Episode 19: Lawrence of Arabia

Justin:

Putting my own level of enjoyment watching Lawrence of Arabia aside, which again, please don’t hate me... it is impossible to deny how influential David Lean’s film is. All-time great filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg have all loudly sung its praises, the latter of which once even referring to it as a “miracle” and his favorite movie ever. For me, there are two main aspects of the film that will stay with me long after the loooong runtime (besides, of course, just how goddamn beautiful Peter O’Toole was) and they happen to go hand-in-hand.

The first of these is the sheer scope of the film. There will always be something enrapturing about being jettisoned to another part of the world (or other worlds in science fiction films) and feeling like you’ve actually landed in that setting. Lean makes sure that you understand just how vast the great Arabian deserts are and what it would be like to be traversing the scorching sand dunes on camelback. Nearly sixty years later and it’s hard to fathom if modern technology could shoot it any better than he did back then. It’s exquisite and beautiful and aspirational. It’s really no wonder those future cinematic geniuses took to it so well!

The second thing that I’ll never forget about this movie is a collection of stunning individual images that left me feeling like I was in a museum looking at expensive pieces of art. Lawrence on the train after he and his bandits have overtaken it, the first uncertain glimpse of Sherif Ali emerging from the mirage of a horizon, and of course, one of the single greatest scene transitions ever, when Lawrence blows out a match and we’re transported to the desert in an instant. They’ll all live rent-free in my brain, and that’s more than can be said about some movies that I would say I like more than this one. So that says something as well.

Roger Ebert described Lawrence of Arabia by saying “It is spectacle and experience, and it's ideas are about things you can see or feel, not things you can say.” And while I unfortunately have to lean more on the “see” part of that and not so much the “feel,” I can echo his sentiments that a great deal of Lean’s vision of the Arabian desert and the British soldier who sought a purpose there did in fact leave me speechless. 

Pete:

Lawrence of Arabia, both the character and the film, are something like kindred spirits. They can each be succinctly described as bold, ambitious, and somewhat mad. We’ve hopefully been able to illustrate that pretty well for you with tonight’s episode, but I’d like to take it a step or two further than that. When you add up everything we’ve talked about tonight, and think about how David Lean essentially mastered an entire genre with the film to the point of making it obsolete, it starts to become clear just what a miracle of a movie this actually is. 

It’s rare that anything with this kind of legendary reputation even approaches the greatness that’s been heaped upon it for decades, but LOA not only lives up to that rep, but is fully able to work on its own terms as well. It's both the pinnacle of a style of decades-old Hollywood filmmaking, AND a unique work of art. It’s a contradiction of a movie: a nearly 4 hour character study, (its own contradiction in a way) about a man both keenly aware of his impending downfall, and absolutely reveling in that same collapse. It’s a poem about how death comes for us all in ways that can be as literal as they are symbolic, and as painful as they are freeing.

What keeps me coming back to LOA, isn’t the historical interest I have in WWI, or the world class filmmaking on display for virtually every second of nearly 4 hour running time. It’s the small, intimate, personal, truth it's able to get at – that people, all of us, are full of these kinds of contradictions. It makes it nearly impossible to truly describe who someone is, historical figure or not. It’s why a movie can ask us time and again, who its main character is and spend 3 hours and 45 mins showing us, and not come to a clear conclusion. It’s bold, it's ambitious…it's mad.