Lawrence of Arabia is one of those movies you can do a bad job of watching.

There's so much happening in this film that you can actually fail at it as a viewer.

To succeed at watching this movie is to leave it more confused than you

entered, to have your prejudices challenged and your assumptions upended, and to appreciate

that not all of that was the film's intention.

The events depicted can't be summarized or diagrammed.

You can't dissect them effectively using the blunt instrument of any particular ideology. there are no coherent narratives where the choices

were clear or where history could have gone a different way, and maybe none of it happened

like this anyway, but maybe it did.

Coming out of this movie with a couple of pat conclusions and a prescription is equivalent

to whacking at a turduchen with a pocket comb and claiming to have rebuilt a living

turkey chicken and duck.

It's a movie about a man in a time and place, the myth of the man, the making of the

myth of the man in his own time, the myth of the making of the myth of the man in his immediate

aftermath, and the math of making the myth of the man either stand or be damned

after the dashed off first draft of his plan to salve the wrath of the clans was panned by cads and

damned by a new brand of grandstanding also rans who want to reprimand and ban what they can't understand.

But it's so tempting.

Here is a smorgasbord of sweeping takes on imperialism, colonialism bureaucratism, classism, castism, militarism,

militarism, Orientalism, pan-Arabism, proto-Antasim, revisionism,

revisionism, is full of lies and tap dancing but it is also plausibly true in many ways or at least if

you're prepared to argue it is a hundred percent lies in tap dancing you'd better have a

...