For years and years, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia remained the only film on the AFI’s top ten list of the greatest films ever made that I had not seen. In fact, I managed to forgo ever seeing any of Lean’s films until now. There were really two reasons for this. The first one was Pauline Kael’s infamous review of Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, particularly the line, “It’s not art, it’s heavy labor - which, of course, many people respect more than art.” Her review of Lean’s subsequent film, Ryan’s Daughter, was so harsh and, I suppose, accurate that it prompted Lean to enter semi-retirement for fourteen years.

There are many things, on a deep core level, that I strongly disagree with Kael on. Like for example, I felt ripped off by the ending of Jaws. I think that the shark should have eaten Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss, and having them triumph felt thematically incongruent with the rest of the film. I mean, so man triumphs over the natural and spiritual realm after all? Despite the fact that Spielberg isolated his shark victims in distant wide shot? It’s a highly personal thing, perhaps even arbitrary, but I prefer unhappy endings to happy endings. Happy endings often have the effect of making me tremendously angry. I certainly don’t believe that unhappy endings are more truthful than happy ones exactly. Rather, I think it’s more like that Leo Tolstoy line: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” There is something assimilative about happiness, whereas with suffering you sort of feel that you have some room to breathe. My relationship with the cinema is no doubt a masochistic one; I think that I buy into that idea that suffering precedes consciousness and that bliss is placative and numbing.

You know what? I also hated the ending of Carrie. Brian De Palma seemed to build up all this good will toward Carrie, making us sympathize with her, and then he throws it all away for a cheap jump scare making us relate to Carrie in the exact same way as all her tormentors did. There was callousness to this that I found particularly off-putting. Related to my preference for unhappy endings is my teenage-angsty identification with the outsider, and my belief that great cinema is often not only iconoclastic and individualistic, but downright antisocial. (I will not modify that further with my attack toward the ideological anarchy of my frequent enemies Trey Parker and Matt Stone -- at this point at least. Look for a piece on South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut in the near future.)

The problem with Kael is that I don’t think that she regards the endings to Jaws or Carrie as being serious issues or detractions from the “big picture” which to her is this joyous pop filmism. Kael was utterly without any vulnerability. While I wouldn’t go as far as call her inhuman, yeah, if you pricked her she wouldn’t bleed. She was comfortable and complete, and her relationship with the cinema was a relatively tenuous one; she could probably cut it off at any time. The pleasures that she got from the movies were then rather uncomplicated ones, and well, that isn’t for me.

Still, our paths have met on one very important point. Neither of us have any tolerance for good taste. “Stately, respectable and dead,” she said of Doctor Zhivago, and man I can groove to that. Honesty and the pleasures of filmgoing, however we may individually define them, will certainly exist outside of the spectrum of good taste. I guess though that I should have been more scientific in letting Kael influence me. Her actual feelings toward Lawrence of Arabia were mixed and she actually feels very positively towards Lean’s 1948 version of Oliver Twist. She has said elsewhere that most directors are at their very best when they are new (it’s interesting to note that despite being renowned as one of his greatest nemeses, Kael was very much a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s work pre-Dr. Strangelove), and so it’s possible that the “tasteful respectability” that she attacked Lean on was something that only really metastasized late in his career.

Lean’s name on Lawrence of Arabia was the central thing that scared me off from seeing it, but there were a few marginal elements that kept me associating it with “stately, respectable and dead.” It won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1962, and I remember reading that Bette Davis actively campaigned to win an Oscar for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane that year, and while the Academy thought that she was great in it the general feeling was that the film was nothing more but a “pot-boiling exploitation film” and was undeserving of the recognition that the Oscar would give it. Jesus Christ! But anyway, what could be more the opposite of a “pot-boiling exploitation film” than a “stately, respectable and dead” one.

I also distrusted the fact that David Lean was British and that the lead of the film was Peter O’Toole who for all intent and purposes was British. Despite the existence of Monty Python, Michael Caine, et cetera, English-ness readily lent itself to “stately, respectable and dead” in my mind. Also, years and years ago I remember a good message board buddy giving the picture two and a half stars out of five, although I can’t remember exactly why. Anyway, all of that made up my first reason for ignoring Lawrence of Arabia.

My second reason, simpler and more basic and as thus probably more significant, was that the film was like four hours long. I don’t have anything against lengthy films per se; in fact there are a good number of butt-numbers that I have great affection for. But I have to admit that it has been years since I watched Intolerance, Greed or even Magnolia which at one point I named as one of my ten favorite films of all time. I’m barely cracking my new Criterion Collection edition of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage; I’ve only gotten through the first episode. And while I am often very thankful that I do so afterwards, I have to admit that it takes some degree of will to get started on most of my all-time favorite Stanley Kubrick’s 150-minute-plus opuses. It’s easier to take in something short and self-contained instead, isn’t it, which may be why I often find myself wasting hours of prime movie-watching time looking at television. And so if this film is “stately, respectable and dead,” this monumental length not only would accentuate the boredom of its questionable aesthetic (I’m a masochist, just not a masochist in that way), it also presents a great cost for what could very well be very little benefit.

I think that you can probably see where I am heading with this. Lawrence of Arabia is not only better than I was expecting, it’s an all-out fantastic piece of cinema, a true masterpiece that deserves to be in the lofty company of stuff like Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, and Gone With the Wind. On the basis of this film alone I am convinced that David Lean deserves to be mentioned as one of the all-time greats. (Although, to be sure, I am betting that this belief will be better reinforced by seeing The Bridge on the River Kwai than it would be seeing Doctor Zhivago).

Somebody, I can’t quite remember who but I want to say Robert Altman (if anybody knows please write in so that I can amend my review), described the filmmaking process as polishing several little stones and then, when all have been polished, making a mosaic of them. Lean seems to have taken this analogy to heart with Lawrence of Arabia. Every shot looks as if it has been meticulously thought out and painstakingly realized. You can taste the blood, sweat and tears that went into this film. Lean and cinematographer F.A. Young have honed every frame of the picture to the degree in which they can exist outside of the context of the film as works of fine art. And from these brilliant lovingly polished photographs, Lean assembles a motion picture.

The film’s editing is perhaps the most surprising thing about it. Lean’s cuts are very hard and very precise; they have the snap of a pair of scissors slicing through the celluloid. In one of the film’s more famous transitions, a shot of Lawrence blowing out a match is juxtaposed with one of a desert dawn. Holy mother of God, what a punch! Abruptly shifting from this modest bit of action to a static landscape produces a multi-kilowatt jolt of electricity. What does the sequence mean? Lawrence is established as a masochist who we have seen snuffing out matches with his fingertips. By blowing it out and going to the desert, the idea is that his masochism is going to have a greater arena to flourish. That’s a little cute for my tastes. I better like the idea that it serves to deify Lawrence, to turn him into some monolithic natural phenomena. But it hardly matters anyway. The power of the sequence is without any foundation in emotional engagement with the characters or with thematic resonance. It’s a power divorced from any real consideration toward content. Lean is getting us high on nothing more or less but pure cinema.

There are a few neat tricks with the editing, remarkably simple things that I’ve found myself experimenting with on my occasional dabblings with filmmaking. If I do something to abstract the image at the end of a shot, like say do a very fast swish pan, I can start a second shot with the same abstraction, cut in the middle, and the transition between the two will be unnoticeable to the viewer. It will look like both shots are part of the same take. Lean does something like this a couple times throughout the film. Lawrence will be walking left to right in the frame and then a sand storm will blow over and hide him. When it leaves, Lawrence will suddenly be walking toward the camera. The change in angle indicates that we missed the cut. To some extent, this little trick calls attention to itself, but ultimately the use of any sort of dissolves or other post-production bells and whistles to connect the two shots would feel far more inorganic.

Lean’s filmmaking, it’s so… earthy and basic. He’s more or less removed camera movement from the filming process; the only variable that he really introduces into still photography is mise-in-scene movement. As the blown-out match scene lucidly illustrates, this proves to be enough. The editing is similarly basic, introducing only two more variables to the still photograph: duration and juxtaposition with other still photographs. And with just a handful of exceptions (Lean will occasionally use the zoom lens, which is OK by me, as it retains that earthiness that makes up the film’s entire aesthetic), photography, mise-in-scene movement, duration and juxtaposition are the only cinematic tools that Lean uses. Lawrence of Arabia is a beautiful pencil drawing of a movie; by limiting his resources Lean is forced to be inventive in using them. It’s inspirational really -- a camera, film, a splicer and tape, and that’s all you need to construct a masterpiece.

In what seems to be a thinly veiled attack toward Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Lars Von Trier muses:

"At the beginning of my career, I made very 'filmic' films. The problem is that now it's become too easy - all you have to do is buy a computer and you have filmic. You have armies rampaging over mountains, you have dragons. You just push a button. I think it was OK to be filmic when, for instance, Kubrick had to wait two months for the light on the mountain behind Barry Lyndon when he was riding towards us. I think that was great. But if you only have to wait two seconds and then some kid with a computer fills it in... It's another art form, I'm sure, but I'm not interested. I don't see armies going over mountains, I only see some youngster with a computer saying, 'Let's do this a little more tastefully, let's put some shadows in, let's bleach the colours out a little.' It's extremely well-done and it doesn't move me at all. It feels like manipulation to a degree that I don't want to be manipulated."

Quite. Of course, Von Trier would then sort of give up on this issue and create a sort of countercultural aesthetic through Dogme 95 and the uncategorical wackiness of Dancer in the Dark and Dogville. Made in the early sixties and with an economy of technique, Lawrence of Arabia is old school filmic. This is a profoundly beautiful, cinematic film, but it’s not at all a sterile one. It’s real is what it is, sacrificing none of the texture or flavor of fresh-squeezed. They’ve left the pulp in.

If it weren’t for this reminder of how the age of CGI has successfully airbrushed movie lovers’ wet dreams, I would be tempted to say that Lawrence of Arabia is the first modern film. The hard cuts are one of the more obvious ways that the film has broken away from classical cinematic conventions. The film is void of abstraction and requires no conscious interpretation or informed forgiveness of a dated technique. In Irving Rapper’s pretty awful Now, Voyager, the camera zooms into spinster Bette Davis, and her overbearing mother is superimposed to provide her with some discouraging words. And it’s so corny. It’s exactly the sort of thing that alienates modern audiences from the classical studio system. In stark contrast, the 43-year-old Lawrence of Arabia hits you directly. There is no cognitive deconstruction or historical perspective needed, it’s just—bang! And there you go.

The 1960s were such an exciting period of filmmaking. I guess that I hesitate to canonize them, as the shit from the period is likely to be far shittier than the shit from any other decade of the twentieth century. I mean, I’m sort of scared of it. (Ever seen a certain beach blanket rip-off with Jayne Mansfield called The Fat Spy? Unholy doesn’t even begin to describe it.) But the good stuff is often really good. This was the transition period between the cinema of the 1950s which represented studio system genre work at its absolute peak, and the hyper-personal if aesthetically countercultural (a euphemism for visually grungy, I suppose) 1970s. Lawrence of Arabia fits quite snugly into this context; this is a pure epic made when they still made epics, but void of all the degrading epic-isms of its immediate predecessors. I mean, Jesus Christ, can you believe that this took home the Best Picture Oscar just three years after William Wyler’s Ben-Hur did so? That just boggles the mind.

I apologize for not exactly talking about the actual film and perhaps hammering home a few of these points too heavily, but the truth of the matter is that I am just plain fuck-dazed after seeing this movie and frankly nothing in the actual film is as exciting to me as the quality of its filmmaking. I’m talking about Lean’s filmmaking in the same way I have talked about Kubrick’s filmmaking previously in terms of it being economical and pure, focused and streamlined to produce a potent and undiluted effect. That is by no means faint praise. It sort of makes sense that the two would be so similar: each was spawned by a different end of the spectrum. Kubrick was a photographer and Lean was a film editor and both understood the value of the other’s trade in creating cinema.

I could have sworn reading an interview with Kubrick (I can’t relocate it now) where the master ranked Lean with Fellini and Bergman as one of the only directors whose entire past, present, and future body of work it was imperative to watch. At the time, my prejudice about Lean was so strong that I actually doubted if Kubrick really understood what he was saying. Apparently not; on a sheer technical audio/visual level this film is at least as good as anything that Kubrick has ever done.

Like Kubrick, Lean’s hyper-filmism has been seen as rather alienating and lacking in any real human core. He’s a brilliant filmmaker and he makes beautiful movies, but they’re “cold.” Where the criticism of the two filmmakers diverges is through their worldview. Kubrick is considered a misanthrope whereas Lean is considered a sentimentalist. It seems that sentimentality will win you more Oscars and probably a wider audience. (Kubrick may be the world’s most popular cult director, but Lean has a much cleaner reputation.) But misanthropy, it seems to have more honesty to it. The sentimental filmic-but-cold film seems to have this aura of trying to impress you by the very fact of its weighty significance. In contrast, Kubrick’s misanthropy wins him points in that it makes it look as if he doesn’t really care if you like him or not.

I, of course, cannot speak for Lean’s later films. I know that Doctor Zhivago ends with a rainbow expanding over Russia, and that certainly sounds pretty disgusting. But whatever his later crimes, Lawrence of Arabia pulls surprisingly few punches. T.E. Lawrence is a lieutenant for the British army who united warring Arabic factions and led them into battle against the Turks. He does this by assimilating with them, dressing like them, adopting their values, and taking some teenage boys as servants (and possibly as lovers). This is pretty loaded material.

First of all, Lawrence is made Arabic and the Arabs are not made British. Lawrence is not initiating them into a superior civilization or culture. The film is very frank about the imperialist interests and casual racism of the British. Lawrence is told by his superiors late in the film that they have come upon an agreement with France to “divide” Arabia after the war. In one scene, Lawrence walks into an officer’s bar with his servant causing a fit. They don’t want either of them there, but offer that Lawrence can stay if the Arab leaves. Lawrence, of course, will not compromise and angrily demands that they make the boy a bed and get him a glass of lemonade. And so there is that. But still, this setup threatens to turn Lawrence into a great white savior and it threatens to make his Arabic army overly grateful to be in his presence. And it threatens to turn the Arabs into a race of noble savages, who Lawrence joins precisely because they are so uncivilized.

Lean survives this though by acknowledging it and working in a great deal of counterbalances. To begin with, the Arab characters are not stupid. They know the score and understand very well how the British see them: both as exploitable resource and as savage, noble or otherwise. They mention these things in the movie much to the embarrassment of the British. At the same time, the film is unblinking when it comes to Arabic “savagery.” Men are shot and killed for using the wrong well. The soldiers plunder the Turkish trains after they are blown up. There are floggings. And as Lawrence become more Arabic, he is tied into accepting these rather questionable customs.

Peter O’Toole is not without his oddness, but still there is something traditionally beautiful about him. His blue eyed, blonde-haired physically androgynous Lawrence fits our visual picture of Christ, particularly since he’s wandering around in the desert. Omar Sharif tells Lawrence that they aren’t “water walkers” like him. The film is savvy to the Christ parallels though and subverts them instead of out-and-out exploiting them. The fact of his iconology is slyly satirized through the structure of the storyline (after his funeral some men argue about who really knew him best) and through a scene where he poses on top of a train for an American photographer following a flawless victory.

Most significant to these specific Christ parallels, however, is the famous scourging sequence. Lawrence is flogged, like Christ, by the Turks and raped off-screen. This does not transform him into a martyr though; rather it facilitates his insanity. After executing a thief earlier in the film (in order to maintain peace between the warring factions), he realizes to his horror that he enjoyed it. After the flogging and rape he is able to find an avenue for his sadistic impulses through the righteous rage of revenge. He goes about executing Turks in battle with only a pistol, like some sort of animal, terrifying the American photographer who is documenting it all. The violence is PG-rated to be sure, but it has a genuine sense of brutality to it. It works. Lawrence is made so bloodthirsty that his iconic Greatness is effectively compromised. To some extent, he is an ignoble figure.

There is great controversy as to the fidelity of the film to the true life of T.E. Lawrence. Unlike most biopics, which are often accused of white-washing the darker elements of their subjects to make them more appealing and heroic (Schindler’s List, Ed Wood, A Beautiful Mind), Lawrence of Arabia is accused of slandering its subject. Of making him less heroic than he really was. That he wasn’t a masochist, he wasn’t a sadist, and there was no massacre like that, et cetera. I support such complaints being made for the record, but of course art is not the same thing as history. Lawrence of Arabia would not have been as good a film had it stayed closer to the truth; for once the alterations add complexity to what would have otherwise been rather straightforward material. It was necessary that it be based on fact, to better emphasize the elements of legend and iconology that it will work to subvert. And I think that it’s necessary that it deals with T.E. Lawrence.

Lawrence of Arabia is full of contradictions but it is not politically correct and it is not cowardly. There is one clear vision throughout the whole thing. The Lawrence of Lawrence of Arabia is one part Cool Hand Luke and one part Patton. On one hand he is a positive countercultural icon and the other hand he is a negative procultural icon. Only the story of T.E. Lawrence, a homosexual British general of warring Arabic tribes, could really safely contain those divisive elements. And it’s necessary that it contains those divisive elements. Not only does Lawrence of Arabia thematically predict the cinema of the Vietnam era, it thematically predicts the cinema of the post-Vietnam era. It’s far too smart and far too complex to readily lend itself to appropriation by either the outsiders and freaks or the all-American warhawks. This would certainly have been a great movie no matter what it was about, but fortunately for us, it also happens to have one hell of a pair of balls.