Old Films (To Me, Anyway. Review of "Lawrence of Arabia")

A vast expanse of land, colorless. Stretching across the horizon, as big as the sky.

The sun, setting slowly. In the distance, a tiny black figure appears, no larger than a dot caught between land and sky.

Enormous, sweeping scenes of landscape feature in this film -- swaths of sand, rolling dunes, and still silhouettes. Lawrence of Arabia is an epic: clocking in at nearly three hours, along with an intermission, and depicting a heroic quest across desert and sea.

When I first watched the movie, I realized that they don’t make movies the same way today: Lawrence is slow, heavy on dramatic landscape shots and succinct dialogue. There’s some quality of older films that’s unique: maybe the way people talk (which, by the way, I looked up and it’s this thing called the Mid-Atlantic accent, some weird synthesis of both British and American speech used primarily in Hollywood in the 20th century), the honey-slow and leisurely pace of sequences, or the long, drawn-out sprawl of the film itself.

I only knew about Lawrence of Arabia from the new, in comparison, film Prometheus, a part of the Alien franchise.

One of the main characters of Prometheus is this humanoid robot, David, who is obsessed with Lawrence of Arabia. David, like Lawrence, is caught in a no-man’s land: David is not completely human, but not entirely robot either, something like a shell which knows that it is empty; and Lawrence is no longer an Englishman when he travels to war, but is not truly an Arab either. Both are caught between two worlds, never quite fitting in -- a familiar, recurring theme in many movies.

But the languid torpor, the slow, sun-drenched scenes of Lawrence aren’t familiar at all to me. “Have you no fear, English?” Sherif Ali asks Lawrence upon their first meeting, to which Lawrence replies: “My fear is my concern.”

David’s obsession with Lawrence is perhaps understandable. The film is reminiscent of one of those epics you have to read for English in high school, maybe the Odyssey or Gilgamesh, a fantastic, convoluted and gripping tale of a hero’s journey, the meaning and moral of which still vaguely eludes me. It has this timeless quality to it, a sort of picturesque, idyllic voyage. Something about that level of unattainability -- the pedestal that Lawrence has been placed on (despite some of his flaws) -- attracts me, and reminds me of love stories almost, ones set in Italy or France thirty or fourty years ago. There’s something about the idea of an epic perfection, of sunlight and honey and the blurred, oil-painting quality of memories.

Of course, these depictions are romanticized and dramaticized, but like Tim O’brien’s reasoning in The Things They Carried, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the emotions and memories evoked are meaningless.

 

Either way, watching these old Hollywood films is fascinating. Next up on my list, The Guns of Navarone!