The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [271]
In its darkest form we saw this in Frankenstein and Moby Dick, where the roles of hero and monster are reversed. At the beginning the hero himself appears as the story's chief dark figure, while the monster appears as `light, representing in an inferior form the unrealised value of the Self which the hero will never achieve. As the hero darkens further, so does the monster: to the point where, as the hero is finally destroyed by the shadow of his own egotism, the monster disappears.
An example of the `lesser dark version' of this plot, in its own way almost as revealing about the psychological one-sidedness of modern civilisation, was that Hollywood classic from the early days of sound-pictures, King Kong (1933). An American film director Carl Denham is working on an immensely important and secret new project. He has hired a ship in New York and is desperate to find a young girl to act as his star. Spotting a penniless but beautiful blonde, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), stealing an apple from a stall, he intervenes to save her from arrest and brings her onto the ship, to the disgust of its all-male crew. Only one young officer, the hero Jack Denholm, overcomes his initial aversion to her femininity and falls in love with her.
The ship crosses half the world to arrive in dense fog at a mysterious, unknown island, which has a small peninsula inhabited by a primitive people, cut off by a massive, ancient stone wall from the dark, jungle-clad interior. The white men see painted tribesmen working themselves into a frenzy, to the throbbing of drums, while a small girl is garlanded with flowers to be offered up through a mighty gate in the wall as `the bride of Kong'. The tribesmen see the blonde white woman as a more appropriate sacrifice, and come by night to the ship to kidnap her. She is dragged through the gate and tied between two pillars, where she is terrified to see bearing down on her the mysterious denizen of the island's interior, a monstrous ape the size of a house. But instead of eating her, Kong carries her gently off into the jungle: a first sign that something unusual is happening to the normal archetypal pattern.
Everything we have seen up to this point reflects the way Denham and his all-male crew represent the ego-consciousness of modern American civilisation, cut off from the instinctive world of nature. In the metal prison of the ship, surrounded with their weapons and camera equipment, they represent all the limitations of one-sided masculinity. When they arrive at the island its geography symbolises what is happening. The small, inhabited peninsula of consciousness is cut off by a mighty barrier from the dark interior of the unconscious, inhabited by the natural forces of instinct which, because they are repressed, seem shadowy and menacing. And now the feminine value, the anima, has passed into that unconscious realm, into the clutches of the shadow of the dark masculine from which she will have to be rescued if there is to be any happy resolution.
Back on the ship, the crew discover she is missing and, led by the hero, the only man among them open to the feminine value, a group of them set off in pursuit. By the Rule of Three, they are attacked in turn by three monsters, first two dinosaurs, then King Kong himself. Twelve men are killed, leaving only the hero alive. We and the hero, who has arrived at the spot where Kong is guarding the heroine, then see her being threatened by prehistoric monsters, again three in number: a tyrannosaur, a huge snake and a pterodactyl. Each time she is saved, after a mighty struggle, by Kong. After the second battle, high on a rocky mountain ledge, he holds her in his huge hand, removing strips of her gauze-like clothing, looking at her tenderly, even playfully. Despite seemingly being an archetypal monster in every