Emily in Paris strikes again: Montmartre in the city is to pedestrianise, jeopardising local businesses and logistics, to accommodate the still-surging, Netflix-inspired tourism that has made the district hopelessly overcrowded.
As a screen-generated over-touristing menace, the perky American fashionista is a mere parvenue. Twenty-six years after Notting Hill debuted, Notting Hill locals are still complaining about thronging fans’ mania for selfies with the blue door immortalised by Julia Roberts’ and Hugh Grant’s screen romance.
Locals have clashed unpleasantly with visitors in Belgium’s Bruges, the chocolate-box city still teeming with devotees of the 2008 movie In Bruges – despite its having (spoiler alert) more of a pine box sort of ending.
As New Zealanders know from the Hobbit economy, even pretending to be somewhere else can draw hordes.
Northern Irelanders can’t always see their coastline for tourists’ Game of Thrones re-enactments, and arborists fear recent surges of GoT foot traffic through the majestically Gothic Dark Hedges is hastening the trees’ demise.
Thrilling and lucrative as it can be to see one’s neighbourhood trending, the resultant overcrowding can make life unbearable for locals and, over time, tarnish a destination’s attractiveness and economic value. In a grim spiral, overcrowding deters the high-spending tourists whose input massively outpaces that from cheaper, prepaid mass-tourist deals – cruises and the like – from which locals seldom see much change.
There is a solution to this screen-wrought swarming. But you’d need a strong stomach. The semi-biographical Midnight Express became a classic more than 45 years ago, elevating director Alan Parker and screenwriter Oliver Stone to film royalty. It also tanked Turkish tourism. Its depiction of a first-time drug dealer’s incarceration and escape from a brutal Turkish prison made it more horror than adventure story, the cruelty meted out by prison guards and a pitiless justice system deeply shocking audiences.
Never mind that the film departed from key facts – the dealer was not a novice – and its research into Turkish prison conditions was scanty, Stone visiting Istanbul but briefly. The damage was done. Academic and journalist Haluk Sahim has likened the impact to a sustained bombing over 20 years. In 1980, Turkish tourist numbers stood at a meagre 1.3 million (its population was 45 million).
Midnight Express is also often blamed for crimping the development of Türkiye’s relations with the West and slowing its admission to the European Union.
Stone later apologised to Türkiye for his inaccuracies, and Billy Hayes, on whose experience the story was based, also expressed regrets about exaggeration and invention in the movie and went on to promote the country as a tourist destination. Its annual visitor tally now fluctuates around the 50 million mark.
Should beleaguered tourist spots commission their own Midnight Express-deterrent movies to get some respite? Realistically, a film-maker would not likely get away with such a biased depiction today without push-back. Hit series Baby Reindeer, which applied dramatic licence to a true story, is subject to litigation. Israel and Türkiye are at diplomatic loggerheads over the Turkish series Ayrilik’s depiction of conditions in Gaza.
Türkiye’s highly developed tourism industry would doubtless mount a forensic rebuttal of any latterday Midnight Express depiction.
Also, not all horror deters tourists. People still roam Australia’s Outback despite the loosely fact-based gorefest, Wolf Creek. HBO’s luxury resort series The White Lotus boosts its locations’ visitor numbers, despite its fictional tourists having holidays that mostly comprise cosmic vengeance.
Anyway, today’s most effective horror tourist-deterrents are already widely deployed and would hardly support a hit series: the inability to find an oat milk latte, hours-long queues for everything, Instagram shot-spoiling beach toy detritus and grumpy locals spraying one with water pistols. Privations undreamt-of by Hayes.
