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Desert thoughts

Posted on January 25, 2019 | 3 comments

Lawrence of Arabia aired on local public television last weekend, and I persuaded the household to watch it with me. Even though I’d only seen the film once before on television in the late 70s, it made a lasting impression, and I was very excited to watch it on a larger and more proportional screen. (I still hope to see it in the theater some day.) Just like the first time, I fell hopelessly in love with the desert and was transported by Peter O’Toole’s performance.

My fellow viewers thought the film could have used some editing, that some of the sequences were too long. Though I see their point, I don’t necessarily agree. Some of their response corresponds to a change in cinematic expectations over the years: audiences today want the film to give them a sense of the place and get on with the action. Lawrence of Arabia doesn’t work that way. The desert is not the setting — it is the most important character in the film.

The first half of the film is a love letter to the desert, but even those long, slow pans can only hint at something so vast, complex, inscrutable, and achingly beautiful. I reminded those watching with me that these scenes were filmed on location and not the results of special effects wizardry. The scale is too staggering to be grasped through briefer shots – the eye takes a moment to notice the tiny human figures and the mind still more moments to process the image as a whole.

The desert is the chief antagonist in the film, against whom all the other characters must contend, and against whom they stand in sharp relief. The desert is immense, and in that immensity often seems indifferent and harsh. It is not, however, the villain. That role falls to any number of characters who fail to act on a human scale, where fellow feeling is a human quality and indifference is a choice. Blaming someone else — the desert, the war, the empire — for one’s lack of human sympathy is the worst kind of villainy. Those who own both their actions and the consequences thereof, however unbearable, are the true heroes.

The tension of the film turns on Lawrence’s inner conflicts, and the battles he wins or loses are those within his soul. By the end, it is clear that he is no knight in shining armor, but it’s equally clear that he is no villain.

For those who get Kentucky public television, the film airs again tonight at 9:00 EST/8:00 CST.

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Posted in Reviews

Tagged Arabia, desert, film reviews, Kentucky public television, KET, landscape, Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O'Toole, T.E. Lawrence

Writing that inspires: Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Posted on August 9, 2012 | 6 comments

I’ve been reading T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and at times his prose is breathtaking. Here’s what he says about his journey down the Red Sea by boat from Suez to Jidda:

By day we lay in shadow; and for great part of the glorious nights we would tramp up and down the wet decks under the stars in the steaming breath of the southern wind. But when at last we anchored in the outer harbor, off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless. (p. 49)

I feel like I’m there, standing on the ship’s deck beneath a noonday sun so bright that all color seems muted, trying to hold firm against the assault of that intense heat.

Lawrence describes dozens of different types of sand and stone throughout the book, the way they lie together in valleys or tower over the landscape in layered escarpments. I can see them in my mind’s eye, and I find myself longing to see them with the eyes of my face as well, to feel them beneath my camel’s feet and hear the sounds they make when traversed by wind and body.

The swept ground was so flat and clean, the pebbles so variegated, their colors so joyously blended that they gave a sense of design to the landscape; and this feeling was strengthened by the straight lines and sharpness of the hills. They rose on each hand regularly, precipices a thousand feet in height of granite-brown and dark porphyry-coloured rock, with pink stains; and by a strange fortune these glowing hills rested on hundred-foot bases of the cross-grained stone, whose unusual colour suggested a thin growth of moss. (p. 72)

His language often evokes images of water, reflecting both the incongruent influence of water on the terrain and the necessary preoccupation with water that underlies the thoughts and actions of desert dwellers.

The hills got lower, with the sand banked up against them in greater drifts, till even the crests were sand-spattered, and at last drowned beyond sight. So as the sun became high and painfully fierce, we led out upon a waste of dunes, rolling southward for miles down hill to the misty sea, where it lay grey-blue in the false distance of the heat. (p. 93)

Such descriptions remind me of the incredible cinematography in Lawrence of Arabia (one of my favorite films of all time), and I realize that the movie’s vast panoramas and sweeping score attempt to express the ineffable qualities of Lawrence’s evocative words. This is what he writes about the great interior expanse of the Arabian peninsula:

We, ourselves, felt tiny in it, and our urgent progress across its immensity was a stillness or immobility of futile effort. (p. 238)

Alas, thus does my own writing seem some days!