The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [108]
However novel this situation may seem, it is really only a contemporary version of that theme which has run through Comedy since the time of Menander: the lovers who are separated by a misunderstanding, and may even temporarily go off with other parties, but are eventually reconciled. It was precisely the situation that shaped that apparently revolutionary drama of the 1950's, Look Back in Anger (1956), which few would have dared at the time to describe as a mere `comedy. In a cramped flat in a dingy Midlands city, Jimmy Porter is perpetually arguing with his wife, Alison, until eventually he escapes with her friend Helen. He recognises that he is no better off and that it is Alison he really loves. He returns home, makes up his quarrel with Alison, and they end happily reunited in their childish fantasy of `squirrels and bears.
Only towards the end of the twentieth century, however, did modern Comedy finally manage to turn the outward conventions of the time-honoured plot completely on their head. The hero of the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), played by Hugh Grant, is one of a group of young friends who, one after another, get married (or in one case, die). After the first wedding, he has a one-night affair with another guest, an American girl, but she returns to America. Eventually, as the sequence of weddings unfolds, the hero becomes so desperate at seeing all his friends married off that he proposes to another member of the group who is similarly on the shelf. As the guests all gather in church for what it seems will be the final wedding of the story, the hero sees in the congregation the American girl he has never been able to get out of his mind. The bride is already standing at the altar when the hero and his American friend manage to escape from the church and run off together into the rain. Declaring undying love for each other, they agree their love is so real that it would be a mistake for them ever to get married.
After more than 2000 years of comedies in which the climax was the moment when the hero and heroine could at last head off to their wedding, here was one which might have seemed the complete inversion: a story made up of a whole succession of weddings, but in which the resolution finally came with hero and heroine agreeing, as ultimate proof that their love was real, that they should not get married. However, it was only the outward form which had been stood on its head. The story still ended, after all their separations, misunderstandings and pairing off with the wrong partners, with hero and heroine coming together in recognition of their loving union. For all its seeming reversal of convention, the underlying power of the Comedy plot still brought the story to its irresistible archetypal conclusion.
Comedy: Summing-up
Comedy cannot be summarised in quite the same way as the other basic plots because the very nature of the plot requires it to cover such a range of variations. But the essence of the story is always that:
(1) we see a little world in which people have passed under a shadow of confusion, uncertainty and frustration, and are shut off from one another;
(2) the confusion gets worse until the pressure of darkness is at its most acute and everyone is in a nightmarish tangle;
(3) finally, with the coming to light of things not previously recognised, perceptions are dramatically changed. The shadows are dispelled, the situation is miraculously transformed and the little world is brought together in a state of joyful union.
The key to Comedy is thus the transition between two general states. The first which persists through most of the story is a kind of twilight in which nothing is seen clearly; where people's true nature or identity may be obscured; and where there may be uncertainty as to who should end up with whom. The chief cause of the twilight is usually some central dark figure, who is in some way acting blindly and heartlessly.