The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [353]
The ineffectual David is so wrapped up in his life of the mind, as he chalks up equations on a blackboard, that his physically frustrated wife deliberately allows a gang of builders to see her standing naked in the hallway. She then arranges for David to be out of the house, so she can receive an old lover, who slaps her about before tearing off her clothes to penetrate her. She is enjoying this when they are interrupted at gunpoint by one of the builders, who takes over, turning adultery to rape. Little Janice meanwhile flaunts her sexuality in front of a mentally retarded young man in the village, disappears with him and ends up being strangled.
When the village idiot comes to the farmhouse pleading for sanctuary from her pursuing father and brothers, David agrees to protect him. This prompts the enraged Venner and his sons to storm vengefully up to the house, where Amy wants to hand the murderer over, But, faced with this crisis, her hitherto weak, overcerebral husband suddenly discovers the physical side of his masculinity, hitherto so conspicuously lacking. As the attackers prepare to break into the house, he slaps his wife into submission and prepares to meet force with force. There is a long, extremely violent battle, which leaves the farmhouse strewn with corpses (the heroine herself finally shooting Venner, in an echo of High Noon, just as the old monster is about to kill her husband). The triumphant hero is last seen driving off smiling into a fog-shrouded landscape, to hand over the village idiot to the authorities. He has discovered his masculine strength.
In archetypal terms, this is the only interest of the story. Through most of the plot, the hero, lost in his intellectual calculations, is only the indecisive shadow of a man. Everyone else in the story is aggressively physical. The two female characters are sex-mad; the men brutal, violent and also sex-mad. Eventually the scales tip, the ineffectual wimp discovers his manhood and becomes as violent as any of them. This familiar wishful-thinking reversal (`weak, humiliated guy gets his own back on his persecutors') provides the excuse for a prolonged explosion of blood, violence and death, before the story concludes in a typical pseudo-ending with its hero disappearing into the fog. This of course leaves wholly unresolved the question of how he is going to explain to the police that he and his wife have just been responsible for shooting several people.
A film which aroused a stir the following year was Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), starring Marlon Brando as a middle-aged American expatriate living in a dingy quarter of Paris, full of prostitutes and drug-addicts, whose wife has recently committed suicide. He roams the streets and decides to inspect a vacant flat. Jeanne, a French girl barely out of her teens and waiting for her boyfriend to arrive on a train, decides on an impulse to look at the same flat. While she is wandering through the rooms, Brando looms out of the shadows. After sparring over who should get the flat, they are about to leave when they suddenly grab each other and snatch a fumbled act of sex against the wall. This launches a series of further meetings in the all-but empty apartment, each marked by acts of crude, impersonal, unloving copulation which become the main theme of the film. What gave it the frisson of novelty was the sight of two anonymous people, so cut off in their own egos that they never even get to know each other's names, meeting merely to co-operate in the act of sex. An episode which generated a particular stir in 1972 was where Brando used butter to lubricate his entry into the girl's anal passage. Eventually she wearies of participating in this loveless sexual game with an ageing, totally self-absorbed male and brings their meaningless relationship to an end.
If Last Tango `pushed back the frontiers' in sexual terms, by showing sex for its own sake in the most dehumanised