Grilling Lawrence

Yesterday was Independence Day in Jordan, so in honor of that auspicious day I decided to do something I can’t believe it took me this long to do: I finally watched in its entirety the much-lauded and beloved epic adventure Lawrence of Arabia. I know, I know, I act as if I might have seen the whole thing before, probably have nodded many times as people talked about it, just as I have done about Star Wars. I just hadn’t watched the whole thing. Well, I have put the DVD in before, lying down on the couch I never made it through the whole thing awake. So, in honor of Jordan, I decided to watch the epic about the flamboyant, controversial Lawrence of Arabia.

Did I mention it is an epic? Oh, yes…in the way that Gone With The Wind  is epic! Huge! Spectacle! Movie magic and sweeping pagantry…and about as reliable of history as GWTW is. Wait—‘reliable’ isn’t really the right word. It’s about perspective. When you watch GWTW we are manipulated to weep for the end of the ‘Old South,’ and fear what those nasty scalawags and carpetbaggers did to the Glorious South. While I love to watch GWTW, I don’t share that perspective. But that’s for another blog entry…let’s get back to Lawrence of Arabia, and the sweeping David Lean epic!

Lawrence, oh,  Lawrence…It is interesting to watch the movie at this stage of my tenure in Jordan because I see things in the movie now I am quite certain I would have ignored or been oblivious to six years ago. While the movie is lush and yes, Peter O’Toole is searing in his beauty as Lawrence, it is a movie that makes you just shake your head and wish they had gotten it more “right.”

I rather like my title of this blog entry because I think I am being clever. I want to “grill” the movie on its interpretation of Arabs. If you know your Roman Catholic saints, you will know that Lawrence is the martyr that ended up roasted on a grill. Get it? Grilling Lawrence? Grilling Lawrence? The movie? I am still chuckling at my clever title. Oh and another level: it’s Memorial Day weekend in the USA and what do many families do on this holiday weekend?? Clever, right??!  What? Oh, am I the only one? Never mind…

Here is the problem of Lawrence of Arabia—it doesn’t portray the Arabs fairly, and to quote a film scholar, Max Alvarez, editor of Cinecism: “The culture for which Hollywood has shown its greatest contempt has been the Arab culture.”

My dear friend and colleague Ruba loves to teach everyone, anyone, proverbs in Arabic, and here is one:  Al tikrar, biallem il hmar—By repetition even the donkey learns.  Here is the problem of bad interpretations and perceptions: seeing a steady diet of caricatured Arabs in movies since the dawn of cinema has adversely affected perceptions of Arabs. I looked at a book I bought in 2007 entitled, Reel Bad Arabs that stated in the introduction: “I was driven by the need to expose an injustice: cinema’s systematic, pervasive and unapologetic degradation and dehumanization of a people.”

Whoops, I started my rant about the movie, I was so eager to get to the grilling that I almost neglected to look at some of the problems/issues of the movie. Okay, grab your bowls of popcorn, boys, and girls, and let’s look at the movie…

After the beginning of the film when we learn that an older T.E. Lawerence has died in a motorcycle accident (hardly a spoiler alert if you know the story at all) we go back in time and meet our Arab friends circa World War I. We see two Turkish planes bombing Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) and his followers, gunning down scores of Arabs. We immediately see that Lawrence empathizes with the victims. Soon after that Lawrence and his Bedouin buddies blow up Turkish railroads; the Turks are the villains and the Arabs are seen as decent…as we get to know Lawrence we see that he prefers Arab dress and befriends Arab youth. As we get to know Faisal I notice that there are not any (yet) gratuitous harem scenes. But then as the movie winds on, the Arabs become denser and denser, and greedier and greedier, and more and more helpless, it seems, and certainly one-dimensional and primitive.

There is a scene that is pretty improbable to me: Ali greets Lawrence and shoots his guide dead; Lawrence has a soliloquy about Arab feuds and Arabs being a “cruel people.” Ali shot him for drinking from his well—that is so not like the Arabs—not the uber-hospitable Arabs that I know! Hospitality is a sacred duty for Bedouins. The incident is also not in Lawrence’s book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Well, there is an encounter at a well in the book, but it is light and humorous and not deadly.

While Bedouins were seen as heroic in the beginning of the film, later, after the Arabs take Damascus from the Turks, director David Lean shows them as untamed animals who quarrel over everything. The message here? Arabs are not qualified nor worthy to govern civilized societies. In the movie the Arabs govern Damascus for two days. In reality, it was almost two years. The French army forced them and Faisal out of Damascus.

Overall, how does the movie look as far as history?? Well, it is that theme of cultural domination prevailing—the civilized British conquering uncivilized folks. The film peddles the trope of the brave Englishman and not a valiant Arab. Lawrence is the sun god uniting the Arabs! His courage and intelligence saves the day! Lawrence continues to compel the world’s attention, but I have learned that he is not as beloved in Jordan—how self-serving might he have been? How much of a media darling? The movie is the same old self-flattering theme and also of Western prejudices about Third World peoples. Lawrence’s real value to the Arabs was more about his role in supplying arms, equipment, and money. But the movie does show how France and England reneged on promises to the Arabs about independence.

It is time for the school day to begin here, the day after Independence Day in Jordan…I will continue my rant later. Stick around for Grilling, Part II  (Hey, aren’t sequels also a predictable part of Memorial Day fare??? That title just kills!)