Since the issue of gender has long been stood far away from the dominant flow of the Turkish cinematic discourse, periodically Kocek represents/produces a somewhat original standpoint through taking the issue of gender at the center of film inten tionally or not. In 1975, all the films were in color and this year marks the end of the black-white films. The popular films of the year were comedies (e.g. Hababam Sinifi directed by Ertem Egilmez) and sex-comedies (e.g. Civciv Cikacak Kus Cikacak directed by Nazmi Ozer).
Literally, Kocek means boy dancer and in the film, Caniko/Raziye is a belly-dancer in both sections of the film where s/he changes her/his sexual identity. In order to analyze Kocek, it is better first to discern the purpose of such an a nalysis. Christian Metz states the goal of cinesemiotics as the study of discourses and of texts in the film. Unlike the cinematic fact that refers to the cinematic institution in general, "the filmic fact, meanwhile, refers to a localizable discourse, a text; not to the physical film-object contained in a can but rather to the signifying text." (quoted in Stam et. al., 1992: 34) Therefore, an analysis of Kocek, to great extent, should try to deploy the texts that can be read throughout the cours e of the film itself.
Drawing back to Saussure, it can be said that any reading of a text involves putting all particular events in the film into an order of paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. In film, images and sounds form syntagmas which are "units of narrative autonomy in which elements interact semantically." (Stam et. al., 1992: 34) Kocek, first and foremost, deals with the issue of sexual identity. Caniko is supposedly male, despite his feminine physical and personal characteristics (e.g. , his wearing of a fak e mustache and his complaining in front of the mirror saying: "Look at that face. You are more like to a woman than a man!") in the first part of the film.
The process of changing of Caniko/Raziye's sex in the film begins with kidnapping of Caniko by the crew of Acenta Riza to force him belly dance just because they think that he is a woman. The sexual ambiguity of Caniko which is fostered up till the attemp t of the villains to rape him. They see that he has a male sexual organ and then, one pierces a knife to his sexual organ. After an operation, Caniko becomes 'really' a woman -a real belly-dancer, Raziye, unlike the boy dancer, Caniko. Until this attempt to rape him, Caniko/Raziye's sexual identity is ambiguous on the side of the spectator. For instance, in Caniko's first encounter with Adnan after the ball Caniko and his friends are playing with is burst under a car, Adnan holds his hands and they look to each other. Especially, Adnan's gaze reminds me of Humprey Bogart gaze at woman in Maltese Falcon or in his other films.
Kocek is formed by two distinct parts. In the first part Caniko, as a male, despite his lower class origin, may be attached to a power structure in which he sees himself as active or dominant, at least not passive or not inferior, due to his masc ulinity. For instance, he sees himself as the friend of Adnan. He makes fun of Adnan by stressing his profession, goalie, and by stressing that he can score goals to him. In other words, Caniko identifies himself as a good kicker which refers to masculine metaphors attached to football game. Then, in the second part, when she understand that Adnan loves her, she become well aware that they belong to different worlds perhaps because of her identification with womanhood. Just after the operation the screen is split into two parts by a vertical line in between the screen and on the left hand Caniko/Raziye is in the hospital as a patient who is denying to accept that he has become a woman, while on the right hand, there is a slight shift from Caniko, the boy dancer, dancing on the streets to Raziye with long hairs lying on the beach with splashing waves to her body. This scene is the apparent turning point of Caniko/Raziye's sex from male to female.
This scene reminds me of another film - Gunah (Sin). In that film, the truck driver (Ibrahim Tatlises) falls in love with a prostitute and after he takes him out of her former life in which she is a prostitute in order to marry with her, he takes her to a beach in a cold fall or winter day to wash herself in the sea. Both of these scenes in Kocek and in Gunah should be thought as scenes of saving themselves from their former wrong or repulsive identities. Moreover, these scenes may also ". . . be connected to the myths of woman drowning in or coming from water (water giving life to the myths of somebody)" (Erdogan: 2).
In relation to particular scenes in the film, the belly dancers in Naciye's house and also the belly dancers trying (!) to swim on the beach in Adnan's fiancee's house, all the belly dancers including Raziye are represented as images. "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly." (Mulvey, 1986: 203) "The argument returns again to the psy choanalytic background in that woman as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat." (Mulvey, 1986: 208)
Lacan begins with the symbolic which is formed by a set of differences articulating the crucial elements in child's world. "It is the acceptance of a potential lack (castration) which marks the child's access to the symbolic and to language." (MacCabe, 19 85: 65) "For Lacan, the signifier of castration is the phallus, and the Lacanian formulation of the Oedipal scenario is framed in terms of its possession. . . .both sexes define themselves in relation to the phallus, as signifier of lack, and it is this r epresentation of absence that symbolizes all prior separations. The moment of castration divides the world between those who possess the means to represent this lack and those who do not." (Stam et. al., 1992: 134) In the first part of the film, despite h is discontent with some of his feminine characteristics, Caniko is a 'true' man; he uses the masculine language both in his words and in his gestures. Interestingly, there is a well use of slump in the first part of the film which in the second part helps Adnan to identify Caniko as a woman, as the belly dancer Raziye. Since both the father and mother figures are little or not represented in the film with actual players, it is hard to shift the course of analysis in the way toward Oedipal complex. Nevert heless, the split between the conscious and the repressed desires of the unconscious may be seen in Raziye's use of masculine language that belongs to Caniko who is now replaced by Raziye as the doctor, the knowing subject, after the operation, aptly stat ed, "because all the tests have shown that your feminine side is more ponderous, we forwarded the operation and you now become a true woman both medically and legally."
Since the acceptance of Caniko his new identity as Raziye has been very difficult especially in his/her attitudes in the hospital and then in Naciye's house, the particular moment of her wearing clothes just as any belly dancer should be; her going out of his room and walking downstairs under the admiring look of everyone in Naciye's house is her real acceptance of womanhood. (Perhaps this setting may be related to Mulvey's concept of to-be-looked-at-ness in which for another moment in the film, the spect ator is really forced to accept her womanhood and to look at her with some voyeuristic identification.) However, in this second part of the film, following the feminist argumentation of psychoanalysis, it may well be proposed that Raziye has developed a f eminine unconscious unlike Caniko's masculine unconscious. "While maintaining the symbolic priority of the phallus, . . . a notion of woman not as castrated, but as a fullness which has to be repressed" (Stam et. al., 1992: 138) is developed by Raziye. Sh e is now somewhat saved herself from castration anxiety, but through repressing her previous masculine identity.
Whatever the psychoanalytic arguments are, one should not neglect the cultural and social impacts upon the formation of the sexual identity. Since it is much clear with Foucault's deployment of the constitution of a sexual identity in a discourse imposed by the society, one may well forward the filmic text to much further points. Psychoanalysis can only consider the subject as a singular category whose divisions and complexities are bounded by the interiorized space of an actual and imagined body. But wha t about the multiple sets of discourse and institutional interpellations that delimit this body from the outside according to legal, economic, scientific, or even aesthetic designations?" (Rodowick, 1991: 139) Following that point, one may come to grips w ith the conjuncture in which Kocek has been created. "It is definitely emphasizes the difference between gender and sexual identity (that is gender/feminine is not sexual identity/female), drawing attention to the relationship between culture and identity." (Erdogan, 1) Moreover, the period in which the film is made in Turkey is worth noting because of the intense debates about the transvestites in the Turkish society. The sexual ambiguity of Caniko is well imposed by his surrounding, too. He is aware that he is not a true man because of his feminine characteristics which do not suit to his excessively masculine attitudes, but the attitudes of the people around him fostered his acceptance of his lacking masculine elements, like mustaches. In con trast, after becoming Raziye, s/he has become rather more true woman both according to herself and according to other people. Enthusiastically, the implementation of the myth of passing below the rainbow, in the end of the film just after both de facto an d de jure marriage of Raziye with Adnan perhaps in another moment of ambiguity in the mind of Raziye which especially marked by her dream where Adnan and Raziye are changed their sexual role has seemed to me as making the parody of the whole film in the e nd through the risk of changing her sexual identity for another time. Whatever the sort of the parody is, the film is ended with the "happy" end.
WORKS CITED
Erdogan, Nezih. Gender and Split Identity in
Kocek.
nezih@bilkent.edu.tr
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology ed. by. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
Rodowick, D. N. The Difficulty of Difference. New York and London: Routledge, 1991.
Mac Cabe, Colin. Tracking the Signifier. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985.
Stam, Robert, Burgoyne, Robert, and Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
SAVAS ARSLAN
(arsavas@bilkent.edu.tr)