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A film with the unearned reputation of being as dry as the dunes. It saddens me to think of who may love this film that has avoided it for this reason. Because it is impossible for me to envision not loving it. Lawrence of Arabia is a staggering triumph, a coux de grace for the medium of film. At once performance, the craft, and nature itself come together for a once-in-a-century fable of ego, folly, and belief.

The picture flirts with and inverts Messianic imagery throughout. Lawrence stumbles into transliterations of historical events that are reframed within the context of miracles, feats that fly in the face of conventional strength or wisdom yet are nonetheless effective. Yet it walks us up the line of that school of thought, before showing us that Lawrence is very human and perhaps undeserving of his deification.

This is one of the central preoccupations of the film, as a whole. History, and who writes it. What persists because it is true, and what persists simply because it needs to be true to enough people for the greater good to prevail. We are consistently invited not to think of Lawrence as a pure hero, but as a man who wants so desperately to prove that he is something, that he knows something, that he embraces a role handed to him perhaps unjustly.

Homoeroticism is a latent facet here, which is 1:1 with the IRL Lawrence's predeliction for younger boys. The erotic masculinist torture sequences, the pining and sultry stares between Ali and Lawrence, the entire concept of the boy servants - this is a gay film, a film that rectifies the homosexual and homosocial with the powerful, the noble, the righteous. Instead of weakness, the thin line between strength and vulnerability is teased out by this stylistic and thematic choice.

Lawrence of Arabia is perhaps as good as a film from this era, at this budget range, at this scale, can get as far as I'm concerned. It's a steadfast work of dedication - moments in Middle Eastern history struck to film and preserved in higher resolutions with each passing decade. Essential.