Lawrence of Arabia
I don't get it. And hey, it was WAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY too long. This is the only movie I've had to watch in 3 separate sittings - not because I was busy and had to do something else, but because I would get too exhausted after a while.
I'm at the credits right now. I wonder why Spielberg and Scorsese got included in the special thanks.
Anyways, first the good. Visually beautiful! If you were to translate the concept of epic into pure visual form, it would look exactly like this. Any other movie, it would get boring to see people plodding along on camels though the desert - and only that - for about 30 minutes. But the palette and the composition kept the interest up.
I'm not sure why we should see Lawrence as a hero. I get that the best heroes are supposed to be ambiguous, but I don't think Lawrence qualifies. Basically we get a raging egoist, who gets raped, and then loses it. I feel that if anything, a hero should find his moral center in the face of adversity. I also feel that adversity should consist of something more existential than a few minutes of feeling unmanly. Really, all women deal with sexual exploitation like it's a way of life, and you don't see (most of) us screaming for a bloodbath. When I think of my real heroes - like V (V for Vendetta) or Brando in On the Waterfront - their moment of herodom comes with the philosophical discovery that they play but a small part in the larger human struggle. A non-real hero - say, American History X - stakes his whole identity on his cornhole. It's egomaniacal, that's what it is.
Still, Lawrence has one very fine heroic moment: when he has to execute Gasim. It's so...muah! perfecto.
I'm at the credits right now. I wonder why Spielberg and Scorsese got included in the special thanks.
Anyways, first the good. Visually beautiful! If you were to translate the concept of epic into pure visual form, it would look exactly like this. Any other movie, it would get boring to see people plodding along on camels though the desert - and only that - for about 30 minutes. But the palette and the composition kept the interest up.
I'm not sure why we should see Lawrence as a hero. I get that the best heroes are supposed to be ambiguous, but I don't think Lawrence qualifies. Basically we get a raging egoist, who gets raped, and then loses it. I feel that if anything, a hero should find his moral center in the face of adversity. I also feel that adversity should consist of something more existential than a few minutes of feeling unmanly. Really, all women deal with sexual exploitation like it's a way of life, and you don't see (most of) us screaming for a bloodbath. When I think of my real heroes - like V (V for Vendetta) or Brando in On the Waterfront - their moment of herodom comes with the philosophical discovery that they play but a small part in the larger human struggle. A non-real hero - say, American History X - stakes his whole identity on his cornhole. It's egomaniacal, that's what it is.
Still, Lawrence has one very fine heroic moment: when he has to execute Gasim. It's so...muah! perfecto.
posted by Rex at 9:58 PM
3 Comments:
Hey there. sorry for serial posting, but when I was in sixth grade I had an obsession with T.E. Lawrence, so I thought I'd chime in. I think the thing about Lawrence is that he did totally go native (I don't think the film adequately reflects his complexity, but it's very beautiful). Before he was this guerilla (sp?) fighter during the war, Lawrence was an Near Eastern archaeologist with Sir Leonard Woolley (worked at Nineveh), and there he developed this deep sympathy with the Arabs he had encountered. These bonds, plus also this at the very least homosocial but probably homosexual attachments he formed with a few Arab men, made Lawrence very enthusiastic about promoting Arab nationalism. Lawrence identified incredibly with the Bedouins due to the rootlessness he felt, stemming from his own status as the bastard son of fallen gentry. Then, he personally made extravagant promises to the Bedouin on the Allies' behalf (believing in them himself for the most part, foolishly really), and then saw those promises cast aside during the negotiations of the peace treaty in Paris. It broke his heart, and he sort of retreated from public life afterwards, although he did court a great deal of publicity during his Arab campaign, for the sake of the effort but also probably because it was personally gratifying. He changed his name after the war, to Hume, then I believe to Ross. He never wore Bedouin clothing again and was very conflicted about the attention he received. It's sort of very sad, actually, because here's this person whose love of antiquity translated into a love (infatuation with?) of the modern people and culture, and then his idealism was slowly and excruciatingly snuffed out. And he knew that he was partly to blame. Yikes.
I would recommend his book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which narrates the action of the Arab Campaign but skips over the Dera (that's where the bey got him, yes?) details. Also, did you know that he did a translation of Homer? I believe that he was translating the Iliad in the desert. Pretty neat. Anyway, just some context. And when you think about it, he basically handpicked the people to whom Britain would hand over the Middle East, and who still control the Middle East today. Weird.
sorry for yet another post, but Spielberg and Scorsese spearheaded a campaign to restore the film negative for the movie when it was basically starting to rot, and this is actually the movie that started the whole film restoration trend that began in the late 80s to early 90s. Thank goodness! Saving some of those pictures. And also, as you'll probably know from TCM, it's one of the main examples of why letterboxing is good and pan and scan is evil.
Thanks for all that background! I think the movie did a good job of capturing Lawrence's rootlessness and his adoption of Arabia (is that one place?) as his home, but I at least totally missed the idealism. In the end it seemed like he just lost interest in the war, and that Feisal was casting him off just as much as the British officers. Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to take some of the blame off of him? Noble revisionism, if that's the case, but I was really confused.
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