The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [325]
The hero and heroine then approach the colossal craft and see, coming out of it, first her son, then the seven pilots of the planes which had disappeared a generation before. Like their aircraft, it is evident that they are not a day older than when they vanished. They have returned from their experience completely unchanged. Then, out of the unearthly light emanating from the spaceship, come the extra-terrestrial beings themselves, like little, smiling human foetuses. They smile to the scientist from the US Government, as if to indicate that they know him. The hero then steps forward and goes off into the spaceship alone, leaving the heroine and the child behind. Forlornly they set off on their journey home, and the story ends.
This curiously unresolved story includes a number of features which may strike us as particularly odd and revealing. In the opening scenes, our expectation is built up that some tremendously important, world-changing event is about to take place. There are miraculous signs - the untouched aircraft found in the desert, the lights in the heavens - which seem to indicate that some stupendous supernatural power is at work. At first we do not know whether it is hostile or friendly, dark or light, although the way the little boy goes off happily into the unearthly light seems to suggest it is benign.
At the point where the hero and heroine separately become possessed by the compulsion to set off on their quest, all our ancient instincts in following stories tell us that they are about to undergo some great, life-transforming experience, an encounter with this colossal but benign and therefore life-renewing power, which has chosen to intervene in worldly affairs and has singled them out for a unique destiny. This is underlined by the fact that the goal of their quest is a mountain, which so often in the storytelling of the world is a symbol of the Self.
But already there are warnings that the story may turn out to deliver less than it promises, not least the mountain's name, Devil's Peak. When they arrive, they find the mountain surrounded by barriers to others, ordinary mortals, but they are let through by some special dispensation, as if to underline their special destiny ('the test which only the true hero or heroine can pass'). The sense of some impending great act of transformation is brought to a climax by the arrival of the huge spaceship: the great, round, glowing object in the heavens, which again is a classic symbol of the Self in all its awesome power. But then the warning signs that all is not going to turn out like this come thick and fast.
The pilots emerge from the spaceship, after their unearthly adventure, completely unchanged (right at the start of the film, the unchanged state of the aircraft had in fact been the first warning sign). The extra-terrestrial beings emerge, not as superhuman, god-like figures, but looking like unborn human children. Most significant of all, the hero steps up into the spaceship alone, parted from the heroine, who presumably had been as much called to the Quest as himself. Unfulfilled, the anima-figure goes off home, accompanied by that other great symbol of Rebirth, the Child; so that the hero ends up separated from both the two chief redeeming figures in storytelling. We no longer have the slightest indication that, when he steps up into that spacecraft, anything of real significance will happen to him,