Lawrence of Arabia depicts what was nearly the birth of the modern Arab state, but it’s shot like the end of history. The movie is apocalypse-sized; as if it expects to the last one ever filmed. Everything is huge and grand and excessive – the setting, costuming, score, running time, everything. It thunders over the senses like a train.

It’s an epic about TE Lawrence, as interpreted by Peter O’Toole and largely derived from Lawrence’s own prolific writings. It paints a picture of a freak, a misfit, a uniquely-shaped gear who fell into the engine box of history and miraculously slotted into place, allowing world events to turn. I don’t have much interest in its factual accuracy. Movies aren’t Wikipedia articles.

Lawrence of Arabia starts at the end: with Lawrence’s death in 1935. We see a media frenzy around the dead man, a jostling clash of claim and counterclaim. A great hero? An exhibitionist? Everyone’s comparing puzzle pieces of the deceased man, but none of them match. We sense that Lawrence hasn’t left much of himself behind.

Then the film cuts back in time to 1916, with Lawrence a young army lieutenant in the Arab Bureau intelligence unit. He backtalks his superiors, and comes off as pretentious and arrogant. He paints, knows his classics, and deports himself with a certain effeteness. The film can’t explicitly depict him as gay, but the subtext is a brick to the face.

But when he’s dispatched to Arabia (to shadow Prince Faisal, a putative ally of the British in the revolt against the Turks), his alienness becomes an asset. He establishes a rapport with the tribes, and comes up with daring, impossible plans: crossing a desert that can’t be crossed, storming a city that can’t be taken. He stands out – both with his white complexion, and inability to play the game the normal way – and is soon at the center of regional politics.

His handsome face becomes a generic slate onto which various characters project their desires – Prince Faisal’s wish for Arabic independence, Sherif Ali’s personal ambition, Auda Abu Tayi’s lust for plunder, General Edmund Allenby’s desire to entrench Britain’s tactical position against the Ottomans. Like all messiahs, Lawrence is who you need him to be, and like all messiahs, he is disposable.

Virtually no part of this movie could be made now. There are no speaking roles for women. The set of Aqaba was built by Franco’s fascist regime. The idea of British intelligence running the show in Arabia is portrayed as morally neutral or positive. Most of the actors (Omar Sharif excepted) are not Arabic but British or Americans in brownface. Anthony Quinn, who plays Auda Abu Tayi, has a Brooklyn accent and a silly fake nose.

I’m sure most kids now watch this movie for a school report, and write about how it’s a racist old film about how unenlightened Arabs just need a smart British person to whip them into line.

But the point of Lawrence’s character is that he isn’t British, except in a nominal sense. He has no loyalty to his homeland. When he’s praised for his achievements by Allenby and Dryden, their words sound hollow and false. Lawrence never conquers Aqaba out of some “Rule, Britannia!” patriotic impulse. It’s something darker, less explicable, less controllable. In any case, the sympathies he develops for the Arabs soon cause Allenby to suspect he’s gone native.

But what does Lawrence really want? I kept asking this of the film, but director David Lean leaves it unclear. Lawrence is a confusing person: outwardly flashy and flamboyant, but inwardly hollow. He’s more defined by what he doesn’t have than by what he does.

We see a streak of kindness in Lawrence (as well as an unwillingness to get his hands dirty), but also a vanity that almost gets him killed. While spying undercover in an enemy city, he is captured and mocked by a Turkish bey. A real politician would not have risen to the bait, but Lawrence lashes out, and earns himself a beating. Soon it becomes clear that the British will betray the deal they brokered with Faisal, shattering the last of Lawrence’s confidence in himself.

His stated motives for his actions (“I just want my ration of common humanity!”) sound curiously unspecific. It shows the danger of not having a moral center: you get sculpted and distorted by whatever your environment is. He ends up as an existential ghost, haunting the desert like a Dybbuk, detached from the world he thinks he controls. Lawrence reshapes the politics of the Middle East to suit himself, but he’s reshaped by it in turn. Soon this nightmare becomes apparent in his eyes. He’s nothing, and knows it.

Lawrence: I killed two people, I mean two Arabs. One was a boy. That was yesterday. I led him into a quicksand. The other was a man. That was before Aqaba anyway. I had to execute him with my pistol. There was something about it I didn’t like.
Allenby: Well, naturally.
Lawrence: No, something else.
Allenby: I see. Well that’s all right. Let it be a warning.
Lawrence: No, something else.
Allenby: What then?
Lawrence: I enjoyed it.

Is this an accurate depiction of Lawrence? I’m doubtful. It occurs to me that most “weirdos” are not actually that weird – they’re non-freakish people who can play the role of oddball on command but are actually fairly normal. David Bowie (who likely took fashion notes from Peter O’Toole in this movie) is a good example.

Imagine if Forbes Magazine ran a “most inspiring poor person” contest – most of the entrants would be crustfunders or fakers or LARPers. Genuine poor people don’t read Forbes Magazine and would never hear about the contest. It takes lots of social cleverness to become famous: a misfit celebrity is something of a contradiction in terms. Genuine freaks are either ignored, or are put in cages to be gawked at. Freakishness is as prone to gentrification as anything.

But even if Lawrence wasn’t like this, the depiction still rings true in a game theory sense. Sometimes it does pay to be an alien dropped out of the sky. Lawrence has no reason to prefer one tribe of Arab over another. He is blind to doctrinal differences, doesn’t care about interpretations of Wahhabism vs Hanafalism. This is his strength. It’s often worse to be a little different than vastly different (other players “neargroup vs fargroup”). Think of how Genghis Khan is popularly regarded in society, vs Hitler. Or how the Tlaxcalans of Mexico allied with the fargroup Spanish agains the neargroup Aztecs.

Lawrence is Genghis Khan to the Arabs. In his first few days in Arabia, he learns a harsh lesson. Upon landing in Arabia, he journeys with a Bedouin guide. The guide drinks from a well owned by Sherif Ali without permission, and is killed by Ali. Lawrence drank too, but is spared. In this land, being a foreigner is like protective armor. He doesn’t yet know about the Islamic principle of amān (safeguard) which likely just saved his life.

Again, Lawrence of Arabia is better off watched as a fantasy film, not as commentary on the geopolitical ramifications of the Sykes-Picot treaty or whatever. Beethoven once said “To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.” Real life contains a lot of smallness and silliness and incidence that cannot be used as fodder for a story. Epics, almost by definition, have many wrong notes.

The depictions of Arabs as squabbling idiots who can’t even keep the power on without British help (that’s literally a scene at the end) may come off as racist. But it may have a grain of truth. Certainly, Saudi Arabia was late to the modernisation game. Here’s an interesting anecdote I read on Matt Lakeman’s blog (for which he tragically does not provide a source)

Wahhabis oppose innovation. This is not just an accusation flung from the moral high horse of my modern liberalism, this is how Wahhabis describe themselves. They believe in a strict literalist reading of Islamic texts, hence innovation is deviation from the texts. This mindset expands beyond esoteric theological theory into everyday life. The founder of modern Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz al Saud, publicly smashed a telegraph to appease his clerics who worried he was using too much modern technology.

That aside, some scenes do overplay their hand, and come off as goofy. The action was as good as it got in 61, but it’s not as visceral and bloody. It’s very “stagey” – punches that clearly miss, men who don’t duck when fired upon, but stand up, so the cheap seats can see them. There’s the obligatory scene where a man gets sucked to his doom by quicksand: it’s supposed to be shocking and horrible, but the fact that it’s quicksand gives it a Roger Corman quality.

We’re meant to watch it on a huge screen (and on 70mm stock) and some scenes don’t really work on a small one. As Lawrence’s men cross the terrible Al-Nafud Desert, the warrior Gasim falls from his camel, and is left behind. When Lawrence discovers this, he goes back to rescue him. It’s an important scene, setting off an IOU that pays off later in the movie…but if you watch it on an 640×480 DVD rip acquired in an extremely legal fashion some shots (such as a distant man walking across the dunes, like a crack piercing the sky) become impossible to understand. The human figures are too small to see. Can you see the man in the picture below? Look closer.

The film has some of the best desert footage ever shot. Lean has a sense of depth and space, and how to make it resound off the screen like an echoing scream. This movie made me feel gravity. At times, I felt vertigo swirling out, as if I might fall forward into the celluloid.

It diminishes the human side of the conflict. Imposes a sense that none of it truly matters much. Whoever prevails in the Arab Revolt, the only winner will be the desert.

Everyone seems tiny in this ocean of sand. The British, the Hashemites, the Bedouins, the Ottomans – are just ants floating in an ocean of sand, slowly dying in a light more blinding than any darkness, hunched double with their thawbs and keffiyehs flapping against blasting wind, hoping that the oasis in front of them actually exists. They might be princelings, warriors, or statesmen, but the desert equalizes them, crushing them all down to nothing. The film achieves an odd effect: the mythic figures look so powerless that they actually become human again.

The film brilliantly portrays the main character’s psychological collapse. Reportedly, Lean’s cameras kept malfunctioning, because they were choked up with sand. Lawrence eventually reaches the same point. He is humiliated, damages, and begins descending into the kind of honor-feud vindictiveness. He learns of the British plot to betray Arab interests, and begins to wonder what it was all ultimately for. A sense of setting sun hangs over everything: the end of history. It’s one of Hollywood’s final great epics.

According to Hollywood lore, the cheapest special effects are bare breasts and dwarves. Lawrence of Arabia has none, but it finds another one: deserts. But the desert’s so big and empty that it projects futility. What can one man ultimately do out here, except lose?

The final time Lawrence meets Auda Abu Tayi, he says “I pray that I may never see the desert again.” To which Abu Tayi says “there is only the desert for you.”

The final shot argues that this is true. He is driving out of Arabia. “‘home, sah!” his driver says. But we see dry dust twisting up into the air behind the car, and it tells another story. The hot, soul-chilling desert is coming out with him, like a shadow that will never leave. He can’t run from who he isn’t. Wherever Lawrence goes, he will find the lone and level sands waiting for him.

I watched this with some friends – we’d been told it was the sickest, goriest movie ever made.

It wasn’t very good. I don’t know what else to tell you. The tagline is “AUGUST UNDERGROUND’S MORDUM WILL VOMIT ALL OVER YOU AND LEAVE YOU FOR DEAD!” That sounds pretty hardcore. Does it have that effect every time? I’m not sure I’ll rewatch it much. They should have toned it down, so that it only acid-burps in your face and leaves you with a faint sense of despondency.

It’s a fake snuff film – shot in a deliberately amateurish style – about a trio of serial killers, who record their crimes. They have sex with each other, mutilate themselves, go to a crack den, kill someone, and then a fifth event occurs, and then a sixth, and then a seventh. If you like movies with events, you’re in luck! This one has so many of them!

August Underground’s Mordum doesn’t have a story, it has incidents. The scenes could be rearranged in almost any order. The dialog consists of shouting and profanity. The characters have names like “Crusty” and “Maggot”. The cinematography consists of flailing shakycam that made me literally nauseous – surely if there’s one positive trait serial killers possess, it’s calm, steady hands?

It’s artless, boring, and dismaying. The writing is so blandly and forgettably stupid that I fully expected a character to say “As an AI language model, I am programmed to follow ethical guidelines.”

Whiles, Cristie: [cutting herself deeply in the chest with a piece of glass] Do you fucking like it?

Vogel, Fred: Shit yeah I like it!

Whiles, Cristie: Why don’t you jerk off on it, fucker?

No, I don’t know what August Underground’s Mordum means. There’s nobody and nothing called “August Underground” in the movie, and “Mordum” isn’t a word – though, pronounced phonetically, it absolutely becomes a description.

The film has serious Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People energy – it’s trying hard to be the most outrageous thing you’ve ever seen, so much so that it backfires and becomes not shocking at all. The actors are often visibly uncomfortable with what they’re asked to do, which is funny. The climactic final scene involves the character Maggot raping a dead body in a bathtub. He gives it some fake, half-hearted humps, like a frat pledge trying not to look gay. At no point does his pelvis touch anything except air.

The runtime is padded out with pointless crap, like a scene of Maggot getting a septum piercing. There’s actually a term for this: “Shoot the rodeo”. Is your movie too short? Just scrounge around your camera’s SD card for some unrelated footage, and suddenly it’s not. The concluding shot is of a cat eating a mouse.

The thing about August Underground’s Mordum is that you can basically know everything about it just from a single detail. Do I give an in-depth discussion, or can I just mention that it has characters called “Maggot” and “Crusty”? Or that the director fronts a death metal band? Or that the production company is called Toetag Pictures, and their website has a .biz TLD, like all serious big-boy websites?

A toe tag, by the way, is a piece of cardboard that is fitted around a corpse’s toe, providing identifying information to the coroner. Most morgues haven’t used toe tags for a long time – now there’s an ankle bracelet. But it fits the company’s approach to invoke a cliche that’s twenty years out of date.

August Underground’s Mordum seeks to recreate the flat, naturalistic affect of Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer, and the gooberish “OMG, is it real??” rubberneck-factor of Cannibal Holocaust or Guinea Pig 2. Those are old movies. And they didn’t seek to be mistaken as real, it happened by accident.

As Dave Kehr noted once, “It is a curious attribute of camp that it can only be found, not made.” You can’t really click your heels and wish your movie into cult status. It has to happen organically, and accidentally. This is exactly one of those try-hard “let me into the canon!” manufacted camp classics that Kehr writes about. There’s a reason The Room will be remembered forever, while the word Sharknado already has no meaning to anyone.

This film is the middle child in a trilogy of films. I briefly considered watching the first or the second, but then I decided to watch HR Pufnstuf instead. That’s a good example of August Underground’s Mordum‘s strike rate: it loses a battle against HR Pufnstuf.

Eight hundred years. You sense their weight; feel them wrapped around each word like chainmail. I thought it would be easy and fun to read Georgia’s foremost national poem, but I was mistaken. Nobody can read The Knight in the Panther’s Skin at all.

Or you can read it, but from a great distance. It’s like staring through a telescope at a distant pulsar – you know the faint glow beating raggedly against the lens is not how the pulsar would look in reality, but that doesn’t bring you any closer to its light, and so it goes for old stories. The text sits in your hand, yet somehow isn’t there at all. It belongs somewhere (and to someone) else.

Jonathan Swift’s books from 300 years ago still hit hard, and so do Shakespeare’s plays. Maybe eight hundred years might be too far for a time capsule to travel. Empires have risen and fallen in that time, and so have literary movements. Everything is different – too different. The Knight in the Panther’s Skin is ultimately a book for interpretation and guesswork, not raw, sensual experience. That’s sad.

It tells the story of the knight Avt’handil, who is on a quest for the great knight Tariel, who is on a quest for the maid Nestan-Daredjan, who has (etc). Rustaveli’s tale unpacks itself like a sequence of matryoshka dolls, and there’s a cyclical element to the narratives within narratives.

Rustaveli’s eternal wayfarers encounter friends, enemies, visions. They fight battles, and discurse on philosophy. They hunt deer. Comparisons to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur are easy, but there’s little sense of fate or destiny or divine providence. Instead, Rustaveli seems more interested in painting the emotional world of the characters.

It can be unexpectedly modern, even a little existential. Everybody, man or woman, is essentially their own person, doing things because they want to. There’s little sense of dry ecclesiasticism – it’s a warm and emotional work. There’s even some passages that now read imply things very at odds with what Rustaveli might have imagined (but who knows?)

Tariel met him. They were both fit to be ranked as suns, or as the moon in heaven, cloudless, spreading her rays on the plain beneath. Compared with them the aloe-tree was of no worth; they were like the seven planets; to what else shall I liken them?

They kissed each other, they were not bashful at being strangers; they opened the rose, from their lips their white teeth shone transparent. They embraced each other’s neck, together they wept; their jacinth, which was worth rubies, they turned into amber.

Quatrains 275 and 276

The plot is complicated, and the nested perspectives make it hard to keep track of who’s saying and doing what. But there are simple repetitive motifs that reoccur at every level. It’s less a story than an algorithm, like Conway’s Game of Life: it’s hard to understand by staring at the replicating cells, instead it’s better to learn the rules and let the details sort themselves out. Everyone’s questing, everyone’s unfulfilled, the roads wind on forever, etc.

I can only read things in English, and must use a translation. But The Knight in the Panther’s Skin was originally poetry: 1,600 quatrains (or four-line stanzas) in stylized Georgian verse. My 1912 English translation by Marjory Wardrop drops the poetic meter, turning it into a prose narrative. There’s a newer translation that preserves the rhymes, but I’m sure the text was further corrupted to make that happen. Even if I could read the original Georgian, I’d still be reading it with modern eyes and modern sensibilities. There’s a gap from here to the past that can’t really be crossed. And the book’s fey, dreamlike narrative may have been so idiosyncratic that only Rustaveli truly understood what he was saying.

The Knight in the Panther’s Skin is now regarded as a national epic, but Rustaveli’s vision extends far beyond Georgia’s borders. He has his characters exploring the entirety of the known world. We visit fictional versions Cathay, and India. It’s even theorized that the merchant city of Gulansharo that Avt’handil visits in quatrain 1309 might be Venice.

I don’t know if Rustaveli ever went to these places in real life. Certainly, his descriptions don’t seem particularly vivid. India (Tariel’s homeland) is described as a land with seven kingdoms, with one king holding sway over six. There’s no language barrier: Avt’handil and Tariel freely converse. It’s likely that Rustaveli treated India and China the way H. Rider Haggard treated inner Africa – an exotic locale for his heroes to have their adventures.

A sense of oneiric wonder prevails. The characters are like wind-sculpted smoke, endlessly changing to suit the story – in the opening quatrains, the king describes himself as aged, and at death’s door.

“My day is done; old age, most grievous of all ills, weighs on me; if not to-day, then to-morrow I die–this is the way of the world. What light is that on which darkness attends? Let us instate as sovereign my daughter, of whom the sun is not worthy.”

Quatrain 36

But soon after, he’s healthy enough to undertake a monumental hunting trip with Avt’handil.

The king commanded the twelve slaves: “Come, accompany us, bring us the swift bows, prepare the arrows, compare what is struck and keep count of the shots.” Game began to come in from every corner of the plain.

Herds of game, innumerable, flocked in: stags, goats, wild-asses, high-leaping chamois. Lord and vassal pursued them; what sight could be fairer! Behold the bow, the arrow, and the untiring arm!

The dust from their horses’ tracks cut off the sun’s rays. They slew, their arrows sped, blood flowed through the field; as the shafts were shot away the slaves brought more of them. The beasts wounded by them could not take another step.

They ran through that field; they drove the herd before them. They slew and exterminated, they made wroth the God of the heavens, the fields were dyed crimson with the blood they shed from the beasts. Those who watched Avt’handil said: “He is like an aloe-tree planted, in Eden.”

Quatrains 74-77

Was the king lying about his infirmity? Or did Rustaveli merely want to include a hunting scene and didn’t feel like revising what he’d written before? Answering that requires nothing less than a time machine back to medieval Georgia and a syringe of sodium pentothal.

Everything about the text exists on the same of shifting quicksand: you never know how you’re supposed to take anything. Even the title is unclear. Is it really a “panther”? Some translations render it as “tiger”. Is it meant as a meant as a pastiche? Don’t know. Who was Rustaveli? What did he achieve in life, and what did he experience? Was the book an attempt to win the favor of “King Tamar” (as quatrain 4 indicates), or is it more personal?

But maybe this ambiguity is fitting, because Georgia is an ambiguious country. It’s neither east nor west. It’s at the crossroads of people groups and faiths. Empires have warred over it. At the time of King Tamar (who was a queen!), it was a nascent empire in its own right.

As conquerors and Khans and and immigrants rolled across the country, each left their own stamp. Like the Balkans across the Black Sea, Georgia ended with up a gestalt, mongrelized identity, and an aesthetic outlook to match. If Christianity is red and Islam is green, Georgia’s religious makeup could be described as yellow (perhaps with a pinkish tinge), and that comes through in the book.

Rustaveli was probably a Christian. The book contains plenty of nods in that direction, and some phrasings seem drawn directly from the Bible (“gall of bitterness” in quatrain 99, for instance). But there’s also some references to Mohammed, Mecca, the Koran. The philosophical outlook is very Sufi – some of the odder asides could be dropped in from the tales of Nasruddin and you wouldn’t notice. Rustaveli has a very…cosmopolitan view on faith, and this apparently got copies of the book burned by ecclesiastical powers in the 18th century.

But how does it read?

Viewed as a historical text, Knight is fascinating. Viewed as literature, your ability to enjoy it depends on your willingness to let go of modernness. Some medieval literature is bloodless. But Panther has the opposite quality: it’s entirely blood. It’s a raging river of emotion and feeling that quickly drowns the senses. Nobody’s just handsome. They glow with such aureate splendour as to dim the sun. Nobody’s merely upset. They rend their faces and decant bitter wormwood tears.

He lay down on his bed, he weeps, it is difficult for him to wipe away the tears, he shivered and swayed, like an aspen in the wind; when he fell into slumber he dreamed his beloved was near, he starts, he cries out loud, his suffering increases twentyfold.

Quatrain 139

Rustaveli writes with a bludgeon, not a scalpel. This was the style of the time, I guess. But it makes you appreciate modernism, and its softer, lighter touches. After a few hundred quatrains of that, it has a deadening (or deafening) effect. When everything is turned up to 11, you lose track of what’s actually important. It’s like having a gong banged beside your head constantly as you read.

The book is rewarding, but it’s hard: I can’t stress that enough. Vast amounts of meaning have vanished from The Knight in the Panther’s Skin‘s core and cannot be recovered. You feel the loss, which resounds right through the text. It’s like wood that’s been subtly eaten from inside by termites – it still holds together, but it’s less weighty than it should be. Thousands of holes seem to be chewed in the book’s meaning.

Reading about turns us all into knights errant, seeking answers. It’s a story for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, but which still matters, because it lead directly to the world we have now.