The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [350]
Of course, acts of physical violence have played a prominent part in storytelling since the dawn of time. But when it is shown within the archetypal framework, the exercise of violence is always subject to clear rules. If a dark figure is shown committing a violent act, the archetype dictates that there must always ultimately be a recompense. In the end, the monster, like Macbeth, must always be paid out for his crimes. When light figures resort to violence this is acceptable, because it is always made clear that they are doing so for selfless reasons, on behalf of others. Even when stories first venture onto the fantasy level, taking on a `sentimental' form, these same rules still hold good. The scenes of violence in a James Bond film may in reality only be included for their sensation value, to excite the audience. But they are still sanctioned in the audience's mind by the fact that Bond is a 'light figure', selflessly risking his life to challenge some monstrous dark figure, the `good guy' acting to save the world from a megalomaniac super-criminal.
What happens when stories move still further into fantasy, losing contact with their underlying archetypal purpose altogether, is that this opposition between `light' and `dark' disappears. Everyone in the story is seen in a twilight. We may see men inflicting violence on each other because they are obviously cruel, vicious and dark. But since there are no `light' characters to oppose them, such acts of violence become just sensational images for their own sake, designed to excite the audience's horror or disgust.
Where this process becomes even more obviously extreme, however, is when violence becomes entangled with the sexual urge, and is shown being directed against a woman. This is where it at last becomes clear that the real unconscious drive of the process is to turn the archetype upside down, to show the figure who symbolises the highest value in storytelling, the anima (and thus the Self), being violated in the most shocking way possible. The value of de Sade's story about Justine is that it illustrates this point so explicitly. Because he was writing in an age when heroines in stories were still generally depicted in their full symbolic anima-guise as shining, innocent souls of virtue, to conjure up such a heroine solely in order to show her being repeatedly violated was calculated to give his story the maximum shock-value. It was precisely for this reason that, for nearly two centuries, de Sade's book was regarded as so obviously offensive to the moral sense that it remained buried from view; until society had so changed that the mainstream of storytelling was ready, as it were, to start catching up with him.
It was apt that the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 should have coincided almost exactly with the release of Psycho, and in particular the scene of a naked young woman being coldly stabbed to death for minutes on end. Hitchcock's heroine was scarcely `a soul of virtue' in the same way as Justine. But she still, in her vulnerability, symbolised the `eternal feminine. Like Justine and countless other `persecuted heroines' since de Sade's time, Marion represented the defenceless anima being violated. And in the way Hitchcock showed it, lingering obsessively over the physical detail of her destruction, he achieved the complete inversion of that archetypal climax to so many of the great stories