Growing Up After the Coup: Turkish Movies and Müjde Ar

I grew up with Turkish movies. The television was always on. It was the 1980s, a strange and unsettling time in Turkey. After the military coup of 1980, fear and isolation spread throughout society. Political discussions disappeared from daily life, and people retreated into their homes. Turkish films, with their familiar stories and moral certainties, became a kind of opium for stressed minds.

My mother did not work outside the home. At that time, women were expected to stay at home, take care of their children, and be good wives. This meant cooking, cleaning, and putting the needs of the family before their own. Going out simply for personal enjoyment was often seen as selfish or inappropriate.

We were a middle-class family. My father worked long hours to support us. He had two children and a wife to provide for, and money was never enough. He was often tired and unhappy. My parents argued frequently, as many couples did under the pressure of everyday life.

Like everyone else, my mother had her own dreams. But television was one of the few places where those dreams could exist. Through Turkish movies, she could imagine different lives and possibilities. She lived through the characters she watched on screen.

Most of those characters were stereotypes that reflected the patriarchal structure of Turkish society. They were predictable and reassuring. There was little ambiguity and nothing to fear. Television was also the only activity we regularly did together as a family.

Through those films, I learned what was expected of me as a girl. Be respectable. Protect your honor. Do not be "that kind" of woman. Find a husband and get married.

Many Turkish films of the 1970s and early 1980s were built around a simple contrast: the good woman and the bad woman. There was usually an honorable man at the center of the story, and it was always he who made the final choice. Unsurprisingly, he chose the woman who embodied society's ideals: modest, obedient, properly dressed, and sexually restrained.

In the middle of all these clichés, there was one actress who seemed completely different. As a child, I disliked her films because of that difference. She felt strange and unsettling. Looking back now, I realize how important she was.

Her name was Müjde Ar.

Müjde Ar brought a new kind of woman to Turkish cinema: rebellious, independent, and searching for her own identity and sexuality. At a time when female characters were often defined by their relationships to men, she portrayed women with desires, doubts, and ambitions of their own.

One of the best examples is Ah Belinda, directed by Atıf Yılmaz. In the film, Müjde Ar plays Serap, a successful actress who appears in a shampoo commercial. While portraying a happy housewife and mother, she suddenly finds herself trapped inside the life of the fictional character she is playing. Everyone around her insists that she is a wife and a mother, while she knows she is an actress.

Her confusion is often treated as a form of madness. Yet what the film presents is not simply a psychological crisis. It is also a powerful metaphor for the lives of many women in Turkey at the time. Serap is forced into an identity she never chose. She struggles against a role that society expects her to accept without question.

The apartment, the husband, the children, the endless domestic responsibilities—everything that is supposed to define a successful woman becomes a kind of prison. The film exposes the tension between individual freedom and social expectations, between personal desires and prescribed gender roles.

When I was a child, I did not understand any of this. I only felt that Müjde Ar's films were different from the others. Today, I see that they offered something rare: a challenge to the certainties that surrounded us.

And sometimes I wonder whether there has ever been a period when Turkey was not living through some kind of strangeness. Perhaps that is why Ah Belinda still feels so relevant. Its story is surreal, but the questions it asks about identity, conformity, and freedom remain painfully familiar.