Last month, there was a cool article in the Times about The Sarah Connor Chronicles, although I didn’t get around to reading it until now. The writer, Ginia Bellafante, does an excellent job of OverthinkingIt ™ in terms of its religious symbolism, apocalyptic mood, and political leanings. She even makes mention of John Connor’s Important Haircut at the beginning of this season, thus scoring points in my book.
But then, at the very end of the article, she says this:
Like “Lost,” “Sarah Connor” speaks in code, but one that is considerably easier to read. The name of the Skynet brain is not geopolitically neutral: it’s called the Turk. So the machine endangering mankind is symbolically Ottoman.
Oh, come on, New York Times. Read into the ethnicity of the series’ chess playing computer if you must,
Symbolically Ottoman?
but do the research first. Even I knew that the Turk is a reference to an Automaton Chess Playing machine that wowed audiences through the late 1700s and early 1800s. If you want to Overthink the Turk, don’t talk about the fact that it’s “symbolically Ottoman.” Talk about the fact that it was a giant hoax. The chess playing robot was actually just a chess master in a box. If we’re going to read any symbolism into that, maybe it should be that Terminators and humans are more similar than anyone once thought and that the evils and ambitions of the Terminators are extensions of human evils and ambitions.
Why did they call this chess machine The Turk, anyway? Maybe these 18th century hoaxers were also playing up fears of Middle Easterners and terrorists.
Yeah, no. The machine was made to look like a guy in a turban, because mystical-looking old men in turbans = magicians = sexy and exotic. It was just another way to wow the audience.
Research, New York Times! Research! Or are we to assume that Turk from Scrubs is a political symbol, as well?
You know, when Yasemin and I use “The Mechanical Turk,” it refers to something entirely different altogether. Though we still hold on to the chess metaphors, to keep it real.
Mmm.. Spanish Open.
-Sheq, engaging on a closed, circular Knight’s Tour. Rrowl.
Shechner, you win comments.
w00t w00t! Huge props for this!
I love the story of the Turk!
Also of note – chess came to Europe from the Middle East (“Checkmate” is from “shah mat” or “the king is dead” in Persian – I think it’s older than modern Farsi), so there was an intended, if vague and wrongly reasoned, connection between that sort of exoticism and chess.
But that is only a small sidenote – you have the main reason pretty much nailed.
Thanks for this article!
Oh, and also, given the particular breed of exoticism and crusader narrative that runs through European culture, the implication of mysticism, its vague association with the literature of medieval Baghdad, and the pronounced Persian influence (specifically regarding chess as well as more generally), “The Turk” was probably more Seljuq than Ottoman.
You’re quite right to dump on the writer’s use of the Giuliani Analysis (“NOW EVERYTHING IS ABOUT TERRORISM”). And yet… and yet…
There are any number of historically informed names they could have given the chess computer. They chose “The Turk.” That doesn’t mean nothing. And you may not be doing your argument any favors by reminding us that “old men in turbans = magicians = sexy and exotic.” There IS some racist symbolism at work here. But oddly enough, it’s the specific 18th-century flavor of orientalist hooey that inspired the original Turk: not “Turkey=Islam=Terrorists,” but rather “Turkey=unstoppable legions of brainwashed Janissaries.” The European image of Turkey as a nation of killer robots dates back at least to Machiavelli (remember that bit in The Prince about the Ottoman empire being impossible to conquer, but easy to rule once conquered?). It’s no less offensive than the lazy association of all things Islamic with terrorism, of course… but at least it’s offensive in a more interesting way.
Stokes, your argument sounds perfectly valid to me. But if the Times meant that, wouldn’t they have said so? And maybe this is a stupid question, but if the Terminator writers were thinking of that, wouldn’t they have made at least one of the Terminators Middle Eastern?
You’re *certainly* right about the Times writer. She seems to have been looking for Al Qaeda symbolism behind The Turk, and I don’t think it’s there to be found. You might also be right about the Terminator writers. They do like to play up the whole “machines and people are kind of the same” angle. But when they decided to invoke the original Mechanical Turk, they also picked up some of its cultural baggage, whether they meant to or not. The Turk isn’t the most offensive thing in the world… but it’s not *totally* innocent either.
If anything, wouldn’t calling the ruling machine “The Turk” in a contemporary setting cast it as aggressively secular?
Exoticism? 18th Century? Racism? Sounds like the modern definition of Orientalism, to me. In case you haven’t read Said’s groundbreaking book (one I had to read in THREE classes during college because of how theory-based my major was…), here’s a link to the Wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)
Gr, so click on the link the article about Orientalism in general gives to the book in the opening blurb. I really should learn HTML to avoid this kind of crap.
Or maybe, “The Turk” is just a hint about how “Terminator Salvation” ends …
***PROBABLY SPOILER***
At the end, inside the big machine that controlls every bad robot, is a very bad human. (Get it? Turk, Chess computer, with no Intel-inside; but Dude-inside?)
:O
Fuentes, you have a strong theory. What we “know” is that Skynet caused a nuclear holocaust wiping out most of the human population. But what if some HUMAN actually planned that, and just used Skynet as a scapegoat? Then again, it’s hard to imagine what kind of person would want the outcome depicted in the Terminator movies. So maybe the real person behind Skynet is planning something else, but he’s about to lose control of his baby. (For this exact scenario, see Tron.)
I’m thinking Men in Black. “The little dude inside the big dude’s head.”
“Fuentes on Fri, 24th Oct 2008 12:25 pm
Or maybe, “The Turk” is just a hint about how “Terminator Salvation” ends …
***PROBABLY SPOILER***
At the end, inside the big machine that controlls every bad robot, is a very bad human. (Get it? Turk, Chess computer, with no Intel-inside; but Dude-inside?)”
OMG–skynet is gantz!
Interestingly, in German the Mechanical Turk has left his imprint in the language: The verb türken (to turk sth.) is used to indicate that something is rigged in order to decieve somebody. You could say for instance that a company’s balance sheet or a researcher’s statistics results are getürkt (“turked”). Using the word is not politically correct, however.