© ephemera 2003 ISSN 1473-2866 www.ephemeraweb.org volume 3(3): 236-249 236 reviews ephemera critical dialogues on organization Interrupted Happiness: Class Boundaries and the ‘Impossible Love’ in Turkish Melodrama * Barış Kılıçbay and Emine Onaran İncirlioğlu Social classes in Turkey, the existence of which is often denied in dominant political discourses, are nevertheless apparent in a wide range of cultural forms including the cinema, particularly the melodrama of the 1960s and the 1970s. The specific nature of the Turkish melodrama puts this genre quite apart from other filmic genres existing in Turkish cinema. An axiomatic representation of love and the unchanging formulas typically exemplified in the classic Turkish melodrama have been so popular that even in the non-melodramatic genres this kind of romance was ubiquitous. Class difference between lovers is a typical melodramatic mode in Turkish film; classes constitute boundaries for love and they delay, interrupt or inhibit happiness. In these melodramas upper classes are typically portrayed by means of negative conventions (immorality, decadence, ruthlessness), while various positive qualities are attributed to the members of lower classes (innocence, altruism, humanism). In this paper, we explore the use of class phenomenon in the Turkish melodrama of the 1960s and the 1970s as a way of creating a societal background for the ‘impossible love’. [T]he realism of Marx’s science is achieved through many of the same critical intentions and rhetorical effects it shares with melodramatic fiction. Just as Marx’s scientific and political aim wants to evoke in his readers intense emotions while inspiring new insights, so too the melodramatic arts of eighteenth-century musical theater, nineteenth-century mystery stories and spy novels, and even twentieth-century horror movies, romantic serials, and courtroom dramas have tried to present as graphically as possible the most compelling social realities in the most poignant way possible. 1 The very definition of melodrama is ambiguous. While, on the one hand, melodrama is considered “a particular, if mobile and fragmentary, genre, specialising in heterosexual __________ * Parts of this article is taken from a paper that we presented at the Congress ‘Translating Class, Altering Hospitality’, organised by the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History, at the University of Leeds, UK, 21-23 June 2002. We would like to thank Liz Conor and Defne Onaran İncirlioğlu for reading and commenting on earlier versions. 1 Thomas M. Kemple (1995) Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, The Market, and the ‘Grundrisse’. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 105. abstract