The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [267]
The essence of sentimentality is that it arises from the capacity of the human ego to appropriate the values and properties of the Self. It is thus egotism in disguise, pretending to identify with something higher and beyond Self. If one of the most obvious attributes of the Self is selfless feeling, sentimentality is the outward show of such feeling without its reality. This is why we particularly associate it with such expressions of emotion as the romantic love between a man and a woman; love between parents and children; sympathetic feelings for the plight of other people in general; the love of country; of nature; of God. All these are naturally functions of the deeper, ego-transcending Self. But they can all be sentimentalised when the ego seeks to enjoy such feelings without letting go of itself.
In one sense all the dark, ego-centred versions of stories we have already looked at are sentimental, compared with stories which are fully integrated with the underlying archetypes. Hence the two-dimensional nature of all the characters who appear in them. But at least in the `dark' versions it becomes obvious something has gone seriously adrift, and that the story cannot achieve its proper archetypal ending. What we must now look at are those stories where the ego manages to appropriate almost the entire outward form of the archetype, while emptying it of its inner significance; although even here, as we shall see, the result always somehow indicates that something has gone awry.
Nowhere in our time has been more obviously the home of Rags to Riches stories than the `dream factory of Hollywood: either in its real life role of transforming Norma Jean Mortensons and Archie Kerrs into Marilyn Monroes and Cary Grants, poor, anonymous little boys and girls into `Princesses' and `Princes'; or in the multitude of fictional versions which over the past century have poured out onto the screens and into the fantasies of the world. Every conceivable permutation has been worked on this theme, not least in that host of films which showed some unrecognised genius winning his way at last to fame and recognition.
An example we looked earlier was The Benny Goodman Story (1956), recreating the early career of the 1930s swing bandleader. Outwardly this story followed the exact pattern of the Rags to Riches archetype, right up to the happy ending, with the hero winning the hand of the beautiful `Princess' and succeeding to the `kingdom, as he wins a standing ovation in Carnegie Hall, the supreme citadel of American musical respectability where no mere jazz musician had ever been allowed to play before. But when we look more carefully, we see how the hero's success is all presented in external terms. We see no inner development in his character. The story is no more than a wish-fulfilment fantasy, originally centred on a small boy whose only real defining characteristic is his exceptional musical talent, rather like Julien Sorel's capacity to remember chunks of Horace, and his all-consuming will to succeed. Because the hero is a pleasant-enough cardboard figure, there is nothing obviously dark and inimical about him. It is therefore acceptable that he should eventually win through to worldly gratification and acclaim. But it is telling that the ultimate mark of his success is when the heroine's rich elderly parents are seen tapping their feet to his music and joining in the cheers in Carnegie Hall. Really he is still just the small boy who wants approval from the `grown ups'. He has not matured to become fully grown-up himself, a king over his own inner kingdom, which is what the Rags to Riches archetype is about. In psychological terms, like all those other Hollywood versions of the Rags to Riches story