“A man can be whatever he wants, you said.”
“I’m sorry. I thought it was true.”
Sitting in a darkened theater for four hours watching Lawrence of Arabia makes me feel like I’ve lived another life (even though the period of Lawrence’s life depicted in the movie is relatively short). In those four hours, David Lean never lets up on the challenge of the movie’s primary question: Who are you? What is it that makes us who we are? Is it our family and upbringing, our skin color, our cultural background, our ambitions and desires, our abilities? Is it something unchangeable within ourselves, or is it simply who we are to the other people around us?
The movie takes Lawrence to a geographical blank slate to confront these questions. “There is nothing in the desert,” Faisal protests. Lawrence travels through, and sometimes seems to master, this barren landscape, wanting to use the empty space as a canvas in which to create a better version of himself.
As the movie progresses, Lawrence sees his own shortcomings, again and again. He can’t be who he wants to be, and some of his aspirations conflict with others. And then he sees more deeply into what’s going on around him. The desert was not an empty space waiting for him to fill it; it was a battlefield, a chessboard, with pieces (including himself) already being moved and manipulated by powers above him. What’s left by the end is a broken man, very far from true healing, returning ashamed to his origin point. We want very much to know what happens to him after the end credits, but for that we have to look elsewhere. The film is not going to answer the questions it has raised.
The ray of hope in this complicated story shines through the evolution of Sherif Ali. He rides slowly into the frame, nothing more than a self-centered bandit, living for what he can get that day, eager to enact vengeance, careless toward those he considers outsiders. His encounter with Lawrence leaves him transformed at the end of the movie — thinking of the good of others and ready to take his place in the new international society. God changes lives even through radically imperfect examples. I love that the real story in this sprawling epic named for one character is actually the story of another character entirely, always there in the background or by Lawrence’s side. “Who are you?” You are the sum of all the ways you love others more than yourself, in each small choice of each day of your life. Nothing is written, except the story we create. What story will you write?
—Neil Coulter, 2025
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