David Lean's movie Lawrence of Arabia clearly shares important structural attributes with the Homeric poem Odysseus: For one thing, precisely like the plot of Odysseus, Lawrence of Arabia essentially takes us in a circle (moving from Lawrence’s birthplace to his sojourn across the Arab peninsula and back once again to the English countryside).
It should of course be noted that in the case of a film like Lawrence of Arabia, this circular motion becomes achieved through a flashback narrative structure: We open with Lawrence’s death (a death the funeral attendees respond to with a paradoxical mixture of intimacy and alienation: “I can tell you he was a great man—of course I didn’t really know him.”) What’s more, this ambivalence is reciprocal: the Lawrence character has mixed feelings about his native country. (On his fatal motorcycle ride through the English countryside Lawrence appears content, more or less "at home"--yet upon his first depicted encounter with a native resident of the Arab peninsula, Lawrence characterizes England as a land of “fat people,” by which he means lazy and indulgent, characteristics Lawrence clearly reviles.). So for all the similarities (including the structuring of the story in terms of a journey away from home and back again by way of a “magical territory”), important differences between the two narratives would seem to emerge.
The trick in understanding something as potentially abstract and illusive as “epic experience” (not to mention its relevance to our everyday lives) is to embrace such differences, to grasp the thing in question in its successive incarnations so that it’s essence begins to appear in the cracks (like the meaning of a piece of film emerging in the cuts between shots).
The figure of the Mobius strip can help us with this.
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| Mobius strip: arriving at the place where we've stood from the start |
To quote Zupancic, the Mobius strip “has, at every point, two sides (the surface and its other side), yet there is only one surface. Starting at any point on the strip and continuing the movement along the same side, without ever crossing the edge, we come sooner or later to the reverse side of the point where we started” (54).
So how might the figure of the Mobius strip help us grasp the intersection between epic and cinematic experience? We can begin with this figure’s doubled dimension (the coexistence at each given point of two distinct surfaces and two attendant edges). As we’ve seen in our viewings, one of the keys to every epic narrative is a certain doubling of "home," a doubling of one’s place of origin (a phenomenon also linked to the type of experience explored by Freud in his essay on the uncanny, as we know). So we can begin with a simple analogy: The strip’s edges can be said to correlate to the Epic narrative's staging of a hero's or heroine's "homeland" (whether that’s Odysseus’ residence at Ithaca or Dorothy’s family’s farm in Kansas).
As we’ve discussed (and as Zupancic notes), if we traverse one or the other of the strip's surfaces long enough we’ll eventually arrive at the opposite side. And while by now we understand this matter pretty well, the key, for our present purposes, is to recall one’s first encounter with this paradox. (This is why Jacques Lacan used to ask his students to imagine an ant crawling along the strip’s surface—a creature too small to take in the strip’s overall structure in a single view and thereby forced to explore the figure over a passage of time, thereby realizing only after the fact that it has already been traversing what it has taken to be an opposite side).
From the perspective embodied by this hypothetical ant, the ultimate realization amounts to an impossible re-encountering of one’s own “place” (in every sense of the word, including one’s sense of self). Upon traveling far enough along a line or surface (or along the path through a magical land), one suddenly encounters one’s point of origin in a dimension that one is by definition unprepared for.
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| Lawrence (re)encounters the British empire, his native domain |
We should note there’s a particular temporal component to all this (a particular structuring of time): What’s encountered is one’s own place (literally the surface one stands on)—yet it’s encountered in a manner not accessible in its native time, a dimension only ever experienced as “that which had been previously overlooked.”
To return to the epic tradition, a central component of epic narrative is the hero’s experience of the same paradox suggested by the Mobius strip. Like the ant, the epic hero comes to experience his or her homeland as a point of origin that can only be returned to, a place the essence of which can only be experienced after the fact, through a return trip or repeated residence--whereby the
value of one's home becomes experienced as “that which had been missed” the first time around. Dorothy's "return" home is perhaps the most direct example, but one way or another this same paradox imbues every film we've watched this semester.
The encounter we're talking about entails an element of excess: The true value of the hero or heroine's homeland always catches the heroine by surprise (arriving, as it does, as a suddenly visible oversight). And to make matters more interesting, it's not necessarily as if the "homeland" wasn't already loved--on the contrary: In classic epic narratives, in particular, the hero's alienation from the homeland becomes necessitated by threatening external circumstances (a war, a natural disaster, an intervention of the gods, etc.). Dorothy flees home only out of fear for Toto's life (whereupon she's immediately reminded of the effect that her departure is having upon the loved ones she's left behind, with the bulk of the movie concerning Dorothy's efforts to get back to Kansas).
But there’s another aspect to all this: In certain contemporary variations of the epic tradition, the hero's alienation appears to be intrinsic rather than imposed from the outside. Lawrence's exile is pretty much self-imposed (with the war providing an appropriate conduit), and Lawrence is in fact quick to distinguish himself from his countrymen. Lawrence is a leader of epic proportions--yet significantly, it's not his own countrymen that he leads. Quite the contrary: In relation to his countrymen at the British garrison, Lawrence himself proves
incorrigible, over the top--in a word,
Lawrence appears
excessive.
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| The empire's own agenda, in a dimension it's not prepared to recognize... |
We've seen something of this before: Recall the scene in
The Searchers in which the local white residents bury the victims of the attack on the cabin: When immediately after the funeral Ethan (Wayne) readies to resume chase of Chief Scar, a woman implores him to desist, characterizing Ethan's vengeful pursuit as a needless waste of blood (i.e. excessive).
So what's this recurrent display of excess all about? More soon.
CS
