Zane V. Keifer

America and Turkey seem to be playing out some not-so-hidden hostilities with one another through the lenses of cameras:

ISTANBUL -- In "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq," U.S. soldiers shoot small children at point-blank range, harvest kidneys from Iraqi prisoners for shipment to Tel Aviv, blow a Muslim cleric out of his minaret and, to top it all off, display utter contempt for Turkish foreign policy. The feature film set a box office record in its first weekend, after opening in more theaters than any movie in Turkish history.

Meanwhile, the American television series "24" did not open at all in Turkey last fall, despite high ratings over the three previous seasons for agent Jack Bauer and the swashbuckling Counter-Terrorist Unit. The problem: In season four, the terrorists intent on destroying America were Turks.

"It's kind of like firing missiles at each other!" Yasar Aktas said of the pop culture war now playing between the United States and Turkey. The unemployed cook was one of 1.75 million people who saw "Valley of the Wolves" in its first six days in Turkey. It opened last week in Europe, where the U.S. Army issued a notice warning U.S. service members to stay away from affected multiplexes and "to avoid getting into discussions about the movie with people you don't know."

That two NATO allies that often speak of mutual respect regard each other so darkly on-screen says a good deal about the uneasy state of relations between Turkey and the United States, each of them proud, a bit insular and deeply concerned about the war in Iraq. But as protests roil an Islamic world deeply offended by caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, whose depiction the faith forbids, the state of entertainment in Muslim Turkey also offers a lesson in how easy it remains for cultures to talk past each other, even -- perhaps especially -- in an era of global satellite communication. It's hard seeing eye to eye when perspectives are profoundly different.

The US various media industries used to be the absolute force in international culture. We could assert and redefine anybody through our ideological lens at will.

While it's easy to demonize the enemy in film [think cold-war era Russian enemies in Rocky, Die Hard, etc], the US never really has faced the inevitable. That's what makes this interesting: we're finding just how subversive the non-dominant media of the world can be. Al Jazeera, for instance, is a threat not because of its inaccuracies, but because the US media can't control it.

And here we see just how directly other countries and groups of people may express their disdain for American activities.