The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [324]
`we have nothing to say, except that we have nothing to say.'
It was not only in literature that we can see a similar dead end being reached. In twentieth-century art, as the figurative image had begun to dissolve into pure abstractionism, a similar process had finally led by 1950, just three years before the appearance of Waiting for Godot, to a painting which was no more than a black canvas. In words remarkably evocative of Beckett's own, its creator, the American abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt, wrote:
'An artist ... has always nothing to say and he must say that over and over again.'
In 1952, just when Beckett was writing his most famous play, much the same dead end was reached in music, when the American composer John Cage produced his famous work `4.33, consisting solely of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.
Of course the separation of the ego from the Self was to be expressed in twentieth-century storytelling in more ways than this. The most blatant of these will be the subject of the next chapter. But it was not only in `serious literature', such as the works of Chekhov and Proust, Camus and Beckett, that stories reflected this tendency for their characters and the story itself to end up `going nowhere'. It also emerged strongly, though perhaps less obviously, in popular storytelling. And we shall end this chapter by looking at three of the most successful Hollywood films of the late-twentieth century.
Not so close encounters
Much of the appeal of Steven Spielberg, as the most successful popular storyteller of the late twentieth century, lay in the spectacular manner in which his films exploited some of the great archetypal themes of storytelling, such as the Quest, the overcoming of monsters and the hunt for buried treasure.
His first science-fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) opens with the discovery in the American desert, in the middle of a mighty sandstorm, of seven World War Two fighter planes, which had mysteriously disappeared with their pilots in 1945. There is no sign of the pilots, but what puzzles their finders is that the aircraft are as good as new, without a trace of rust. Even the oil in their engines is still fresh.
One night shortly afterwards, much of America is amazed by extraordinary displays of lights in the sky, and the appearance of dozens of `unidentified flying objects'. Our attention is then focused on three people: the hero, an electrical repairman, who lives with his familiy in Indiana; the heroine, a divorced artist; and a child, her young son. There is an eerie scene when the house occupied by the heroine and her son is illuminated by unearthly light, and all the toys in his bedroom begin moving about by themselves. Obviously some more than natural power is at work. Household machines begin to shake, but quite harmlessly and without breaking. The little boy walks out of the house towards the source of the unearthly light, smiling, and disappears.
The following day, quite independently, the hero and the heroine both begin obessively trying to make models and pictures of a strangely shaped mountain. They behave in other odd ways, as if they are possessed by some power beyond themselves, as when he starts throwing rubbish which should be outside his house in through the windows. Then, still independently, they both see on a television newscast, a picture of the mountain they have become obsessed by. It is called Devil's Peak, in Wyoming, and it seems from the news report that something very odd is going on there.
Both know at once that they must set out for Devil's Peak as the most important thing in their lives. The story thus becomes