This Is What We Miss When We Don’t Teach Social Criticism - Blog Posts

Lawrence of Arabia holds this absolutely fascinating position of being made by an Englishman who had grown up during WW1 and seen Britain go through WW2 and then decolonization and whose movies are so closely interwined with the direction Britain was heading as an Empire: from his propaganda-film In Which We Serve during WW2 to the dismantling of British military ideology and philosophy in Kwai in 1957, and then every movie for the rest of his career (except Zhivago, which is still an illuminating movie wrt his thoughts on Empire, the birth of ideology, authoritarinism, etc) is deeply concerned with Britain as a nation and doesn't shy away from the Colonial and Imperial legacy that continued to colour British society even post-decolonization. Lawrence is, on the one hand, one of the few British films about WW1 that doesn't center on the domestic experience of the war or on trench warfare on the West Front (both of which obscures the Imperialist and globalized reality of WW1 and excludes colonized peoples from narratives about the war) but on the other the main character is very much a white, English man in an archetypical White Saviour narrative but on the other hand again it is a deconstruction of the White Saviour story; Lawrence fails at his primary ambitions and does not get to "get his and go home" as Auda puts it, and leaves Arabia exceedingly traumatized, unsecure, insecure, and disillusioned: with Imperialism, with his romanticized notions of Arabia and the Bedouin, and with himself. Created by a visionary director who became almost as much as a "desert-loving English" as Lawrence himself and whom also, as can be seen from his movies, is disillusioned with Britain's Imperial past, present, and future while still being firmly in love with colonial areas (Arabia, India) that he tries to engage with and represent "authentically" while still coming from the vantage-point of a white Englishman whose whole life has been spent in a colonialist country grappling with it's territories and identity once bereft of them.