The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [355]
There was one last significant step left for the process to take, and this reflected the dramatic change which was taking place in Western society's view of women, and in women's image of themselves. In parallel with the rise of the feminist movement, the most conspicuous feature of this transformation was a conscious rejection of those values which had traditionally been understood as `feminine, and a new emphasis on the importance of asserting that `masculine' element in the female psyche which Jung terms the animus. The image of women was becoming de-feminised. No longer were the styles of women's clothing intended to express such traditional feminine attributes as grace, allure, prettiness, elegance: they were designed to be either, in a hard, direct way, sexually provocative, or sexlessly businesslike. The more familiar the sight of the naked female body became on screens and stages, not to mention in newspapers and in millions of pornographic magazines, the more it lost its old aura of hidden female mystery. No longer were female characters in stories expected to display such traditional feminine qualities as innocence, modesty, intuitive understanding, a loving heart.
There was now a premium on showing animus-driven women capable of competing with men and outperforming them in masculine terms. Female characters were expected to be shown as just as clever and tough as men, mentally and physically. We have already touched on one early example of a film, Alien (1979), in which a woman was cast in an archetypally male role, as the central figure in the crew of a spaceship which is invaded by a peculiarly horrible and deadly monster. The basic plot of this film was very similar to that of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In a terrifyingly claustrophobic, closed little world, we see the seven crew members being picked off one by one, their bodies disintegrating in the most gruesome manner. Eventually only the tough, resourceful heroine is left alive, and in a final shoot-out, worthy of any male hero, she manages in the nick of time to blast the monster into space. The whole point of her part in the story was that nothing about it should be distinctively feminine. She was simply transposed directly into the traditional role of a manly hero.
A rather less straightforward example of the complications this gender-switch could lead to was the horror film The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The heroine Clarice Starling, a young police trainee with a psychology degree, is first shown as physically and mentally tough, a match for her all-male fellow-trainees. The emphasis is placed clearly on her masculine rather than feminine attributes. She is then, in a way which would be implausible whatever her gender, pitted by her superior officer in a battle of wits against the most fearsome criminal of the age.
Dr Hannibal Lecter is himself a renowned psychiatrist, but also happens to be serving a life-sentence as a cruel and clever serial killer who likes to eat the bodies of his victims. The purpose of her being sent to interview him in his prison cell is to pick his brains in trying to track down a second serial killer, still at large, who has killed three young women before removing parts of their skin. To build up the horror of what she has to face, when she walks down the corridor of cells to meet the cannibal, another mass-murderer hisses through the bars `I can smell your cunt' (he later showers her with his semen). Lecter turns out to be a masterful, outwardly courteous, devilishly ingenious representative of the `dark masculine' possessed by the `dark feminine'. He has the heartless, intuitive subtlety of a `Tempter' figure, as he tries to lure the heroine under his spell. In this sense the gender wires begin to get crossed because, although Clarice is meant to represent tough modern womanhood, she finds herself getting drawn by his penetrating intelligence into the more familiar archetypal role of a young woman falling into the