The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [351]
Over the next few years, as the unconscious pursuit of sensation became ever more intense, we saw the nudity inevitably becoming ever more brazen, the violence ever more extreme. By the time of Last Exit to Brooklyn, it was no longer enough for the already degraded heroine to be raped once, by one man. It had to be a mass-rape, going on and on. We saw stories drifting ever more into a strange, dream/nightmare realm of fragmented imagery, often not even attempting to develop any proper sense of plot.6 We saw all the framework which defines `reality and `normality' disintegrating into a dreamlike twilight where the fantasies of storytellers were drawn, by an entirely consistent internal logic, to explore literally anything that was `unreal' or `abnormal'. We saw the difference between the sexes dissolving into a kind of epicene blur. And what above all governed all this seemingly free-play of fantasy was that it was unconsciously driven by only one urge: to defy the rules and values of the Self, and to push that defiance ever further towards its ultimate limits. But, in reality, the further the process travelled into those realms of imagined freedom, so the range of images and situations left for it to play with became ever more limited, repetitive and sterile. Until in 1965 this ended up with the most life-defying, Self-defying image of them all, that of a defenceless baby, the archetypal Child, the supreme image of life renewed, being put casually to death by four young men, so lost in unconsciousness they were not even aware of what they had done. At this point even some of the most determined champions of the new `freedom` had a sense that they could take no more.
Into the brave new world
Once that psychological watershed had been passed, its consequences for storytelling were inevitably profound. The transformation which had taken place in moral, social and artistic attitudes in those few years between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s reflected a further decisive shift in the relationship between ego and Self which would find expression in stories in many different ways. But nothing was more obviously to characterise the films, plays and novels of the decades which followed than the hitherto unthinkable degree to which the imagery of egocentred sex and violence had now become an established part of the landscape.
Certain stories would still stand out as landmarks because they managed to come up with some specially `shocking' new variation on the basic formula. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), glamourising the life of two young criminals on the run, caught attention not least because of its brief glimpse at the beginning of the heroine standing naked at a window and the much longer sequence at the end showing both her and the hero being riddled with machine gun bullets, their bodies jumping about with the impact as their flesh and clothes became soaked in blood.
Four years later Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), based on a novel by Anthony Burgess, conjured up so glamorous an image of young men obsessed with sex and violence that the film inspired a rash of imitative crimes in real life, prompting its shaken director to withdraw it from circulation a year after its release. Set in a Britain of `the near future, the story opens with the hero Alex and his gang of three teenagers, wearing uniforms which emphasise their sexual organs, sitting in a bar furnished with fibreglass figures of naked women in submissive poses, drinking drugged milk shakes served from the nipples of more naked female figures and preparing for an evening of their favourite entertainment,