•
Rating: Dear Susan,
I write these words that you will never read, because sometimes it is important to write even when you know everything will be lost in the wind.
I write to you as a guilty Susan, because although everyone here professes to be innocent, I know I am not. I am the only truly guilty one.
And every slap, every kick, every spit I receive, every time I am the object of mockery and derision, I know I deserve it. What I don't know is why every passing day something dies in my soul. Is this the price of redemption?
I bit off a man's tongue, Susan. And do you know why I did it? I did it to feel like a human being again. It's ironic, I know, but sometimes to feel like a man, you must behave like an animal.
Because dignity, Susan, that you must always maintain one way or another. Do you know what dignity is to me? It's circling under a pool of light, in the company of madmen, with the awareness of being the craziest of them all.
Because they swallowed the madness, while I savored it, sip after sip. I got intoxicated and drunk on madness...
But a day will come, Susan, when perhaps these remains will cross that threshold and step by step, without looking back, will return to you. They will return perhaps to celebrate a funeral.
What will return will be only flesh, for by then my soul will already be a corpse.
With love, your Bill.
On October 6, 1970, Billy Hayes (Brad Davis), on vacation in Turkey with his girlfriend, is arrested at the Istanbul airport for possessing 2 kg of hashish. Confined to the terrible Sagmalcilar prisons, sentenced to a 30-year term, lost in despair, he has only one goal, escape.
As in all works based on real events, even in this film by Alan Parker, reality must be sacrificed to fiction. The audience demands blood, pain, and the director and screenwriter are ready to satisfy the sadistic desires of the audience.
Oliver Stone, here as a screenwriter, adhered only formally to the book "Midnight Express" written by the real Hayes, embellishing the undoubtedly terrible real events with episodes at the limit of the tolerable.
The physical and psychological tortures endured by the protagonist, the final escape are, in fact, largely the product of Stone's imagination, and Hayes himself later distanced himself from the film, excluding outright having ever suffered sexual violence and greatly downplaying the actual impact he had with Turkish prisons.
Needless to say, the film caused quite a stir: the image fed to the audience of Turkey was at the limit of tolerable. The inaccuracies, the free concessions were so evident that it's surprising a diplomatic incident didn't occur. The prison guard actors were simply of Maltese or Kurdish origin, and even most of the "Turkish" dialogues were in a barely comprehensible language.
But leaving these inaccuracies aside, the film certainly reaches its goal: what is the limit of endurance for a man? What abuses must one endure before losing reason? The answer lies in the prison's passages, in the cells oozing filth, in the beastliness of guards beyond all reasoning. Violence is sought almost ruthlessly, so much so that the homosexual shower between the protagonist and a prisoner, paradoxically, seems almost an idyllic dance amidst so much horror. The prison settings are at the edge of survivability, a kind of catacombs where even light seems eager to escape. Thus, when Hayes literally massacres an unfortunate informant, guilty of dashing hopes of escape and accusing a fellow prisoner, the most violent scene becomes also the most anticipated. The tension built up during the viewing, the disgust, finds release in the protagonist's relentless hitting: every punch, every kick is accompanied by a sense of satisfaction, almost as if to say "I would have done the same."
Oscar to Oliver Stone for Best Adapted Screenplay, Oscar to Giorgio Moroder for the soundtrack.
The escape of a man from a hell beyond imagination.
Loading comments slowly
