|
 |
A Triumphant Elegy: The Film Music of "Lawrence of Arabia"
Bill Mohr
David Lean is not my favorite film director, Robert Bolt is hardly my favorite
playwright-turned screenwriter, and Peter O’Toole, while often mesmerizing in
his portrayal of T. E. Lawrence’s harrowing experiences in World War I as the
instigator of guerrilla warfare, falls short of giving his best performance. In
O’Toole’s defense, Lawrence was the historical figure in the twentieth century
whose inner conflicts rival Hamlet’s as an insoluble enigma, and O’Toole
probably did as good a job at rendering Lawrence’s uniqueness as could be hoped
for by Lean and Bolt. The artist who most successfully captured a portion of
Lawrence’s inner demons, and who redeemed his collaborators’ shortcomings, is
the film’s music composer, Maurice Jarre. It is Jarre who makes Lawrence of
Arabia one of the few films whose splendid, if flawed, accomplishment has not in
the least deteriorated in my estimate since the first time I saw it screened in
Imperial Beach, California in 1962.
Lawrence of Arabia 's score has the haunting, lilting rhythm of a triumphant
elegy. It’s as powerful as Bolero without one tenth of the maniacal effort. In
its full-length, uncut version, the film opens with an extended overture as
compelling as any interlude from a classical symphony. The music suggests to the
audience that what one is about to see must also be translated into an auditory
argument, and that the visual narrative is
only a metaphor for the self-betrayal of a hero who chose his fate, and
regretted that choice for the remaining two decades of his life.
Jarre’s score is what I carried in my head as I went to the local library and
asked for a copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and it was Jarre’s assemblage of
percussion, strings, wind instruments and odd, ethereal chimes that formed a
chorus in my head to preface the opening sentence of Chapter 1: “Some of the
evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances…” Lawrence’s choice
of the first noun in his formal narrative is not an accident, and the music of
the film argues, in a far more convincing manner than the visuals, that his
valiant subservience to the freedom of another cost him more than simply the
power to control his own destiny; he violated his own ideals, and consequently
imposed a penance on himself far exceeding his culpability.
I am not trained in music, and perhaps if I had found myself at a dinner party
with Virgil Thomson a quarter-century ago, I would have found myself admitting
that I could bring nothing more to an appreciation of Jarre’s music than the
same untutored response that I bring to the work of Debussy, Ravel, Brahms, and
Mendelssohn. Whether Jarre’s composition can hold its own with other
masterpieces of the classical music canon is not for me to say. I am willing to
venture, however, that the music contains the unresolved mystery of Lawrence’s
multitudinous ambiguities: a soldier who loathed war, a writer whose imagination
veered between the literal and the abstract with too little attention to what
comes between, and a man whose friendship and loyal companionship appears to
have been capable of crossing enormous boundaries of class and education, yet
who was profoundly lonely.
Other poets I know first encountered the confessional mode in literature when
they picked up a copy of Ginsberg’s "Howl" or Plath’s Ariel. Lawrence was the
first writer I admired and studied who freely admitted, in a calm and measured
tone of voice, that he did not like himself.
The film dwells far too long on Lawrence’s masochism, and while it is an
important component of his inability to maintain control over and delimit the
self-debasement that idealism often inculcates, it is also worth noting that the
parts of the film that address this aspect of his character are the ones in
which the music is least prominent. In contrast, as one reads Seven Pillars,
one
continually finds moments that serve as incarnations of Jarre’s score. At one
point, Lawrence records a brief conversation with an old Arab woman: “She
questioned me about the women of the tribe of Christians and their way of life,
marveling at my white skin, and the horrible blue eyes which looked, she said,
like the sky shining through the eye-sockets of an empty skull.” It is this kind
of image that Jarre’s music meditates on, a memento mori portrait within the
context of self-denial.
In Human, All Too Human, in a section of that book titled “The Religious Life,”
Nietzsche emphasizes that the heroic gesture of self-denial is not a moral act
generated by the desire to accomplish a task for others, but rather an
“opportunity” for the “highly-tensed heart to relieve itself.” Jarre’s music is
called upon by the filmmakers to substitute for all that they cannot ponder
about Lawrence’s highly-tensed motives, self-inflicted disguises, and above all,
fascination with renunciation, marked most emphatically in the final sentence of
Seven Pillars, where he consigns his epic success to the category of “an
ordinary effort.”
In "The Things They Carried," Tim O’Brien argues that one can always tell a true
war story by how much obscenity it contains. One of the basic problems of
Lawrence of Arabia is that Bolt and Lean leave out too much of the obscenity
that Lawrence includes in his own narrative. I don't know if this disparity is
what triggered Pauline Kael’s complaint that the movie "fails to give an
acceptable interpretation of Lawrence." I doubt, however, that Kael had in mind
my objection. When the average movie-goer thinks of Lawrence, they usually
conjure up the quivering face of O’Toole as he vacillates near the end of the
film between vanquishing a retreating battalion of Turkish soldiers or going
around them to get to Damascus. O’Toole finally
proclaims, “No prisoners,” and Lawrence himself admits in Seven Pillars that he
gave such an order. What the film does not show, however, is a detail that
Lawrence noticed before he chose to order a massacre: a bayonet shoved into the
belly of an obviously pregnant woman. The film would have been impossible to
screen if this detail had appeared on screen, so the film makers omitted an
image that would have helped establish a basis for Lawrence's future
post-traumatic-stress syndrome. And, let it be said, whoever imagines the
bayonet entered at the belly button is missing the obscenity that Lawrence had
to confront.
As I read Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the memory of the film music reminded me of
this: there will be no resolution for anything that torments a person. Even the
great will power that Lawrence possessed could not surmount the sorrow of losing
what he described as “the citadel of my integrity.”
When I returned to my high school classrooms the summer after I'd worked my way
through Seven Pillars, I had no illusions about what the helicopter pilots at
Ream Field were practicing as they perfected their touch-and-go landings at what
was, at the time, the world’s largest helicopter base, or what the slight jolts
from detonations at nearby SEAL training centers portended about a distant land
called Vietnam.
I was 17, the oldest son in a family of six children. My father was a career
enlisted man in the United States Navy who'd served both during World War II and
the Korean War. Neither of my parents had gone beyond high school. Books were
not a major presence in my home, and what reading I did as a child and young man
leaned towards The Hardy Boys or The Guns of Navarone. I don't believe my
parents ever attended a performance of classical music, or even owned a
recording of classical music. I was poor, as are most children whose parents
devote themselves to patriotic duty, and in high school my extremely bad acne
together with my stunning lack of athletic skills furthered my isolation.
My Catholic family and the church held the saints up to me as models of
spiritual power. Yet, despite years of service as an altar boy, none of the
church doctrines, rituals, or sacraments seemed intelligible other than as a
system of total control. By mid-adolescence, I felt myself slowly going insane
with scrupulous self-rebukes. This was far worse than the constant displacement
that any child in a military family experiences. Internally, I began to unravel;
it was one thing to be so poor that I wore the same sweater all four years of
high school, and my father bought my shoes at thrift stores—it was far more
devastating to feel spiritually impoverished.
And so, for me, at age 17, Lawrence of Arabia, then Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
began to break the duplicitous contradictions of Catholicism into smaller pieces
of ideological complicity, so that I could begin to reassemble and then discard
them. This new knowledge—that it was impossible to be a saint or a hero without
stains or remorse—initiated me into modern doubt, and gave me a foothold to
begin my own existential journey.
After many false starts, I assigned myself a task infinitely less arduous than
Lawrence’s trek across the “worst place that God ever made”. From San Diego I
moved to Los Angeles, and helped a community of poets achieve some measure of
self-definition. As I did so, using my motorcycle to lug books that I had edited
and published to and from bookstores and post offices, I often got discouraged.
Not a week went by when I did not renew my vigorous commitment by humming some
portion of the film score to Lawrence of Arabia. Its melodious, restless
yearning still impels my poetics of haunted possibility.
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* *
POSTSCRIPT OF RECOMMENDED SCREENINGS
My list of other films has to begin with a note about a conversation with
Suzanne Lummis concerning this special issue of Speechless. As I
discussed my interest in writing about Maurice Jarre’s music the conversation
quickly turned to other film scores. I mentioned how much I savored the music of
Baghdad Café, and Suzanne cited the film scores of Ennio Morricone, who recently
received a life-time achievement Grammy. By the end of our conversation, Suzanne
and I both agreed that someone should address the relationship between
film scores and the depiction of existential characters in huge swaths of empty
space. Morricone also wrote the music for several other films that should be
compulsory viewing in any course on film history, including The Good, The Bad,
and the Ugly, Battle of Algiers, and Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion.
Most of my other favorite films, with the exception of Days of Heaven, don't
have great film scores, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't mind seeing them again.
My favorite films range from incredibly obscure, Mare’s Tail (directed by David Larcher) to the noteworthy:
Don't look Twice, Man in the Moon, Sunrise (directed
by Carl Dreyer), Resurrection, The Twelve Chairs, When a Stranger Calls
(the
1978 version), Escape from Alcatraz, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
Sunset
Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Thunderheart, Mississippi Massala,
The Burmese
Harp, The King of Masks, Salt of the Earth, Year of the Pig,
The Usual Suspects,
and Burn! Almost all of these titles will be familiar to people who are in any
way interested in the history of film.
Bill Mohr spent most
of his childhood moving back and forth between Navy bases in
Norfolk, VA, and Imperial Beach, CA. His poems, criticism and
reviews have appeared in scores of magazines. His most recent
collection of poems is Bittersweet Kaleidoscope (If
Publications, 2006).He has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University
of California-San Diego, and is currently an assistant professor of
English at California State University-Long Beach.
Contents Top |
