The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [268]
Not all Hollywood's fondly-imagined fairy tales adhere quite so closely to the archetypal pattern, not least in real life. For there is nothing more dangerous than to try to act out externally the patterns of the archetypes, which can only yield their true significance when taken inwardly, as the symbols of inner psychic growth. This is why, behind its fairy-tale facade, Hollywood, as a town where the persona rules supreme, has to this day proved such a graveyard for those who pass unconsciously into the grip of projected archetypes, leaving that trail of divorces, alcoholism, nervous breakdowns and even murders with which it has long been synonymous.
Even Hollywood's fictional fairy tales can often be seen on closer examination to betray the dark side of the psychic disorder bound to rage in a town and an industry so remorselessly dedicated to the self-deceiving world of the ego. A revealing instance was that Charlie Chaplin silent-screen classic of the 1920s, The Gold Rush. The first part of the story shows Charlie and two fellow prospectors, Black Larsen and Big Jim, out in the wilderness, where Jim has discovered an enormous lode of gold ('the treasure in the cave'). After experiencing blizzards and starvation, Charlie's two companions begin to fight. Larsen hits Jim over the head with a spade and is then killed by an avalanche. Jim disappears, having lost his memory and forgotten the whereabouts of his gold mine. Charlie, left alone, goes down into the nearby town, where he meets and falls in love with Georgia, the little dance-hall hostess, who only dances with him to spite her drunken and bullying lover. Charlie, imagining that she likes him, invites her back to his cabin with her friends for a New Year's Eve celebration dinner. They do not turn up.
So far, in light of its inner symbolism, any analyst who heard such a story recounted as a dream by one of his patients might fear his subject was heading for nervous breakdown. Clearly this is an extreme case of arrested development. Both the girl (an infantile anima figure) and the buried treasure (potential personality growth) are `lost. This is coupled with the death of one companion and the disappearance of the other (a severe case of violent repression of important elements in the psyche!).
In the second part of the story Big Jim returns, looking for Charlie as the one person who can help him retrace his steps back to the lost gold. When, by lucky chance, they find it, he rewards Charlie with a share and they both become millionaires. But Charlie is still miserable because he has lost the girl he loves. In other words, he has been able to compensate for his inability to relate to the anima by becoming successful in the world and building up an impressive outward persona. But in no way has he developed inwardly, he is still as immature as he was at the beginning of the story and his fundamental inadequacy still nags at him.
In part three Charlie, now rich through no effort of his own, is embarking on a ship back to civilisation, happily showing off as he poses for photographers in his old tramp's clothes. Suddenly he falls over a rail into the ship's lower depths, where it just happens that little Georgia is travelling steerage. Seeing him in his old rags, she imagines he is a stowaway on the run and offers to look after him. In other words, he has regressed into the unconscious, where he finds his infantile anima projection who will love him as he really is, in his undeveloped, immature state. The story concludes on the hope that the two little sexless `babes in the wood' can get married and live happily ever after: i.e., in the wishful thinking that they can remain happy frozen in their infantile state forever. Analysed in this light, it is not really a very happy little tale at all; and anyone who wished to understand Chaplin's