Man without Capital: Cultural Dispossession and Neoliberal Survival in Turkish Cinema Between 1980-1990

This article investigates how Turkish cinema transformed under neoliberal restructuring following the 1980 military coup, proposing “Neoliberal Realism” as a new conceptual framework to describe the cinematic narratives of the 1980s. While Turkish cinema from 1960 to 1980 was shaped by collective struggles and social realism, the post-1980 era witnessed a departure toward individualized narratives marked by alienation, moral compromise, and economic survival. The research aims to analyze how neoliberal logics redefined narrative structures, character formations, and symbolic capital in Turkish cinema between 1980 and 1990. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of field, habitus, and cultural capital, the study offers a close reading of selected films—such as The Naked Citizen, The Wheel, and The Honest One—to decode how characters navigate a commodified social reality. The findings show that neoliberal realism replaces revolutionary cinema with depoliticized storytelling, where social mobility is no longer tied to labor or merit but to media visibility and spectacle. This shift also illustrates how cultural capital becomes devalued under economic liberalization. The article contributes to the literature by bridging cinema studies with sociology, offering a multidisciplinary analysis of Turkey’s cinematic and ideological transformation. This article introduces the original concept of Neoliberal Realism to explain how Turkish cinema of the 1980s internalized and reflected neoliberal rationalities through narrative and character transformation. By shifting the analytical focus from comparative periodization to the symbolic consequences of economic liberalization, the study offers a novel contribution at the intersection of film studies and political sociology.