Fantasies of Returning to Nature as an Escape From Culture

Abstract

Modernism and its institutions have begun to be questioned by postmodern thinkers in almost every field. Nature was affirmed as an ideal on the path to liberation from culture. According to Camille Paglia, culture, which was seen as a way to the main obstacle to freedom, and the hierarchical position of the contrasts such as East-West, nature-culture, etc., has become the focus of discussions in the world of art and thought as fictions that need to be questioned and overcome on the way to liberation. While the view of nature as a liberating potential finds its place in consumer culture and popular culture as an extension of the opposing perspective originating from the counterculture, the return to nature has been fetishized by authenticating Eastern cultures with an Orientalist perspective. The beach, which is one of the representations of this common interests in the East in the art of cinema, will be examined in the light of the concepts of counter culture, postmodern subject, consumer culture, in the axis of nature-culture and East-West dichotomies.