LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)
Without a doubt the greatest film of its kind; Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is an epic in every sense of the word, and yet personal enough to illuminate our central character psychologically and philosophically. Keeping the focus squarely on a small group of recurring faces so as not to allow the film to become mired in the magnitude of its subject matter, Lean allows the intimacy of his plot to shine through while the film’s elaborate set pieces and crowds of extras play as garnish. What will a man endure just to prove to himself that he can? Nothing so arouses Lawrence’s mettle as being told that his Bedouin guide is taking it easy on him with his water allowance, “I will drink when you drink”, he concludes. So goes the character’s behavior for much of the first half of the film, rising to meet each moment he’s told that no man could possibly endure in the face of certain death. His new countrymen retort to him each time that was will come to pass cannot be altered, ‘it is written’ after all, to which Lawrence scoffs that nothing is written. It is this mixture of admiration and scorn, of a deep feeling of superiority toward a people and an even deeper need to be accepted and cherished by them that makes up Lean’s approximation of the colonial mindset. To be loved by his new compatriots is not nearly enough for Lawrence, he must be revered beyond all comprehensible imagination, he must be as a genius God who sees deeper than any man into all that exists around him, leading a lost flock toward what they truly desire, not merely what they profess to desire, not merely what they believe in their hearts that they desire, but what he, and he alone, in his divine powers of perception knows that they truly want below the surface of their own cognition, what their soul thirsts for that their mind cannot Is it freedom? Is it dominion? Is it a bed with sheets and a glass of lemonade?
Lean initially shows us his Lawrence as an odd duck; out of step with, and openly shrugged off by, his peers among the ranks of the British military. He’s unable to gain the equilibrium required for assimilation with the other men in even the most basic situation, making a display of his exceptionalism by quenching fire with his bare hand and naked willpower. Here is a man who can either be above his fellow man, or below, but never to blend in nicely with any group, let alone become truly ‘one of them’. Lean’s film is essentially simplistic in its broad view and deeply complicated and world-weary in its fine grain textures. In all, Lawrence is about the self; the prison our identity can become, the shedding of that self when we transcend, alone, into a distant world. It’s about the hubris associated with ego loss, suddenly our morality, our sense of what’s rational, even our sanity is all is called into question. What Lean does so well is to take this man at the center, a man who’s forgotten all reason, and stage him always under the watchful gaze of men for whom life can never be forgotten. The eyes of a world that does not forget, a sober world of realities and cold fact, watches closely and judiciously as this man, shedding his every learned hinderance, marches blindly into madness, away from his own mind. Lean also wisely places his audience firmly in the middle, we can see the world and we can sympathize with Lawrence, we can understand his motives, but we cannot forget that reality exists, just as it always did; the billiard room with the good old boys sipping whiskey doesn’t simply vanish just because we’ve left town, it only washes away in our mind. The human spirit unleashed to face its most savage impulses, its lust for greatness, Lawrence exemplifies the God complex and the crushing defeat of being brought back down to Earth by remembering his mortality. We can transform, but the world does not transform with us. Lawrence is the outsider who can be above men or beneath them, but never feel kinship. Lean shows us a Lawrence who wishes to be above his own body, playing with a flame with his bare hands, riding the whirlwind, “the trick is not minding that it hurts”. Nothing, not nationality nor race nor rank, holds any meaning for him now, as he plunges ahead toward authorship of himself and the world around him. He becomes a will, and that will is a purpose unto itself. Ultimately, Lean shows us the fate of all who would attempt to outrun themselves, an eventual day of reckoning when the two sides of Lawrence come crashing down. Faisal, in a den of wolves, relaxing at the sight of a friend and greeting him as he’s come to be known to his people, ‘Awrence’,and suddenly changing his posture when he sees the man’s aura has changed; “or is it Major Lawrence?”. The question we can only grasp at is, which is the Lawrence at the surface of things and which is the Lawrence under the surface? At which point have we exposed the real Lawrence? The clumsy man being shouted out of the room by his superior officers? The insubordinate man defying rank to speak to Faisal of his aims? The headstrong man galloping across the desert after saving Gasim? The triumphant man atop his slain dragon of the locomotive or conquered cities? The deranged man sick with bloodlust as he grips the dagger with shaking hands? The broken man, whipped and defeated, turning back to Cairo in shame? He is all of them and none of them, he is like all who live in modern times, somehow an ever-unfolding contradiction in a natural state of hypocrisy. Like the American newspaper man who comes to use him to sell a war and winds up chastising him from his moral soapbox. In the desert he had finally met men who weren’t hypocrites, who weren’t a contradiction. His remark to the newspaper man reveals all when asked about the desert, he replies “It’s clean”.
The choice to show us the uneventful death of the man who became a force not even a world super power, who carved up the map of the globe as though it were a game of strategy, would dare tame is the key that makes the picture work. The man who stood defiant as a dying Turkish soldier fired at him from feet away was ultimately undone, not by battle, but by leisure, as a pair of Sunday bicycle riders strayed into the wrong lane on a country road. For Allenby, who never stopped practicing his fishing cast even in a conquered city, it would have been unthinkable, but for Lawrence, whose soul was claimed by the desert, there was no escape. Like Gasim, whose death was written and delayed by the will of Lawrence, so too was it written for Lawrence himself. He found the ease of leading men to plunder and profit, but the impossibility of leading in peacetime. The war had taken Lawrence in so many circles it had become impossible to discern where he came in at all, and who he was when he did. Lean balances all of this by never letting us forget the man who will inherit the leadership when the fighting concludes, Allenby, Faisal and Dryden stroll comfortably in the wings for the entirety of the picture and sit down to negotiate the peace when all is said and done. Lawrence, drained of all direction, witnessing the curtain of politics fall over his clean land, does the only thing he can do; he leaves for home. Sitting blankly in the Jeep, Lean gives us one final reminder of what awaits him when he gets there, and in that instant, reminds us of where all the paths of glory ultimately lead us.
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