An English Teacher's Dream

Rating: 9/10 (29 June 2013)

My friend says of this movie: it is an English teachers dream. It is a movie of stunning lines and real characters. It is a movie of many themes all tied together and one that has gone down in history as a classic. It is a movie that needs to be watched over again to fully understand many of the ideas that flow through it. Lawrence of Arabia is nothing short of brilliant.
The movie is set in the closing stages of World War I where the British want to encourage the Arabs to revolt against the Ottoman Empire and destroy a thousand year regime. The period is constantly referred to in the movie as the Arab rising, and it is a rising for independence, not for overthrowing the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence is sent to Arabia to liaise with the Arabs and try to unite them and send them against the Turks. He sees the opportunity to capture the port of Aqaba so that the British can land and attack the Turks from behind. Thus Lawrence sets out to capture the city and crosses what is considered to be one of the harshest sections of Arabia.
Lawrence is a messiah figure. He believes himself to be as such for he compares himself to Moses. After capturing Aqaba he decides that he needs to inform the British and proposes to cross the Sinai desert. His Arab colleagues believe that he cannot do it, but he believes that he can. He crossed the desert to take Aqaba and they said he could not do it, but he did. As the movie progresses we see that the Arab tribes flock to him and he becomes more of an authority figure. Even more he believes that he can reshape the Arab nation and rushes to Damascus to capture it under the name of the Arabs, but this idea will be examined later.
Lawrence is a very complex character. He is an Englishman that falls in love with the desert. He comes to believe that he is apart of the desert and dresses as those of the desert. At first it seems that he is doing it to take the role of a leader, and his Arab friend believes that when he returns to his English people he will return to their ways, but he does not. Instead he has become an Arab in his heart. He walks into the bar dressed as an Arab with an Arab and receives a very cold welcome. He is slowly changing. He stands out among the ordered uniformed officers. Lawrence refuses to become like the rest and retains his Arab feelings. As the movie progresses we see that he slowly moves from somebody who feels that killing is wrong to become a blood thirsty savage. Before Cairo he watches two people die, and by the end he screams "take no prisoners" and massacres an almost defenseless Turkish army. After the massacre he carries a bloodied knife with blood covering his hands. Lawrence degenerates into a savage and the movie ends with him returning to England silent.
On the other hand Lawrence's companion moves the other way. He begins as a savage Arab who hates certain tribes because they are his enemy. He first walks onto the scene after shooting Lawrence's friend because he stole water from his well. The more he follows Lawrence, the more he becomes indentured into civilised English life. The final part has the Arabs realising that Lawrence is a double edged sword that is no good for anything. A psychopath makes a brilliant general but a hopeless leader. We see this in history with Ulysses S. Grant, and in the movie with Lawrence as he fails to establish an Arab democracy in Damascus.
Modernisation and the descent into barbarity are the major themes in the movie. The Arabs are shown as a primitive people who do not understand technology. They begin by fleeing from Turkish planes that attack one of their encampments. They don't want technology but they cannot escape it. With Lawrence's leadership they begin to embrace it even though they do not understand it. They are given too much at once, as can be seen at the failure of ruling Damascus. They cannot use the electricity and the people in the hospital are dying because they are incapable of improper care. It is this scene in the hospital that makes Lawrence realise that he cannot rule a nation.
On the otherhand there is the descent into barbarity. Who are the real savages? Lawrance becomes one and the Turks are seen as such, but Lawrence's friend is appalled that Lawrence brutally massacred an army of Turks. The British considered the Arabs to be barbaric but we see by the British attitude that they were barbaric. They were not fighting the Turks to free the Arabs but to change the control of the region. The British divided the region into both French and British sectors, the Arabs had no say in the decision. What we see is the collapse of the old order in the emergence of the new. The Ottoman Empire is disintegrating as the British and French move in to reshape the area. Lawrence made an impact, but once it was made, he is quietly taken away.