The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [343]
The delighted howls of scorn this remark aroused from the progressives reflected what had now become a significant psychological feature of their battle to `push back the frontiers' of what was socially permissible. The progressives actually needed such self-caricaturing expressions of disapproval from the `reactionary' elements in society, because it helped confirm their conviction that they were involved in a heroic crusade. They needed to be able to deride these reactionaries as `anti-life, narrow-minded, hidebound, sexually-repressed, as `prigs, `Puritans' and `prudes' whose only concern was to restrict other people's freedom, because this was vital to building up their sense of the moral righteousness of their cause.
But what was the real nature of this `freedom' for which they imagined they were fighting? Their own view was that, by thrusting aside the old moral conventions, they were moving forwards into a boundless new world in which anything might now be possible. Yet the reality was very different. What they did not realise was that this new realm they were entering would be very much subject to laws and constraints of its own, one of which was the compulsion constantly to push the bounds of what was permissible a little further. The highest terms of praise for a new novel, play or film were that it was `exciting, `shocking, `daring, `disturbing' or `sickening, in that it stripped away some further layer of what was considered socially acceptable. But each time the `frontiers' were pushed back, it would be necessary next time to heighten the dose, to sustain the sense of novelty on which the spiral depended.
The legal battle over Lady Chatterley's Lover was not about the story itself. Almost the whole of Lawrence's novel had in fact been freely on sale for many years before 1960; just as Nabokov's Lolita, on the face of it a much more 'shocking' story, in that it centred on the sexual relationship of a middle-aged paedophile with a 12-year old girl, had been published uncensored ever since 1955. The only thing `new' about the version of Lady Chatterley on which Penguin Books won its historic court case was that it included the more graphic details of some of the sex scenes; and, more specifically, that it included those publicly taboo (though privately long-familiar) four-letter words. It was these the jury agreed it should now be permissible, under Jenkins's Act, to put into print. So great was the novelty of this that, although one or two newspapers self-consciously printed the `F' word in reporting on the trial, it was to be quite some time before public use of these words passed into anything like general currency, either in print or on stage or screen. But in essence the floodgates had been opened. Over the years to come, this was to transform the character of storytelling more dramatically than anything in its history.
Into the twilight world
What happened next can be summed up simply by describing some of the films, plays and novels which in the years that followed came to stand out as particular landmarks, because each in turn was hailed as taking stories a further `liberating' step into areas of sex and violence hitherto considered forbidden. As we look at these stories, we see a certain pattern emerging.
One of the first landmarks, released in the year Lady Chatterley was published in Britain, was Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Shot, unlike his other recent films, in stark black-and-white, this took mainstream Hollywood movie-making into a dimension of personal violence and sexual voyeurism it had never entered before. Based indirectly on the real-life story of