The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [359]
In 1999, as the twentieth century came to its close, the authoress of Blasted hanged herself, at the age of 28. Before her death, according to an anthology of contemporary British plays, she had `established an international reputation as the leading playwright of her generation'. Her `theatrical gods', according to her director, included Samuel Beckett and Edward Bond. Psychologically, by far the most interesting feature of her best-known play was the character of Cate who, most unusually in stories of this blackness, is shown as essentially good-hearted. She tries to live by some values, has a simple religious sense, cares for the baby, marks its death with a cross, and ends up feeding the eyeless, hopeless Ian like a child. In her mentally retarded state, Cate is a projection of the authoress's own repressed inner femininity. But this part of her is constantly degraded and overridden by the hard, superior masculine element in her personality, the dark animus represented by the figure of Ian (which eventually splits into two, with the appearance of the even more brutalised soldier). It is a tragically familiar pattern in real life that, when such a conflict develops in a woman's personality, the aggression of her dark animus may eventually turn in on itself, driving her to suicide. In this sense, Sarah Kane's play and her death were a final dark mirror to the inner world of the age: to that psychic disintegration which storytellling had not only reflected but was helping to urge on.
Re-emergence of the archetype: The Terminator
We ended the last chapter with a Hollywood film of the 1980s, ET., which showed how, even in the least promising surroundings, stories can still, on a sentimental level, recover contact with their fundmental archetypal purpose. At first sight The Terminator (1984) might seem just another story relentlessly parading the gratuitous imagery of violence. But, when it is taken together with its sequel, judgement Day (1991), we can see how the unconscious structures ultimately bring this story back to an almost completely archetypal resolution.
The first film opens with the arrival in Los Angeles in 1984 of a truly monstrous figure (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger). Outwardly he appears to be a human being. In fact he is a magically ingenious computer, sent back to contemporary California from a time nearly 50 years into the future, on a deadly errand. That world of the year 2029 is in ruins, after a nuclear war launched in 1997 by a nearomnipotent computer system, Skynet. This autonomous super-intelligence runs the future world like a totalitarian state, and wishes to eliminate human beings altogether. But those humans who survive have launched a heroic war of resistance, under their leader John Connor. The mission of the terminator in returning to 1984 is to seek out Connor's mother, Sarah, and destroy her, before her son can be born.
The terminator is only programmed to do one thing, to kill. It is a perfect representation of the `masculine' aspects of the human psyche without any `feminine' balance. Physically and mentally it seems unstoppable, It is so cleverly designed that, even if smashed to pieces, it can immediately restore itself to full working order. But, like any computer, it completely lacks the feminine attributes which would be necessary to make its strength positive. It is totally incapable of feeling, and it lacks intutive understanding, the ability to see whole. It can only see what it has been programmed to see.
The machine's inability to see the wider picture soon becomes apparent when it starts to track down women called Sarah Connor in the