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Why Lawrence of Arabia Still Looks Like a Billion Bucks
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
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I don't really have singular favorites of anything, but if you put a gun in my face and told me to name my favorite movie, it'd probably be Lawrence of Arabia.
It's a pity that this movie gets mentioned whenever the concept of the white savior comes up, because it's the one movie I could point to from this era that has anything like a deconstruction of that concept. I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that it's an anti-imperialist movie, but it's definitely not pro-British empire by any means.
Edit: I completely forgot to mention, for any film nerds that live in southern California, who would like to see this movie in 70mm, look into American Cinematheque. They're a nonprofit that operates three movie theaters in the LA area from the 20s and 30s. They show all sorts of classic movies, mostly on film, and sometimes host talks by stars, directors, and producers as part of screenings. They screen Lawrence in 70mm pretty regularly, and I can't recommend that experience enough.
I agree that it's a deconstruction of that trope. He tried to do the classic orientalist missionary thing and was immediately tortured for it. Nobody in the film really struck me as a hero, much less Lawrence.
Yeah, really the nicest thing you can say about Lawrence here is that, his genuine affection for the Arabs and their culture aside, his ego and his misguided desire to be a hero saw him used as a pawn by both Allenby and Faisal, and he winds up a broken man for it.
Which isn't too far from how the real Lawrence viewed himself after the war. He's very self-deprecating and pessimistic in the Seven Pillars, which was of course the primary basis for the movie script. The big difference though is that the real Lawrence knew about Sykes-Picot almost from the beginning, and was actively working to sabotage it for most of the campaign. That hardly excuses his arrogance in thinking he was able to play king maker and thwart two empires. Again, the best you can say about him is that he was a somewhat well-meaning, extremely capable, but ultimately misguided and foolish figure.
That may be an overly charitable interpretation, but in my years studying him, I've never gotten the impression that he was some scion of British imperialism. He was just a guy playing hero who dearly paid for it.