Frank Rich has an article in Sunday's New York Times that suggests that Lawrence of Arabia is the movie of the moment for reflecting the current situation in Iraq. It's a good idea, but the article ought to go further. Rich only refers to the last few scenes of the movie, which depict the disorganized Arab council at Damascus. True, it's impossible to watch these scenes today without being reminded of the upcoming "transition of power" (to whom, or to what, still a mystery), but there's a lot more going on here.

I've been an obsessive viewer of Lawrence of Arabia for about a year now. I revisit portions of the movie every few months, and recently watched the whole thing again over a couple of evenings. It's one of the most mysterious movies ever made, endlessly complicated and fascinating, and it would take a long, long essay to do justice to its many echoes with contemporary events. I'd suggest, however, that it's the structure of the movie itself that deserves our attention.

Lawrence of Arabia falls into two halves separated by an intermission, the first of which is an almost mythologically pure story of adventure, and the second of which depicts that adventure's long, messy unravelling. In the first, an extraordinarily intelligent, brave, and ascetic soldier, his head full of the classics, goes into Arabia with the intention of living a boy's book of adventure in the desert, and succeeds brilliantly. In the second, he starts to believe his own myth, is captured, tortured, grows cruel, and orders the massacre of a retreating army. The rallying cry of the first half is "Aqaba!" The cry of the second half is "No prisoners!"

The first half of the movie is what most people remember, but it's the second half that haunts me the most. It's hard to look at Lawrence in his desert robes without thinking of George W. Bush in that flight suit, and it's frightening to think that Lawrence, whose spiritual, intellectual, and martial resources were infinitely greater than those of Bush, couldn't resist the fall into an almost inhuman cruelty. In a way, of course, it's absurd to compare these two men. But there's a line from Lawrence of Arabia that applies equally well to both: "A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth," says Dryden to Lawrence. "But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it."