homosexual assault by the guard Hamid on two occasions, and is once propositioned by a fellow prisoner whose advances he rejects. In the book the assault scenes do not occur and Billy engages in a consensual and mutually beneficial same-sex relationship with his fellow inmate. This is deliberately excluded from the film to keep Billy heterosexual. In the film, Billy's girlfriend, Susan, visits him at a time when he has become 'a babbling mess'. Talking through a glass screen, Bill become fascinated with her breasts and pleads with her to remove her top. Shocked by his depravity, Susan tells Billy that he has to pull himself together and get himself out of there - the turning point in the film. In the book, Billy's pen-friend, ex-girl friend, Lillian, visits and they enact a much tamer version of the film scene, with the important difference that Lillian urges Billy not to attempt escape whilst legal / diplomatic avenues are still being explored to secure his release.
In the film, it is implied that Billy has to attempt escape because the legal system reviews his original four year sentence and substitutes one of thirty years. In the book, we are told that Billy's 30 year sentence is subsequently reduced by two successive amnesties. By the time of his escape he has three years left to serve, and has already been moved to a lower security classification prison. In the film, when Billy learns in court of his new thirty year sentence he gives a speech in which begins by observing that laws vary from time to time and place to place, but which turns into a rant with Billy declaring his hate for the Turkish ‘nation of pigs'. In the book the 'hate you' section of the speech is replaced by: ‘If your decision today must sentence me to more prison, I cannot agree with you. All I can do…is forgive you…' (Hayes, 1977: 167). And, there are any number of other instances where events that occur in the book diverge from their screen representation, with the decisions being made always serving to heighten the story of Midnight Express as being a descent into the nightmarish hell that is the Turkish prison / criminal justice system.
The film would clearly appear to be guilty of sensationalising Hayes' prison experience. Dramatic license turns Hayes into an action-hero, who bites out tongues and slays his prison oppressors in his bid for escape. Perhaps more serious than this are some of the more subtle ways in which lighting and cinematography are use to convey the impression of Turkey as alien, exotic and 'other'. Arguably, most neutrals would hold Midnight Express guilty of constructing a 'racist' / ethnocentric portrayal of the Turkish people. Indeed, both Hayes and Parker, have subsequently suggested that they accept that a more balanced portrayal would have been justified. The implication is that if they were to make the film again, then with hindsight, they may have made it differently. However, it is not clear that the film could have modified or abandoned its narrative strategy, and it may be that there is a more fundamental problem at work here than the naivety of the film's director.
Deeper Problems?
Some might argue that the sensationalism of Midnight Express is not accidental but merely par for the course for prison movies. Mike Nellis has recorded scepticism as to the extent to which popular prison films can provide insights in to the experience of incarceration. He suggests:
Many prison movies are made in deliberate bad faith, utilising the horrors of imprisonment only for their dramatic potential and indifferent to any wider significance which they might have (Nellis: 1982: 44).
Nellis has suggested that such films create a repertoire of 'infernal imagery' (Nellis, 1988). We can suggest that this imagery itself distances these screen portrayals from perceived penal realities. If prison films (or books) display 'the world's most notorious / toughest jails', then this suggests that the excesses they describe are the product of exceptional regimes, something different to 'our prisons', which by default are assumed to be moderately temperate and well run. Accounts of the 'innocent' incarcerated abroad, invariably produce accounts of prison safely distanced as to be occurring somewhere else, and so perhaps not something ‘we' here at home need worry about.
To return to Nellis's main point, are these films made in 'deliberate bad faith'? In the case of Midnight Express both the book and the film appear to have been made with the intention of drawing attention to the fate of non-nationals imprisoned in the drug -exporting countries - some of whom would be facing apparently draconian sentences for their participation in the traffic of drugs which some might see as constituting a 'popular illegality' (Foucault, 1977). We need to ask why a sincerely motivated attempt to capture one person's experience of incarceration, produced a film which is now held to be a gross distortion.
Most discussions of Midnight Express assume that the film is a poor adaptation of the book - and as discussed above, there is plenty of evidence for this. However, many of the problems with the film, are present also in the book. There, Hayes repeatedly expresses the need to escape, regardless of how long he has to run on his sentence at any time. Hayes resents the fact that he is being imprisoned for the transportation of hashish (a popular illegality), and also assumes from the outset that his time spent in Turkish prison is / will be worse than if he was incarcerated at home. The book ‘Midnight Express' puts a thoroughly ethnocentric critique of Hayes' prison experience. The comment where Hayes tells his father: 'I've learned a lot about the Turks. I don't trust them. This isn't the good old United States' is not untypical of the book.
Commentators such as Morgan (1999) and Nellis (2002) have championed the ability of serious prisoner autobiographies to add to our qualitative understanding of prison. In the past, memorable prison autobiographies have come from first-time offenders who experience prison as something as a shock to the system. The accounts of these 'straights' often chart ‘a journey into disillusionment' and ‘a loss of faith with officialdom'. As Morgan suggests: ‘In these texts the sense of a loss of innocence, of the betrayal of belief in a coherent and fair system of justice, is marked' (Morgan, 1999: 336). However, in the case of Billy Hayes and other 'straights abroad', this loss of faith in officialdom is deflected into resentment towards the imprisoning country.
The problem in basing the film Midnight Express on Hayes's true story is that the book itself is the product of a limited experience. Hayes has no experience of the US penal system, and no way of knowing if his experience in Turkish prisons is worse than he would experience at home. The limitations of his experience lead Hayes' to develop very little solidarity with ordinary prisoners either in Turkey or the US, and to see the solution to the problem of non-nationals imprisoned abroad in terms of prisoner exchange treaties.
A contrast to the experience documented in ‘Midnight Express' is generated by the case of Sandra Gregory as told in her book, Forget You Had a Daughter: Doing Time in the ‘Bangkok Hilton' . Gregory served four years in Bangkok's Lard Yao prison before being repatriated to the UK, where she served a further three and a half years in various British jails, including H Wing of HMP Durham. Of the British penal system she states:
The conditions in Lard Yao had been awful but the psychological effects of the British prison service were far worse than what I had experienced in Bangkok (Gregory, 2003: 204).
She characterises H Wing of HMP Durham as ‘a modern dungeon…oppressive and claustrophobic' (Gregory, 2003: 222) and criticises the epidemic of psychological distress and self-harm she observes on the wing. (Gregory's highly critical assessment of H Wing was subsequently confirmed when, five years later, the Inspector of Prisons Ann Owers recommended the Wing for closure, suggesting that the jail was "oppressive" and an "unsuitable environment to hold women"). One wonders, however, what kind of book Hayes would have written if he had been repatriated from Turkey to serve time in the US, and what kind of film might have resulted from it.
No Such Thing As A Bad prison Movie?
The prison-movie Midnight Express might be seen as doing a positive harm to the cause of penal justice. In constructing an ‘infernal prison', safely located some way away in Turkey, the film could encourage complacency about prison conditions at home. There is also some evidence that the books and films which document these ‘infernal prisons' are consumed in a stance of ‘shallow fascination' - readers / viewers revel in the horrors of the prison experience described, but nowhere do they mention in the reviews or comments they post that there is any need to reflect on what prison is per se; about what it does, or whether it is something we should be concerned about. Additionally, of course, the ethnocentric critique of prison in ‘Midnight Express' still outrages many Turkish people today who feel that the film did lasting harm to the perception of Turkey abroad.
It is not the purpose of this article to defend the film against these charges - which clearly contain a degree of truth. However, it is perhaps worth mentioning that virtually all of the criticisms made of the film over the years were aired at the time of its initial release. When, shortly after the film was released, Turkey and the US signed a prisoner exchange treaty, the diplomat signing on behalf the US explicitly distanced himself from the film, stating that it was a travesty as a representation of Turkish prisons, and recognising that Turkish prisoners in the US most likely faced an experience comparable to US prisoners in Turkish jails.
More recently, in December 2004, the BBC television news carried an item reporting discussions by the European Union considering how to respond to the issue of Turkish entry into the EU. The item reported that there was opposition in France and Germany to Turkish entry, and that this was based on some people in those countries still holding to the ‘myth of the terrible Turk'. The item used a clip from Midnight Express to illustrate negative perceptions of the Turkish people - the clip showing when Billy is taken down to the dungeon for a beating! Arguably, the slant of this report was that some sections of the French and German public are some what backward in their perceptions of Turkey, still subscribing to notions circulated in a twenty-year old, discredited prison film!
Bygones …Move On
The prison film optimists, who wish to state a case for believing that prison-movies can play a positive role in shaping the way we think about prison, need not worry too much about defending Midnight Express. In this author's view, it wasn't a great film at the time of its initial release, and still isn't today. It is slightly more worrying that the film's popularity endures to this day, and that it continues to attract the same ritual attacks and defences. Midnight Express is consumed by its audience in a fairly shallow manner - either rhetorically supporting or condemning Billy for his refusal to accept his sentence. There is little evidence that the film provokes any thought on the international politics which produce apparently draconian prison sentences in the drug-exporting countries.
Prison film theorists would be justified in simply forgetting Midnight Express and making a case for which prison films they think are worth watching. Of course, what one person regards as a ‘must see movie' someone else may regard as a ‘complete waste of space'. Practitioners within the penal system, have perhaps a tendency to disparage screen portrayals of prison for their lack of realism. It would perhaps be more revealing to hear from practitioners who can cite instances where screen portrayals have changed their perceptions and ideas, or where screen portrayals have been used as a springboard to debating real-world, prison issues. The category ‘prison film', should be taken to include stories about people going-to-prison, and offenders who have just-got-out-of-prison, there may be some valuable resources for thinking about prison here. Having recently co-authored a book on prison films, and built a website devoted to documenting the prison film tradition, I firmly believe that more use could be made of screen portrayals of prison as an educational resource, both inside and outside the prison service, I just wouldn't start with Midnight Express.
Selected Reading
Bennett, Jamie (2005), ‘24 Prisons a Second', Prison Service Journal No. 157 January
Fellows, Warren (1998), The Damage Done: Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing
Foucault, M (1977), Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin Books
Gregory, Sandra (with Michael Tierney) (2002), Forget You Had a Daughter: Doing Time in the ‘Bangkok Hilton' , London: Vision
Hayes, Billy (with Hoffer, William) (1977), Midnight Express, London: Andre Deutsch
Morgan, Steve (1999), ‘Prison Lives: Critical Issues In Reading Prisoner Autobiography', The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice Vol. 38. No. 3.
Nellis, Mike (2002), ‘Prose and Cons: Offender Auto/Biographies, Penal Reform and Probation Training', The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice Vol. 41 No. 5. Dec 2002
Nellis, Mike (1982) ‘Notes on the American Prison Film' in M. Nellis and C. Hale The Prison Film London: Radical Alternatives to Prison
Nellis, Mike (1988), ‘British Prison Movies: The Case Of ‘Now Barabbas'', The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 27(1) 2 – 31.
Wilson, David and O'Sullivan, Sean (2004) Images of Incarceration: Representations of Prison in Film and Television Drama. Winchester: Waterside Press
Please note: The Prison Service Web Team wish to make it clear that the views expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official views or policies of HM Prison Service.
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