Lawrence of Arabia

Aside from its historic scale and beauty, I think Lawrence as a film is most special to me for its fraught relationship to spectatorship, as Lawrence-the-Man is always in competition with Lawrence-the-Myth. Significantly, Lean directs Omar Sharif to gaze piercingly at Peter O'Toole throughout the three-hour runtime, so that one only has to look at Ali to orient your view to Lawrence in the frame. We see virtually none of the American or British coverage of Lawrence's heroics, but in every single scene we have Ali's assessing gaze as the true vantage point through which we access Lawrence's failures and triumphs. Lawrence was a cinematic gateway drug for me because it was one of the first films I ever saw that represented a split gaze in that way, asking us to reckon with the fact that the audience's gaze wasn't the only gaze. As the US enters another forever war in the Middle East, I wonder if films like Lawrence, despite its flaws, encourage us to watch more productively--to see through multiple perspectives rather than singular ones? I think Lawrence of Arabia deserves to be seen on a big screen because only in this medium can its themes of spectatorship and witness really implicate the audience in these dynamics. Watching on the big screen will best allow us to look inward as we turn our eyes more and more back towards the middle east, and to fresh narratives of Western heroism that are no doubt on our own horizon. Also: lest we ignore the iconic camel choreography!

Written by Lin Young.