“Nothing is Written”: How Lawrence of Arabia Saved My Irish Soul, Part II
“Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
As Lawrence the saboteur returns to the desert to wreak more havoc among the Turks, the American journalist Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy playing the real life counterpart Lowell Thomas) lionizes the exploits of “El Aurens”, fashioning a hero figure to yank the Yanks into the Great War. (In one of his newsreels, Thomas quipped that Lawrence had “a genius for backing into the limelight.”)
Blowing up and looting enemy trains becomes a Lawrentian speciality. [1] After one raid, a wounded Turk shoots Lawrence in the arm as he revels atop a derailed boxcar. Falling off the train, he stoically chokes back his pain. The Turk fires three more times, missing each time, as Lawrence stands still and fearless, even suicidal: “They’ll need a golden bullet to kill me.”
Re-climbing the wrecked train, he poses for Bentley’s camera, strutting above his delerious followers, the arm of his white robes stained with a blood-red stigmata. His Messiah complex Is now unmistakeable: “Who will walk on water with me?” But is he Christ or Hitler?
After Auda’s tribe collect their booty and quit the campaign, Lawrence fights on with a much smaller cadre. When Farraj’s gut is punctured by a detonator exploding in his belt, the master is forced to shoot the teenager to prevent his capture and torture by the Turks. Feeling responsible for the deaths of three loyal comrades, Lawrence’s guilt is now slowly eating him alive.
Scouting incognito with Ali in the enemy-held town of Deraa, he is captured and interrogated by the local Bey (Jose Ferrer). When the Turkish toffee-nose pinches Lawrence’s pale flesh with homoerotic relish, Lawrence flares and punches him in the gut. [2] Stripped and flogged, he once again denies his body and suppresses his pain, indeed seems to crave punishment for his sins. Then he is thrown into the gutter.
After the Christ-like scourging, Lawrence once more longs to quit, realizing he can never shed his white skin. Having readily proclaimed himself extraordinary, he now wants “ordinary happiness…my ration of common humanity.” Back with the British army in an ill-fitting uniform, he realizes he doesn’t fit here, either, and never really did.
Again, the unscrupulous General Allenby reels in Lawrence like a fly fisherman, calling him “an extraordinary man...a man of destiny” and re-igniting his grandiose, ruthless, “bastard” streak. Fired up to lead the Arab army in the “Big Push”, this time into Damascus, Lawrence hires a band of murderers and mercenaries; appalled, the once “barbarous” Ali has evolved into the more civilized man. Torn by a primal ambivalence, Lawrence can’t stop swinging from a horror of bloodshed to an unhinged bloodlust, from courting recognition and fame to retreating in shame.
When the Arab army comes upon the bodies of slaughtered villagers, they inflict revenge on the ragged, fleeing Turkish column. Lawrence shouts, “No prisoners!” and after the massacre, he stares wild-eyed into the mirroring blade of his bloodied knife, the same blade in which he admired himself months earlier. “Jesus wept!” cries Bentley, whose exploitation of Lawrence turns into revulsion: “Let me take your rotten, bloody picture for the rotten, bloody newspaper.” Any lingering shred of high principle within any of the players has been laid low.
Beating the British into Damascus by a day, the Arabs regress into tribal bickering in the town hall. Faced with a power failure and an outbreak of fire in the city, they are unable to run the waterworks or treat their 2,000 wounded Turkish prisoners. The chaotic Arabs abandon the city to the technocratic Brits, leaving Prince Feisal to negotiate “a British waterworks with an Arab flag.” Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Feisal tells Allenby that Lawrence was “a sword with two edges. We are equally glad to be rid of him, are we not?” In the trenches of international realpolitik, the tragic hero, riven by split loyalties and inevitable betrayal, proved as much a pawn as the Arab tribes.
Promoted to the unwanted rank of Colonel, Lawrence leaves Damascus in an open truck, his ordeal by fire, sand and blood having reduced his idealism to ruins. His Cockney driver tries to cheer him up: “Well, sir, goin’ ‘ome!” But he is speaking to a spiritually homeless man.
In the closing shot in the flat desert, Lawrence’s disillusioned face, obscured by a dirty windshield, gazes at a small band of camel-mounted Arabs, including two youths who could pass for the doomed Daud and Farraj. Then a British soldier passes on a motorcycle, leaving a cloud of dust, presaging Lawrence’s death on his own motorcycle, 17 years later, at age 46. Then, with the rising of the poignant, plangent theme music, curtains. [3]
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Winner of the Best Picture Oscar of 1963, Lawrence of Arabia is one of those rare instances, like The Godfather and 2001: A Space Odyssey, where cinematic art mated with mass commercial success. I have lost count how many times – 20? 30? -- I have “re-viewed” the film on small and large screens, including its assorted variations and restorations. In the words of Lawrence: “I enjoyed it.”
I became almost as obsessive about the film as its obsessive protagonist. I mean, what’s not to identify with? Besides John Diefenbaker and Stephen Harper, what kid does not dream of pulverizing the straight and narrow train tracks of his powerless life? Even as I approach my 70th birthday, I continue to stumble upon new insights and subtle resonances. The thrill is not gone.
Why are we drawn to multiple viewings of particular films? In my case, the works of Lean (and Kubrick and the Coen brothers) lead the pack of “repeaters”, scrutinizing the psyches of their (typically) male protagonists with an Aristotelean mix of pity and terror. I experience such gifts as a species of art therapy, or the interpretation of bottomless dreams, both mine and the artist’s, intersecting with the ongoing fiction of “real life.” Screen savers, if you will.
In 1982, while watching a hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens with my brother, he pointed to man sitting directly in front of us and whispered: “That’s Peter O’Toole!”
“No, it isn’t!”
“Yes, it is!”
“No, it isn’t!”
As we squabbled, the PA announcer announced, like the voice of God, that the glamourous figure we had first seen on the 70mm screen of the Carlton Theatre just down the street, 20 years earlier – was, indeed, in the crowd, in the flesh. [4] Yes, mea culpa, older brothers can be cosmic assholes.
As the players slapped the puck and slammed into the boards, O’Toole vibrated in his gold seat like a kid high on benzos. One excitable cat! Mike was struck by how rough and gnarly his hands looked, as if he had ridden camels his whole life. But neither of us summoned the chutzpah to tap the famous alcoholic Irish thespian on the shoulder and crack wise with something like: “I am a river to my people!” Later, during the intermission, we watched in awe as the lean and hungry El Aurens, strangely alone, feverishly smoked a cigarette. Probably a Camel.
Then, on a 1988 trip to the U.K., my brother and I visited Cloud’s Hill, Dorset, a tiny, ascetic cottage, without heat or electricity, where Lawrence lived alone until his death on a nearby road in 1935. Here he paid penance as an ordinary RAF enlisted man, adopting the names T.E. Ross and John Shaw, taking after his Irish writer friend George Bernard Shaw. The spirit of Auda was said to haunt the place. As I stood over Lawrence’s grave, I sensed it was high time to confront my own ghosts. Lawrence of Arabia, the man and the movie, was moving my dormant Irish soul.
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[1] Lean’s boyhood love of trains, an archetypal symbol of drivenness, plays out in many of his films, from Brief Encounter to Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, and Passage to India, not to mention his love of blowing them up. Case in point: in the climax of The Bridge Over the River Kwai, yet another psychotic British officer, played by Alec Guinness, swoons and falls on a plunger that blows up a Japanese troop train. In his women-free war films, Lean implanted sublimated sexual imagery wherever he could. In the end, let’s face it, a chap who married six times – move over Henry VIII -- clearly chose choo-choos over chicks. The Tracks of My Tears!
[2] The Arabian women in the film, veiled and voiceless, appear only fleetingly as background scenery; Auda reflects the general misogynistic stance, unchanged in millennia, with zingers like: “Thy mother mated with a scorpion” and “You trouble me like a woman.”
[3] Not exactly quick on the uptake, it was probably my third or fourth viewing of the 222 minute masterpiece before I picked up on Lean’s brilliant motif of life-as-a-search-for-identity-on-a-motorcycle, adroitly placed in the beginning, middle and end of the story: “Who are you?”
[4] If you must know, O’Toole was in Toronto playing opposite Canada’s own Margot Kidder (aka Lois Lane), something of a charismatic bipolar bear herself, in the film Pygmalion.