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Biography 23.3 (2000) 560-562



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Steven C. Caton. Lawrence of Arabia: A Film's Anthropology. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. 301 pp. ISBN 0-520-21083-2, $19.95.

It takes a certain bravery to publish a three-hundred page monograph about a single film, especially when one is not a film critic by profession and the object of inquiry is a politically dubious Hollywood epic of the colonial sort--in this case, David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. All the more brave, I suppose, if the writer is one of those anthropologists who travels about the sandier expanses of the Sotadic Zone impersonating the natives and taking notes on the finer points of life in the tribe. The author, Steven C. Caton, is a professor of modern Arab society in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, and he recounts with considerable nostalgia the pleasures of wearing Arab garb and eating Arab food and getting shot at by Arab guns, all by way of writing his previous book, a study of Yemeni poetry. The apparent connections between himself and T. E. Lawrence are by no means lost on him, and he knows only too well that comparisons of this sort could prove damning to his profession, given the increasingly influential postcolonial critique of anthropology's historical implication in Western imperialism.

Lawrence certainly no longer enjoys heroic status among scholars, though he is the eponymous and charismatic hero of a film that has proved perennially stimulating for Caton, me, and just about everyone else. Because of Lawrence's role in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1916, [End Page 560] he is evoked in much contemporary criticism as an example of a particular colonial persona, the military or bureaucratic functionary who "goes native" all the better to understand the subaltern and pursue the agenda of the oppressor. The film Lawrence of Arabia is similarly condemned, and Caton quotes the critic Ella Shohat, who writes that it "provides an example of Western historical representation whereby the individual Romantic 'genius' leads the Arab national revolt, presumed to be a passive entity awaiting T. E. Lawrence's inspiration." She has a point, he concedes; moreover, he has no desire to quibble with biographers over the more disturbing facts. He simply points out that there is more to be said about the film. He is concerned with the popular appeal--and the possibilities for postcolonial critique--inherent in this one biopic of Lawrence. Even more intriguing, in my opinion, is Caton's fascination with his own fascination, his scholarly absorption in the film, which he first saw at the age of thirteen when it opened in 1962. Instead of acquiescing in the facile academic denunciation of Lawrence of Arabia, he attempts to explain with refreshing honesty his identification with Lawrence as played by Peter O'Toole, his pleasure in Lean's cinematic style, and his conception of the film as an anti-imperialist, orientalist epic and an allegory of anthropology itself.

Caton's primary aim is to elaborate a mode of "dialectical critique" already available inchoately in cultural studies. He starts with two theorists whose influential work he wishes to complicate: the feminist psychoanalytic film critic Laura Mulvey, and the postcolonial critic Edward Said. Both theorists offer totalizing critiques of oppression as a closed symbolic system that endlessly repeats itself, but in Caton's view they overlook the possibilities for resistance and counterrepresentations within the very texts and contexts they critique. His approach is essentially deconstructive in that he wants us to resist the presumption that texts are monolithic or uniform in their ideological intentions and reception. Lawrence of Arabia is, to his mind, an orientalist text that foregrounds its own doubts about colonialism.

Caton sees the film as part of a general tendency after World War II to question the politics of Lawrence's career. He speaks of the financial need of Hollywood epics to appeal to audiences abroad, and to offer a realism and authenticity that television could not. He also speaks of negotiations with King Hussein to film in Jordan...

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