I finally watched Lawrence of Arabia this weekend. It’s big-g Great, and its bonus features are well done. Notable is the interview with an underweight, t-shirted Steven Spielberg in which the director shares his memories of the movie: growing up in Arizona, he identified with Lawrence’s love of the desert, etc. He talks about the images that struck him when he was eight, and you think Yeah, this guy was put on the earth to make movies. There's a light in his eyes. I’d originally started watching it as a breather between disc one and disc two, but he was so obvious in his passion for the film that I decided to stop: I wanted my favorite images to be mine, not the ones that he points out.

But around the middle of the invu all the fun gets sucked out as Spielberg starts warning viewers that the movie takes some liberties with history. I'd rather have not known. I don’t know jack about the history of the Middle East in World War I, and if I was ever talking to someone who knew jack, I wouldn’t interrupt them and say, “Well actually, I don’t remember Alec Guinness’s character ever saying anything like that.” And I’d venture that the demographic that watches a 4-hour movie by a dead-of-old-age director and a slew of dead-of-old-age actors consists of people who probably wouldn’t either.

“Today, I think critics would be much more critical of the film,” he says, all spark drained from his eyes. This DVD came out a few years ago, so he may have given this interview during a break from his re-edit of ET, where he eliminated all the guns and removed the scene of 10-year old Eliot calling his brother “penis breath.” You can't help but wonder if Spielberg went through ET slicing scenes just so that in thirty years some other director wouldn't say of his film, “Today, I think critics would be much more critical of it.”

The message on the DVD and the ET re-issue: No film is timeless, because the critics are forever equipped with the 1.21 gigiwatts of electric power necessary to reach backward in time and strip a film of its right to be enjoyed by the public.

You can see the vision that prompted the ET re-edit: In some dystopian Hollywood just over the horizon, the once mighty, now old and retired Spielberg is surrounded on a lonely street by younger, post-moderner critics. They taunt the old man, tarring him with the bigoted words of a bygone age: “Penis breath, penis breath!” Old Spielberg crumples beneath a streetlight, remembering how in his prime he’d swatted critics aside like insects. But these are their children, a purer breed. And the world is theirs.

Cowdung.

The most egregious stereotype in the film isn’t Anthony Quinn's bloodthirsty pillaging Arab. It’s the unflappable Jackson Bentley, reporter for the Chicago Courier, who strides up to generals, dignitaries, and kings, fedora cocked to the side and says, “I have two questions for you.” He requests only these two specific pieces that will complete the grand puzzle he has almost completely solved in his mind. With his questions answered, he recedes, self-satisfied.

To reiterate: cowdung.

A reporter most frequently used word is usually “um.” It’s also his least favorite, for the same reason that Chunky Lorraine’s least favorite part of her body is her posterior. The average reporter’s queries are usually over-thought out, asking three questions at once—giving the subject the option of answering the easiest of the three questions and then exiting. Some of the smartest reporters ask the dumbest questions repeatedly, just trying to get a subject to speak the meaningful eight word quote that will actually see print. Some of the worst manage to seem lucid simply because they keep asking the same question: “When will the President admit that he and Bob Jones Jr. are addicted to snorting the ground-to-powder bones of Afghani children?”

Yes, Bob Woodward speaks very eloquently on TV. But I guarantee that three decades ago Deep Throat had to keep explaining to him ad freaking nauseum why each new shred of information was relevant. When he was interviewing the president for his latest book, Bush surely looked at him at at least one point and thought, How did this muttonchop get here without a basic grasp of the English language?

Did I mind the portrayal of Jackson Bentley? Heck no. I’m happy with it in the same way many Detroit-area call girls must be pleased with Patricia Arquette’s character in True Romance—but neither should influence young people making career decisions. Instead, the should be told that the Rumsfeld “to call you a jackass would insult the animal that fuels the peasant economy of Honduras” glare is exactly par for the course, and sometimes you don’t shoot close to par.

News about Africa will return soon, I promise.