Just from the title alone, you know it’s good. It’s not Lawrence of Grand Rapids, or Lawrence of San Bernardino.
Lawrence of Arabia.
You can’t even pronounce it the same way you pronounce other movie titles. You can’t say it matter-of-factly like “lawrenceofarabia.” You have to say it like “Lawrence of uh-RAY-bia,” with the stress on the “ray,” your eyes bulging out, like you’re invoking an ancient spell.
Other movies walk into the room thinking they’re hot stuff, and Lawrence of Arabia just laughs. Lawrence of Arabia eats other movies for breakfast. Lawrence of Arabia crushes other movies into fine grains of desert sand (which it promptly utilizes in the background of a shot or two, just to rub it in).
I used to have this weird daydream. I’m in a conference room, and me and several colleagues are sitting around a large wooden table, and the task each of us has been given is to name the greatest movie of all time. When my turn comes up, I slowly pull my DVD copy of Lawrence of Arabia out of a bag, and with a dramatic flair, I slam it onto the table, so that it makes a nice big THWACK sound. And that’s it. I slam it onto the table, and everyone steps back. I don’t say a word. I don’t need to.
*****
If I hear one more person calling this movie epic, I’m going to scream.
That’s the lazy, superficial explanation of why Lawrence of Arabia is great: the scope, the grandeur, the visual spectacle, the desert vistas, the hordes of extras riding a thousand camels in the background of a five-second shot (note: if you’re seeing a thousand camels in the background of a shot, there really were a thousand camels in the background of that shot).
They’re not wrong, exactly. I might as well get a few of these out of the way:
Not bad. But to me, this is not what makes Lawrence of Arabia great, really.
What makes Lawrence of Arabia great is the small moments. In his review of the 1989 re-release, Roger Ebert alluded to this:
I’ve noticed that when people remember Lawrence of Arabia, they don’t talk about the details of the plot. They get a certain look in their eye, as if they are remembering the whole experience, and have never quite been able to put it into words … It is spectacle and experience, and its ideas are about things you can see or feel, not things you can say … we remember the quiet, empty passages, the sun rising across the desert, the intricate lines traced by the wind in the sand.
Yes. The small moments. But for me, not so much the small moments centering around the sun and the wind, but the small moments centering around the protagonist. With apologies to Ebert, I’m the guy who, when remembering Lawrence of Arabia, remembers the details of the plot.
The crazy thing about this movie is that it is the epic movie that everyone says it is, but it’s also this uncomfortably personal, uneasily private character study of one man. And this one man happens to be a very weird man.
How weird is this man? He’s the kind of man who sits in a room with his fellow officers, lights a match, and puts out the match with his fingers. Because he’s bored. When one of the other officers tries it himself, the officer shouts, “It damn well hurts!”
Lawrence replies, “Certainly it hurts.”
“Well what’s the trick, then?”
“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”
Lawrence of Arabia is a combination of two artistic impulses that, on paper, would seem to be incompatible. It shouldn’t work. It should be a mess. How can a movie be grand and intimate at the same time? What’s the trick?
The trick, William Potter, is that it’s the greatest movie ever made. That’s the trick.
Years ago, while watching the making-of documentary included on the DVD of Malcom X, I remember Spike Lee’s longtime cinematographer Ernest Dickerson having this to say:
When Spike and I were first discussing the photography of the film, the restored Lawrence of Arabia was released. And I remember we went to see it at the Ziegfeld. And we were totally blown away, but what blew me away wasn’t the landscapes, what blew me away were the close-ups. Lawrence’s close-ups, you felt that he was like … right there in front of you.
Mm-hmm. (Note: if you’re looking for a template for the sweeping historical biopic you’re about to make, you could do worse than Lawrence of Arabia.) The close-ups. My God, the close-ups:
Somehow this film allows one facial expression to communicate volumes. Take the first shot I’ve singled out, where Colonel Brighton introduces Lawrence to a dejected Prince Faisal, fresh off another military defeat. “Who are you?” asks Faisal on the soundtrack, and without Lawrence uttering a word, his face answers, “I’m the man who is going to change your fortunes.” And even Faisal, preoccupied with the suffering of his people, knows when he’s looking at a face that’s worthy of attention. He’ll help you, Obi-Wan Kenobi, he’s you’re only hope.
Here lies the film within the film – and I like this film even more than the other one. I’m reminded of Bill James’s old line about baseball Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson: “If you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” Split Lawrence of Arabia in two, and you’d have two greatest movies ever made. It’s like if Ben-Hur were also Taxi Driver. It’s bonkers, it’s cuckoo. But here it is, and we just have to deal with it.
*****
Don’t let the cast of thousands fool you – at its core, Lawrence of Arabia is a film about a loner. He’s a misfit. He’s an outcast. He doesn’t fit in. In other words, he’s me.
I am Lawrence of Arabia.
I’m not, but what I mean is, I know what he’s feeling. I know the experience of walking into the officers’ quarters, wearing an ill-fitting uniform, incapable of making small talk with your colleagues. Of your superiors thinking you’re an overly educated, insubordinate weenie. Of everyone around you telling you, every chance they get, that you’ll never amount to anything. “You’re a clown, Lawrence,” says one officer. “We can’t all be lion tamers,” Lawrence replies before, as if on cue, knocking down a table.
Upon granting him permission to ride out to Faisal’s camp, General Murray doesn’t offer much in the way of encouragement: “You’re the kind of creature I can’t stand, Lawrence. But I suppose I could be wrong. All right, Dryden, you can have him for six weeks. Who knows, might even make a man of him.” Uh … what kind of man are we talking about? Ah, but he’ll show them. It’s his misfit status that fuels him. His weaknesses in polite society turn into strengths out in the desert. Tafas, his initial guide to Faisal’s camp, asks him, “From Britain?”
“Yes. From Oxfordshire.”
“Is that a desert country?”
“No. Fat country. Fat people.”
“You are not fat?”
“No. I’m different.”
So am I, Lawrence. So am I. Here is the secret sauce of Lawrence of Arabia, how it draws me closer into its web. I hear dialogue like this and I think, “At long last, a big budget action movie that’s about me.” Who wants to watch a movie about the guy who fits in?
Later, there’s an exchange between Lawrence and Sherif Ali that feels like a sequel to the Tafas exchange, taking place after they’ve survived the ordeal of the Nefud Desert and they’re bonding late at night around a campfire (the place where all bonding between emotionally reticent men takes place):
“Your father too, just Mr. Lawrence?”
“My father is Sir Thomas Chapman.”
“Is that a lord?”
“A kind of lord.”
“Then when he dies, you too will be a lord.”
“No.”
“Ah, you have an elder brother.”
“No.”
“But then … I do not understand this, your father’s name is Chapman.”
“Ali. He didn’t marry my mother.”
“I see.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It seems to me that you are free to choose your own name, then.”
With this, Ali manages to turn Lawrence’s bastard status into a kind of superpower. Because he was born an outcast, the normal rules that apply to other well-bred Englishmen don’t apply to him. The technical term for this type of dialogue is “badass.”
Of course, Lawrence’s illegitimate birth wouldn’t have been the only source of his outcast status among the British aristocracy. If you know, you know. Ebert explains:
Although it was widely believed that Lawrence was a homosexual, a multimillion-dollar epic filmed in 1962 could not be frank about that. And yet Lean and his writer, Robert Bolt, didn’t simply cave in and rewrite Lawrence into a routine action hero. Everything is here for those willing to look for it. Using O’Toole’s peculiar speech and manner as their instrument, they created a character who combined charisma and craziness, who was so different from conventional military heroes that he could inspire the Arabs to follow him in a mad march across the desert. There is a moment in the movie when O’Toole, dressed in the flowing white robes of a desert sheik, does a victory dance on top of a captured Turkish train, and he almost seems to be posing for fashion photos. This is a curious scene because it seems to flaunt gay stereotypes, and yet none of the other characters in the movie seem to notice – nor do they take much notice of the two young desert urchins that Lawrence takes under his protection.
They don’t notice because they’re probably figuring, “Hey, he’s just British.” Admit it, don’t all upper-class British males seem a little gay anyway? Or maybe Arab culture is a little less fundamentalist than one might think. From Wikipedia:
In an interview with The Washington Post in 1989, Lean said that Lawrence and Ali were written as being in a gay relationship. When asked about whether the film was “pervasively homoerotic”, Lean responded:
“Yes. Of course it is. Throughout. I’ll never forget standing there in the desert once, with some of these tough Arab buggers, some of the toughest we had, and I suddenly thought, ‘He’s making eyes at me!’ And he was! So it does pervade it, the whole story, and certainly Lawrence was very if not entirely homosexual. We thought we were being very daring at the time: Lawrence and Omar, Lawrence and the Arab boys.”
Talk about sand in the Vaseline. The most impressive part? Contemporary viewers hardly batted an eye. Frankly, without Ebert pointing it out to me, it would have flown completely over my teenage head. I look at O’Toole’s performance now, and I think, “This guy isn’t just gay – he’s flaming like an Olympic torch.” There’s a moment after the Turkish Bey torture scene where Lawrence decides he’s going to return to Cairo headquarters, you know, to try to be a proper British officer again. He tells Ali, “I think I see a way of just being ordinarily … happy.” Uh-huh. Good luck. Reminds me of when Elton John randomly married that Belgian woman in the ‘80s.
But I think the restrictions of the Production Code (see my Bonnie and Clyde essay) did the film a favor, turning Lawrence’s sexuality into a subtle layer as opposed to the focal point. To say that Lawrence of Arabia only has one theme is like saying that life only has one theme, but to me, the main theme of the film is: Can a man change who he is? Can a man become someone else, or is he stuck?
A lesser movie would try to answer that question in a neat little bow, but this one asks me to stare at it madly, the way Daud stares at Lawrence and Gasim when he rides out to meet them on the Sun’s Anvil, half-conscious from dehydration. I always assume that, one lucky viewing, I’ll spot the answer, hidden between two sand dunes, but the harder I look, the more mirages I see.
*****
“Favorite movie.” Preposterous term. I’m not legally required to have a favorite movie, the way I’m legally required to, say, have a driver’s license if I drive. And there are different movies for different moods. It’s like someone asking you to name your favorite child, or your favorite member of the 2008 Milwaukee Brewers (Prince Fielder? CC Sabathia? J.J. Hardy? Ben Sheets?). But if you’re putting that proverbial gun to my head, you have my answer.
Funny enough, it didn’t become my favorite movie on first viewing, when I was 16. Nor on second viewing, when I was 17. In those days, when I pictured my favorite movie, I pictured a “perfect” movie – the kind with highly quotable lines, or with a clean and tidy ending (think Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, The Godfather). After my first viewing of Lawrence of Arabia, I couldn’t even remember the ending.
Or the beginning. Shouldn’t your favorite movie open with a bang? Lawrence was too messy, too episodic, too meandering to be in consideration. Unlike my Doctor Zhivago experience, at least I was able to rent a widescreen VHS copy. The video store didn’t carry a pan-and-scan copy – some lines apparently not even the local video store dared to cross. I wish I had some riveting story about the first time I saw my favorite movie, but nope. If you’d asked me at the time, I would have put it somewhere in my top 20.
Even a year on, when I saw it at the Castro Theater in 70 millimeter (the way everybody says it’s “meant” to be seen), it remained in that top 20 range. It’s not like I hesitated to go. For four hours, I forgot I was in a movie theater. Still hadn’t become my favorite movie.
No, it was years later, after renting the DVD so that I could share it with a couple of college friends, and I spent a week watching it obsessively on repeat, when it began its steep climb. The elements I’d considered minor flaws – those odd, inscrutable scenes or dangling loose ends, or the subdued opening and subdued ending – only made me want to come back for more, like a shipwrecked sailor unwisely drinking salt water.
I kept trying to solve Lawrence of Arabia, the way I’d solved Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, or The Godfather, but I couldn’t. The movie was like a bar of soap: the tighter I gripped, the quicker it flew out of my hands.
*****
So what do you do when your last movie was a huge box office hit, won the Oscar for Best Picture, and spawned a lethal whistling earworm? Easy. Ask for even more money than last time, choose the least hospitable place in the world as your next location, and tell the movie studio to leave you the fuck alone.
Early in the film, Prince Faisal accuses Lawrence of being “another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum.” Faisal might as well have added David Lean to the list. In Lean’s own obsession with the desert, he may have mirrored that of his subject.
But leaving David Lean alone in the desert was going to be a tall order for producer Sam Spiegel, a man Wikipedia claims was nicknamed the Velvet Octopus “after his propensity to entwine himself with women in the back of taxis,” a description less creepy-sounding than a few of the others on his Wikipedia page, so … let’s move on.
Lean and Spiegel, fresh off the success of Bridge on the River Kwai, considered established stars like Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Anthony Perkins to play the lead (Norman Bates as Lawrence? What would mother think?), but soon realized it would be wiser to go with an unknown. Albert Finney, who almost landed the role, would have been quite interesting I think, but better than Peter O’Toole? The role needed someone who could appear to be on the edge of madness, and in O’Toole, Lean found his partner in madness. Per O’Toole:
The first thing he’d said to me on the first day of shooting was “Off we go, Pete, on a great adventure.” And that stayed with me. Every time I was feeling a bit down or whatever, as one does, even, you know, without having to be in a film in the desert, I would think of that … He was a connoisseur of good acting. He expected the best, and if you gave him the best, you had the best friend in the world. And the moment he began to trust me, we hardly even spoke other than just to say, “Where are you going to sit, what are you going to do?”
O’Toole passes my number one test for great film acting: I forget I’m watching Peter O’Toole and just think I’m watching T.E. Lawrence. For two years of his life, Peter O’Toole was T.E. Lawrence. I’m not saying he behaved like the real T.E. Lawrence; some who knew the man said that O’Toole was quite off the mark. My point is that O’Toole transformed from the drunken Irish lady’s man known as Peter O’Toole into the movie character “T.E. Lawrence.” The movie character became his own person, separate from both the historical Lawrence and Peter O’Toole. Somehow O’Toole located the inner segment of his personality where drive and determination threatened to bleed into psychosis, and allowed himself to reveal it to the camera.
It helps, of course, to shove your actor out into the real desert to bake on a real camel for months on end. O’Toole didn’t have to act dirty, sweaty, and exhausted when he truly was. O’Toole on camel riding: “… the camel was like riding a dragon, this huge, great thing. And it is not like being on a horse. You can’t post or anything. You just bump, and … nobody can ride a camel, nobody, not even the greatest Bedouin rides. You just sit on top of the damn thing and hope to God it doesn’t fling you off.”
Where are all these places in Lawrence, anyway? When they put “Arabia” in the title, they weren’t kidding around.
Aqaba is in modern-day Jordan (barely), Medina and Yenbo are in modern-day Saudi Arabia, Damascus is in modern-day Syria. When Lawrence traveled from Aqaba to Cairo in 1917, he would have briefly crossed into modern-day Israel (anyone else do a double-take hearing Lawrence and Allenby discuss recent military action in Gaza?) before entering modern-day Egypt. Well, Egypt did exist in 1917, but only as a protectorate of the British Empire. I’m pretty sure. It gets confusing. I mean, what did the British fighting the Turks in the Middle East have to do with some heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne being shot in Bosnia? Don’t ask.
Less confusing are the locations Lean used during filming, although I’m still looking for clarification on several points. Per Wikipedia: “It was originally to be filmed entirely in Jordan; the government of King Hussein was extremely helpful in providing logistical assistance, location scouting, transport and extras. Hussein visited the set several times during production and maintained cordial relationships with cast and crew.”
I’ll tell you one man who didn’t visit the set several times during production: Sam Spiegel. An Austro-Hungarian Jew who not only fled Nazi Germany, but caught the Zionist bug as early as 1920, Spiegel was convinced someone would try to poison him and preferred to stay offshore in his yacht. An excerpt from Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni’s 2003 biography of Spiegel:
He was so petrified that, when he stayed in the king’s summer palace in Aqaba, he insisted that Lean share his bedroom. Before turning the lights out, Lean opened the French windows for a view of the bay. Spiegel, who was then in bed, asked where Israel was. “I’m not sure, Sam, but I think it’s over there,” he replied, pointing into the dead of night. “Don’t point, they’ll shoot!” the producer cried out.
While Spiegel claimed he harped on Lean to get the hell out of Jordan out of a fear that, if he let Lean run rampant, the shooting would simply never end (a fear which O’Toole seemed to corroborate: “David and I had begun to forget we were making a film … after two years it had become a way of life”), Lean thought “it had everything to do with too many Hollywood dollars going into Arab hands.” Yeah, I’m going to stay out of this one.
At any rate, Spain and Morocco did a more than serviceable job of filling in for the rest of the locations, but by the time of post-production, the Lean-Spiegel marriage was on its last legs. From Fraser-Cavassoni:
As a peace gesture, Spiegel invited Lean to dinner at the Berkeley, one of the director’s favorite London restaurants. But after a couple of drinks, Lean decided to let Spiegel have it—how it could have been “a very happy picture,” but most of the time it was not, because of the producer’s cables, messages, and general behavior. “You were absolutely horrible,” Lean said. “Why did you behave so badly to me?” Spiegel took “a great gulp,” then replied, “Baby, artists work better under pressure.”
Apparently so. Look at the end result and tell me otherwise.
*****
With Lawrence, David Lean pulled a fast one on everybody.
When it came out in late 1962, it slotted into a certain template of contemporary movie, so everybody said, “Yeah, we know what this is,” it became another box office success, won another bunch of Oscars, and everyone went on with their lives. They’d all loved Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence felt like more of that, but with sand dunes. On the surface, it fit right in with big-budget, widescreen, overture and intermission-sporting epics like Spartacus, The Ten Commandments, and The Guns of Navarone (which shared two of its Anthonys, Quinn and Quayle, with Lawrence). There was a formula, and it followed the formula.
Or so they thought.
Instead, I think David Lean did what Mike Love apocryphally told Brian Wilson not to do. He fucked with the formula.
River Kwai came out in 1957, and with its crossfades, panning shots, and more conventional sound design, I can believe that. Lawrence came out in 1962, but I can’t believe that. If you told me it came out in 1972 rather than 1962, I could believe that. Surprisingly, given how much the French New Wave directors disliked Lean, we might have Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut to thank for its avant-garde qualities. In the DVD making-of documentary, editor Anne V. Coates shares the following about Lawrence’s post-production:
I was talking to him about the French cinema, and asking him if he’d seen the way they were doing the Nouvelle Vague, as we called it in those days, with the direct cutting, which I admired a lot and thought was really fantastic, and wasn’t really being done in England or America at that time, I don’t think. And so I talked to David about it and he said he hadn’t seen any of those films. So he went to see a couple of them. And of course he loved the idea. And then he came back, and did it better than anybody else.
A little biased, aren’t we? But it’s that collision of high production values and formal experimentation that makes the film exist in such a rarified air. Imagine the Beach Boys taking LSD. Well, the Beach Boys did eventually take LSD, so never mind. Imagine Rembrandt or Caravaggio sipping mushroom tea. Lean’s artistic instincts were rooted in that aristocratic, European, tightly controlled sense of craftsmanship. What happens when you add sprinklings of a wild, modern, fractured sensibility to that craftsmanship?
Lawrence of Arabia’s trick, much like Lawrence himself, is that it’s a weird movie masquerading as a normal one. Compare Lawrence to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie that isn’t shy about being weird. But I think that’s what might make Lawrence even weirder. Say what you want about how weird 2001: A Space Odyssey is, at least the opening shot gives you what you expect: outer space. But when you sit down to watch Lawrence of Arabia, you’re thinking, “All right, here we go, sweeping desert vistas, wind blowing across majestic rock formations, I’m pumped, I’m ready and … why is there an overhead shot of a man fiddling with his motorcycle in the English countryside?”
When Kubrick cuts from a bone to a spaceship, it might take you by surprise, but at least you know what you’re looking at: a spaceship. Lean cuts from a man blowing out a match in a Cairo office to … a Rothko painting? A close-up of a pregnancy test? The flag of an obscure communist nation?
This is where style compliments theme. Just as Lawrence aims to surprise his peers, Lean aims to surprise you, the viewer, frequently presenting you with images that, at first glance, depict the impossible. Naturally, all is explained with a follow-up shot, but for a moment, the only explanation seems to be a supernatural one – all the more jarring, since this isn’t a fantasy film but a historical film, one taking place not in a fantasy realm but in the same world as ours. Or is it? Lawrence is littered with these unanticipated incongruities and directorial sleights of hand, Lean dropping people or objects into environments where they are least expected. The lesson? It is foolish to make assumptions about what is and isn’t possible. Examples:
1. Lawrence and Brighton, making their way to Faisal’s camp, are riding in the absolute middle of nowhere, without a single sign of human life on screen, and then, out from between two rock formations flies … an airplane. But how is there …?
2. Lawrence and Farraj, having spent days crossing Sinai, look up and see … the smokestacks of a massive ship gliding through the sand. But how is it …?
Lean loves playing “Gotcha!” like this. He even does it with characters, especially when they think they’re alone:
1. Lawrence, before meeting Colonel Brighton, is riding to Faisal’s camp without a guide, and, assuming the area is deserted, begins singing “The Man Who Broke the Bant at Monte Carlo,” admiring the echo of his voice against the stony crags and cliffs, only to hear … a man clapping back at him. But I thought …?
2. Newly dressed in his Harith finery, Lawrence indulges in some private roleplay, twirling and posing like a kid in his bedroom, only to realize that … Auda Abu Tayi is sitting right there on a horse, watching this strange Englishman prance around like a buffoon. But where did that other guy …?
This is the only historical biopic I can think of that imbues an otherwise factual story with the flavor of magic.
*****
Lawrence of Arabia is a movie so good that when I hear critics try to point out its flaws, I only end up liking it more.
Do historians know that movies based on real-life figures need to take a bit of dramatic license or else they would be unwatchable? Somebody on Wikipedia is pretty worked up about all the historical inaccuracies in Lawrence, as if this is some kind of mistake on Lean and screenwriters Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson’s part, like they had a secret agenda to tell their audience lies.
The trick, William Potter, is not avoiding inaccuracies, but avoiding BIG inaccuracies. Grading it on the Braveheart scale of historical accuracy, I give Lawrence a 9.3. (A friend loves to joke about the questionable sense of triumph that washed over him when he first heard the voiceover at the end of Braveheart: “They fought like warrior poets, they fought like Scotsmen, and won their freedom.” Yeah! That’s right, suck it, England! Wait a minute … isn’t Scotland still part of …?”) Compare Lawrence to Peter O’Toole’s next movie, Becket, in which the main conflict is supposedly that Thomas Becket is a Saxon while everyone else in the upper echelons of royal society is a Norman. I mean, it’s a big plot point. The only problem? The real Thomas Becket was a Norman just like everyone else, not a Saxon. Whoops! (Upon being informed that the 19th century book he’d used as a source was inaccurate, the playwright decided to keep the play as it was, commenting that “history might eventually rediscover that Becket was a Saxon, after all.” Sure, and history might rediscover that I’m the tooth fairy.)
The key with Lawrence is that, despite its many small deviations from fact, I feel like the general essence of everything it depicts is true. If they’d made Lawrence French instead of British, or changed the setting to World War II instead of World War I, or made all the Brits out to be saints and all the Arabs out to be morons, then I’d have some issues. So the real Lawrence was 5’6” and Peter O’Toole was 6’2”. So reporter Lowell Thomas was a young man and his fictional counterpart Jackson Bentley is middle aged. So Lawrence and the Arabs took Aqaba without charging in on horses and slashing Turks with swords. Learning this information hasn’t undermined the larger meaning of the story that I’ve absorbed. If anything, I see why Bolt and Wilson altered what they did.
One example: the movie depicts Lawrence’s guide Tafas using a well that his tribe is not allowed to use, so when Sherif Ali spots Tafas doing this, Ali kills him. But apparently, Bedouins have never practiced this kind of strict territorialism. In other words, the film made this shit up. So were Bolt and Wilson unfairly portraying Arabs as “a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel” because they were racist? Or did they understand that this early scene would set up Lawrence and Ali’s moral swapping of places, so that, by the end of the movie, Ali comes off as the tolerant and civilized one, while Lawrence comes off as the silly, greedy, barbarous, and cruel one? There’s a logic behind the changes – unlike say, Bohemian Rhapsody. Now there’s a biopic where the screenwriters unnecessarily stacked the deck. Queen breaks up in the mid-‘80s, Freddie finds out he has AIDS, so they perform one last triumphant concert at Live Aid! Except Queen never broke up before Freddie’s death. And Freddie found out he had AIDS after Live Aid. The actual story was dramatic enough already, guys. Give the audience some credit.
Lawrence arguably gives its audience too much credit. You know how much the average first-time viewer of Lawrence knows about the intricacies of early 20th century Middle Eastern history? That’s what I thought. But Lawrence is the thing that made people like me want to go learn more about obscure Middle Eastern history, not less. A movie like this needs to take a potentially boring subject and make it riveting, but not in a cheap, manipulative way. It needs to get that random kid in Indiana excited about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the drafting of the Sykes-Picot Treaty. I feel like adhering to strict historical fact would have lessened Lawrence’s power as a fable.
Speaking of fables, I sense more than a bit of Orientalism in Maurice Jarre’s orchestral score, i.e. what Europeans think Middle Eastern music sounds like, rather than what it actually sounds like. Either that, or Jarre was doing his best impression of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (a classical piece I like to call my favorite prog rock album of the ‘80s – the 1880s). But every time that main theme comes around … I mean, I’d rather have this score than a score that feels entirely politically correct, but stinks. Somehow the main theme, with its leap upwards and immediate glide downwards, mimics Lawrence’s yearning to transform himself and his difficulty in sustaining that transformation. It evokes the ache that’s at his center, that sense that there will always be a hole inside him he’ll never be able to fill, no matter how many tribes he unites or lands he conquers.
A similar line of criticism is Lawrence’s usage of white actors playing ethnic. But not only was this the norm in 1962, and not only would this have deprived us of arguable career highlight performances from Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn, but by 1962 standards, Lawrence used way more non-white actors in non-white roles than most big-budget Hollywood movies of the era would have bothered to use. We’ve got I.S. Johar (India), Gamil Ratib (Egypt), Zia Mohyeddin (Pakistan), and let’s not forget, you know, Omar Sharif (Egypt) … they didn’t have to cast any of these people, but they did.
Oh, and Lawrence of Arabia is explicitly about racism. When Colonel Brighton finds Lawrence making his way to Faisal’s camp alone, Lawrence explains, “My guide was killed at the Masturah Well.”
“Turks?”
“No, an Arab.”
Brighton replies, without a second thought, “Bloody savages.” Not like those British, who never kill anybody, and certainly not for dumber reasons than Arabs do. After Lawrence and the Arab army captures Aqaba, but someone unwisely breaks the telegraph (O’Toole’s possibly gayest moment: flicking his wrist out and griping, “That’s a pity”), he proclaims that he’ll need to ride to Cairo to tell the British. Ali objects, but Lawrence replies, “Look Ali. If any of your Bedouin arrived in Cairo and said ‘We’ve taken Aqaba,’ the generals would laugh.”
“I see. In Cairo you will put off these funny clothes. You will wear trousers and tell stories of our quaintness and barbarity, and then they will believe you.”
Don’t do it, Ali. Don’t give Lawrence another dare. Once in Cairo, he walks into the officers’ quarters in full Bedouin regalia, with Farraj in tow.
“And where the hell do you think you’re going to, Mustapha?”
“Uh … we’re thirsty.”
Upon making his way to the bar with Farraj at his side and being told “This is a bar for British officers,” he replies, “That’s all right, we’re not particular.”
There’s a tiny subplot in the film I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t pick up on until my sixth or seventh viewing. Until it sank in, I kept thinking, “What is the deal with Mustache Man?” (His character probably has a name, but I’ll just call him Mustache Man.)
Only minutes into the film, at Lawrence’s memorial service, the viewer first meets Mustache Man on the steps of St. Paul’s, overhearing Jackson Bentley call Lawrence “the most shameless exhibitionist since Barnum & Bailey.”
“You sir. Who are you?”
“My name is Jackson Bentley.”
“Well whoever you are, I overheard your last remark and I take the gravest possible exception. He was a very great man.”
“Did you know him?”
“No sir, I can’t say to have known him. I once had the honor to shake his hand in Damascus.”
On first viewing, this is one of those scenes in Lawrence that seems oddly irrelevant. I’ve got plenty of movie ahead of me – why are you wasting my time on this bozo? Well, let’s just say that David Lean likes to play the long game.
Because three hours later, as Lawrence, dressed in a white Harith robe he apparently hasn’t changed out of for weeks, gazes in shock at the state of the Turkish military hospital, Mustache Man rides up and immediately proceeds to (pretend to) take charge. “Outrageous!” he shouts, as if any of the residents of the hospital were hoping for his opinion. “Outrageous!” (Did he ever consider that the notion of distant European countries carving up the Middle East like pumpkin pie might be more outrageous?) He looks at Lawrence, who begins to descend into a laugh that is almost a sob, and yet defiantly remains a laugh, and shouts, at T. E. Lawrence, a fellow British officer who is the protagonist of this movie, “You filthy little wog!” And he slaps Lawrence in the face.
Days later, as Lawrence is preparing to leave the Middle East for good, busy processing the conclusion of his equal parts inspiring, maddening, enthralling, and depressing adventure, but now dressed in a British officer’s uniform, he meets a starstruck Mustache Man in the hallway.
“May I shake your hand, sir? I’d just want to say I’d done it sir.”
Pausing with a sense of subliminal recognition, Lawrence asks, “Haven’t we met before somewhere?”
“Oh no, sir. I’d certainly remember that.”
The viewing I picked up on this was a special viewing indeed. For you see, Mustache Man spent the rest of his life telling anyone within earshot (his children, his grandchildren, his fishing pals, his local butcher, etc.) that he had once shaken T. E. Lawrence’s hand … without ever realizing that he had also slapped T. E. Lawrence in the face and had called him a filthy wog days prior. He’d met the same man twice … but for Mustache Man, the clothes made the man.
*****
I’m sorry, did I mention that this movie looks really good? Even the shots of people sitting quietly in a room look good. It’s like you can feel the heat collecting between the walls, or the air being generated by the ceiling fans. I sense a story behind every map, bust, painting, and knick-knack in the general’s office. Each object has a tactile presence.
I should probably mention cinematographer Freddie Young at this point, who allegedly had to drape every camera with wet cloth so that the heat wouldn’t burn holes through the film, and had to store the negative in a giant refrigerator at the end of each day. Let’s also give a shout-out to Super Panavision 70 and Eastman Kodak 50T 5250 (for further details, I recommend this video from YouTuber wolfcrow). Seriously, is there a bad shot in the movie? Maybe the shot of Lawrence gritting his teeth as his motorcycle veers out of control, O’Toole visibly not riding a motorcycle at full speed. But definitely not these:
To quote John Ford’s supposed advice to a young Steven Spielberg: “When the horizon’s at the bottom, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s at the top, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit.”
Moving on.
*****
They say a candidate running for re-election is always trying to win the last election, not the current one, and what adults with messed-up childhoods attempt to do with their adult lives might be kind of the same thing. We’re always trying to win the last election, not the one right in front of us.
Lawrence is a man trying to do the impossible. Not singlehandedly win Word War I, or reshape the geopolitical balance of the Middle East, but erase the pain of his own upbringing. And doing that is a much harder thing to do than the other two. I see within Lawrence a deep drive to prove something, but I fear that the people he really wants to prove it to aren’t around anymore to see it. He’s playing a concert, but the audience has left, and it’s the janitors who are watching. Although the janitors are very impressed.
At what point does his need to demonstrate that his tolerance for suffering is higher than everyone else’s go beyond a strategic ploy to gain the trust of skeptical Arabs and slip into the realm of self-destructive behavior? At what point should a man just let go of the freaking match? During his first stop on the long desert journey, Tafas points to Lawrence’s canteen: “Here you may drink. One cup.”
“You do not drink?”
“No.”
“I’ll drink when you do.”
“I am Bedu.”
Lawrence pours that shit right back into the canteen. Don’t tell me who I am and who I’m not. I’ll show you.
Stocking up on water at the last well before the journey through the Nefud, two Arab boys, Daud and Farraj, offer their services to Lawrence, but the others warn him. “No, no, Aurens, these are not servants. These are outcasts, parentless.”
“Be warned, they are not suitable.”
No? Did someone tell Lawrence no? Don’t you know that’s how you get him to do the exact thing you don’t want him to do?
Aiding the British war effort? Uniting the Arab tribes? Sure, why not? But is that what he cares about, really?
Crossing the Nefud desert? Does he like the plan because it’s a daring military strategy, or because it’s insane? Prince Faisal catches Lawrence sneaking away to start the journey. “And where are you going, Lieutenant, with fifty of my men?”
“To work your miracle.”
“Blasphemy is a bad beginning for such a journey.”
“But since you do know, we can claim to ride in the name of Faisal of Mecca.”
“Yes, Lieutenant Lawrence, you may claim it. But in who’s name do you ride?”
Mm-hmm.
Ali, who, unlike Faisal, actually has to cross the fucking desert with Lawrence, almost wants the plan to fail, just so that he can show Lawrence what an overreaching idiot he is. A battle of wills ensues: Lawrence claims he’ll be the first to wake up the group, only to be caught sleeping long past the planned start time; Lawrence nods off on a camel, but claims that he was merely “thinking.” For a while, the Nefud’s not so bad, although when Lean cuts to a shot of the party trudging its way through a pile of stones, the camels let out a collective groan that reminds me of the sound I make every time I’m in a hurry and I get stuck in a traffic jam.
That is, until Ali announces that they’re about to cross “the Sun’s Anvil.” I didn’t know the Sun was a part-time blacksmith, but that’s cool. After a dicey couple of days, they realize they’re about to make it across, and then comes the Gasim scene.
The Gasim scene. You know what I’m talking about.
There are movie scenes, and then there is the Gasim scene.
The group notices that one of the men, Gasim, has fallen off his camel, and will most likely be dead by mid-day. But Lawrence decides to go back and save him. As military strategy, this is dumb. But then one of the men says precisely what they shouldn’t.
“Gasim’s time is come, Aurens. It is written.”
It is written? It is written?
“Nothing is written!”
Ali begins to understand what this is all about. “Was it Aqaba? WAS IT AQABA?”
The sun begins to rise. Gasim collapses on the ground. Maurice Jarre’s score morphs into an army of disgruntled insects. Daud remains at the edge of the Sun’s Anvil, risking dehydration himself, but he’s never seen a man tempt fate as Lawrence is tempting it. Daud’s camel trots into the pitiless void. A speck appears. His camel trots some more. The speck grows larger. His camel trots faster. The music swells.
Like I’m supposed to rank some other movie number one? Come on.
Lawrence arrives at the well, an apparently still living Gasim on his camel, looking like he’s had, shall we say, better days, his uniform having almost melded with his skin. The man could use a drink. Hell, Daud chugs down water the moment a canteen is handed to him. But Lawrence? He makes that drink wait. Before taking a sip, he removes the covering from his face and croaks out, in a disturbingly unrecognizable voice:
“Nothing … is written.”
And THEN he takes the drink.
I’m no philosopher or religious theologian. I’m sure someone else with a higher degree than mine can better summarize the historical debate over the concept of fate vs. free will. Many discuss the issue as if human existence operates under one principle or the other, and we’re supposed to find out which one it is. But maybe the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Most things we can’t control, but a few things, we can. The trick, William Potter, is knowing which battles to pick.
Lawrence learns that he can save one man in the desert, and that he can impress a few generals in Cairo, but he can’t pass himself off as an Arab in Turkish-controlled city (at least not without getting detained and sexually assaulted), and he can’t turn the Middle East into a functioning democracy. He’s a man who doesn’t merely test his limitations, but finds out what they are.
I have a question: by the end of the movie, has Lawrence succeeded, or has he failed? Are the Arabs better off for having interacted with him, or are they right back where they started (or worse)? Did he do anything that could be considered an absolute good, something that couldn’t be undone by his naivete, bloodlust, or mistakes?
I don’t think the film definitively answers this question. I don’t think it should. But the answer I get, despite all the ways he goes astray, is a faint, barely perceptible yes. It might be as faint at the speck that Daud sees on the horizon, but I see it nonetheless.
*****
There are plenty of movies I love that my father doesn’t, and Lawrence of Arabia isn’t one of those, but whenever I mention how much I love it, he always says the same thing: “But the second half isn’t nearly as good as the first half.”
I suppose that’s true. Maybe there’s one derailed train too many. A couple more Turks get stabbed on the way to Damascus than necessary. The Turkish Bey torture scene could have been a bit shorter and I wouldn’t have complained. In a conversation for Slant Magazine, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard seem to agree with my dad: “We’ve praised Lawrence of Arabia for not being a ‘what happens’ movie, but in the second half, Lawrence shuttles back and forth between his nomadic desert lifestyle and the British high command based in Cairo, and, well, a lot of stuff just seems to happen.”
But I think my father prefers the rise to the fall, and the second half is the fall. And to ignore the fall is to ignore the dramatic arc and the ideas at play. I mean, isn’t life just rising and falling?
If anything, the last fifteen minutes might be my favorite fifteen minutes, because there’s something about the economy with which Lean depicts Lawrence’s slide back into mortality that I find captivating. They say that Lawrence and Zhivago are long movies, but oddly, I think Lean doesn’t waste nearly as much time as he could, instead sneaking a kind of conciseness and density into his long films, rendering them, in a storytelling sense, even longer than they already are. David Lean’s 45-second scenes contain enough content (and set design) for 45 minutes of someone else’s whole movie. Hell, as Lawrence winds down, I almost sense Lean’s impatience. Here is what I mean:
1. Lean cuts from the relative calm of General Allenby’s Damascus headquarters (Colonel Brighton pleading, “We can’t just do nothing,” Allenby replying, “Why not? It’s usually best”) to:
2. A cacophonous auditorium full of flags, headdresses, and Arabs shouting at each other.
It’s the newly proclaimed Arab Council, but things are not going so hot, Ali cursing at Auda, Auda cursing at Ali … let’s just say that, when you’re banging a pistol against a table to maintain order instead of a gavel (as Lawrence does), it’s probably a bad sign.
Cut back to:
3. Allenby chilling at his headquarters, perusing a fishing book, until the power goes out, so he leans over the balcony and witnesses Arabs leaving the city on camels. Cut back to:
4. The Arab Council auditorium, now populated only by Lawrence, Ali, Auda, and some other guy sleeping in a chair.
I love how Ali and Auda are like Lawrence’s mini-Apollo and Dionysus, appealing to the competing aspects of his personality. Say what you want about Auda (apparently his relatives objected to the film’s portrayal of him, although O’Toole claims Auda’s grandson taught him how to ride a camel?), within his own self-serving bandit code, he is reliable and true to his word. Auda’s certainly not the type to promise a region its independence, only to say, “Just kidding! France and I are splitting you in half.” Here in the empty hall, Auda makes one last pitch to Lawrence:
“Leave it Lawrence, come with me.”
“Come where?”
“Back. I know your heart. What is it? Is it this? I tell you, this is nothing. Is it the blood? The desert has dried up more blood than you could think of.”
“I pray that I may never see the desert again. Hear me, God.”
“You will come. There is only the desert for you.”
After Lawrence and Ali exchange what feels like a thinly-veiled lover’s goodbye, Ali steps outside, where Auda approaches him, not to fight, but to find a partner in psychoanalyzing Lawrence.
“You love him.”
“No, I fear him.”
“Then why do you weep?”
“If I fear him, who love him, how must he fear himself, who hates himself?” Ali draws a knife, Auda apparently stirring up the “barbarous and cruel” side that Ali hasn’t displayed for at least two hours now. “Take your hand away, Howietat!”
“Oh, so you are not yet entirely politician. Well, these are new tricks, and I am an old dog. And Allah be thanked! I’ll tell thee what, thought: being an Arab will be thornier than you suppose, Harith.” Translation: “You know, you’re all right after all.” Auda looks up at the moon and stretches his arms. Cut back to:
5. Allenby’s headquarters, a British officer with the stiffest upper lip imaginable scolding him: “In all my years as a medical officer, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Allenby replies, “Now go over to the town hall and see what they say.” Lean replies, “Funny you should ask – I can take you there faster than you can say ‘Bob’s your uncle’.” Cut to:
6. Lawrence, alone in the auditorium, apparently constituting the “town hall,” being scolded by the same officer.
“We did what we could in the civic hospitals.”
“But you forgot the Turkish military hospital.”
“What’s it like?” Lawrence asks, and Lean replies, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Cut to:
7. The Turkish military hospital, the arrival of Mustache Man, and the slap.
“Outrageous!” Then wait … what’s this? Lean uses a crossfade? Outrageous!:
8. Faisal says his goodbyes to an ungrateful Lawrence, as Allenby, Dryden, and Brighton look on. Cut to:
9. Mustache Man mistakenly assuming he’s meeting Lawrence for the first time. Cut back to:
10. Faisal, Allenby, and Dryden negotiating a handover of the city to the British. Faisal points out, with the aid of a newspaper, “The world is delighted at the picture of Damascus liberated by the Arab army.”
Allenby responds, “Led, may I remind you, sir, by a British-serving officer.”
“Ah yes. But then Lawrence is a sword with two edges. We are equally glad to be rid of him, are we not?” Allenby is like, wait, wasn’t Lawrence in the room like five minutes ago? He tries to let himself off the hook (“Not my business. Thank God, I’m a soldier.”) but his ever-mercurial advisor Dryden isn’t falling for it.
“Yes sir. So you keep saying.”
Faisal turns to Dryden. “You, I suspect, are chief architect of this compromise. What do you think?”
Dryden responds with a line so full of understated wit that it makes me long for the three-hour prequel, Dryden of Arabia: “Me, Your Highness? On the whole, I wish I’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells.”
And then, the ending – you know, the one on first viewing I didn’t find clean or tidy enough? The one that felt more like an exhausted crawl to the finish line than, say, a giant bridge blowing up? The one that struck me as inconsequential or even awkward, as if Lean had run out of time to edit the thing and had to slap it together at the last minute? I guess I was looking for something simple, and the ending to Lawrence of Arabia is subtle. It’s restrained. Only on subsequent viewings have I grown to appreciate the quiet purpose of each element:
1. Lawrence is a passenger in an automobile speeding across a desert road that cries out for a single distinguishing feature, yet has none. The driver, oblivious to the dramatic import of the occasion, like the nurse who tells you how incredible the food is at the restaurant across the street while your mother is dying, says to Lawrence in a Cockney accent, “’Ome, sir.” Lawrence mutters his last line of dialogue in the film: a barely audible “Mmm?” “Goin’ ‘ome, sir.” That’s it? These are the last lines of Lawrence of Arabia?
2. As the car passes a cluster of Bedouins on camels, Lawrence stands up. Was it truly the case that, only days ago, he was one of them? Might he even know the men? And surely they would know him? It already feels like a lifetime ago…
3. A motorcyclist passes on the right. A motorcyclist. Now who was riding a motorcycle at the beginning of the film? A motorcycle that led to the rider’s death? It’ll come to me …
4. The car passes a truck full of soldiers, an out-of-context snippet of “Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you …” wafting across the soundtrack before fading.
5. Lean cuts to a shot of … I mean, what kind of a second-to-last shot is this?
It’s a hood ornament and a bunch of dust. It’s like the cameraman set up the shot so that there would be people in it, and then someone smacked the camera with their elbow, and now it’s pointing at nothing, but they forgot to turn the camera off. This shot creeps me out.
6. A close-up of … I guess that’s Lawrence behind the windshield? Anyone even know? Then the merest hint of the theme music, not blasted in bombastically via orchestra, but played on what sounds like a solitary zither, and …
It’s the kind of last shot that evokes several competing emotions in me at once. Am I sad? Am I inspired? Am I scared? Am I disappointed? Or maybe I’ve just got sand in my eye? Whatever I feel, I’m reluctant to sit with it for too long. The ending kind of feels like Death. The journey is over. Does the journey end with a grand flourish? No, it ends with a “Mmm?” and an unsettling shot of a hood ornament framed by brown sand.
Lean must have felt the same way. According to O’Toole, besides the film’s opening motorcycle scene (which was shot in England afterward), this was not merely the final scene in the movie, but the final scene to be shot in the desert. “He just said, ‘Well Pete, we’ve done the adventure. We’ve finished our adventure.’ And I was very moved, actually. But I could see David was lost. You know, it’d been his life for years.”
That’s the feeling I get at the end of Lawrence: relief, triumph, and loss. On a less bloody scale, it reminds me of when I would reach the end of one of those weeklong backpacking trips I used to take as a teenager with the Scouts. I remember finally reaching the parking lot, glad to be returning to civilization, yet sad that the adventure was over and that I would have to return to my shitty teenage life.
It’s not easy to decide to make a positive difference in the world and actually do it. You can’t just wake up in the morning and be Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, Jr. You almost have to be in the right place at the right time. But one thing I do believe is that a person can make lots of little, tiny differences. Think of Ali at the end of the film, who tells Lawrence, “I shall stay here and learn politics.”
Lawrence replies, in full self-loathing mode, “It’s a very low occupation.”
“I had not thought of it when I met you.”
Or think of Colonel Brighton, who runs out after Lawrence at Cairo headquarters, only to find that Lawrence is long gone. (Nice tidbit from Wikipedia: “Quayle and Lean argued over how to portray the character, with Lean feeling Brighton to be an honourable character, while Quayle thought him an idiot.” As Auda puts it, “Give thanks to God, Brighton, that when he made you a fool, he gave you a fool’s face.”) But Brighton, wanting to speak to Lawrence? Wanting to say … what, exactly? Brighton, the man who, in his first scene in the film, refers to Arabs as “bloody savages”? Don’t you think that, three hours later, Lawrence has changed Brighton’s opinion of the Arab people just a little?
“Nothing is written”? I don’t know whether or not that’s true. But I do know a man can’t let someone else tell him that. He has to venture out into the desert and discover it for himself. And often, the journey might hurt, but the trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.
Part-time Buddhist, this is a tour de force. Thank you.