The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [349]
The starting point for an answer lies in the nature of that most centrally numinous figure in storytelling, the archetypal heroine, the anima, the ultimate prize the hero has to win. As an embodiment of the feminine she potentially stands for everything the opposite sex can represent to a man. Certainly this may begin with the fact that she is physically attractive. But the essence of her role in stories is to represent those `light feminine' values, feeling for others and seeing whole, which are crucial to escaping from the confines of the ego and to establishing union with the Self. The hero who reaches the ultimate goal in storytelling is he who is worthy to win her, because he represents the `light masculine; he is both strong and loving. Similarly the light heroine is outwardly feminine and inwardly strong. That is why the sight of a hero and heroine united in love at the end of a story has such power to move us, because unconsciously we recognise this complementary coming together on every level as the image of Self-realisation, complete human fulfilment.
Once stories become centred on nothing higher than the ego, this totality is shut off to them. The ego-transcending feminine values have gone missing. And when fantasy loses touch with the selfless components of love, all that is left to it is to reduce the relationship between men and women to just a physical level. Initially we may get stories like Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley which, in their very different ways, show this through the eyes of wish-fulfilment. They are centred on the image of the sexual act, which invariably works with mechanical perfection to the mutual gratification of both parties (as it also does, if less explicitly, in, say, a James Bond film). But in terms of constructing a story, there comes a point where simply to fantasise about the coupling of two people begins to tire. Because it has been cut off from the deeper unconscious purposes of storytelling, it cannot go anywhere.
It may seem easier to sustain the sense of excitement where the actual visual image of the feminine can be used to trigger off male sexual desire, as on a stage or a cinema screen. Men are instinctively programmed to respond to such stimuli, in a way which is ultimately quite impersonal. This is why, through most of human history, women have dressed in such a way as to reveal their faces, that part of them which most completely expresses their individuality, but to conceal the greater part of their bodies from view. Once ego becomes dominant, this creates a pressure for them to reveal more and more of their bodies, to provide stimulus to physical desire. For a long time after the arrival of the cinema, the gentilities were more or less preserved, except in those special circumstances where actresses were permitted to show their legs or cleavage, as in dance or beach sequences, or where they were playing recognisably louche, immoral characters. But when the great psychological watershed was passed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this inevitably resulted in a compulsion to push display of the female body nearer and nearer to a state of undress: first to underwear, then to half-glimpsed bare breasts, then to full-length nudity. And although, as with a strip-tease act, it may be easy to sustain a sense of arousal and expectation while this process is in its earlier stages, there must eventually come a point where literally all has been revealed. There is nowhere further to go.
So when the ego is denied the only road which can lead to proper fulfilment, where does it then turn? Essentially, as we have seen, it finds three forms of expression. First, when the ego