The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [484]
The prevailing mood of the `Roaring Twenties' was that of a great burst of liberated energy, reflected in all the nervous frenzy and hedonistic materialism of Scott Fitzgerald's `Jazz Age'. It was the age of `flappers' and the Charleston; of the unprecedented share boom on Wall Street, when millions of ordinary folk could for the first time hope to become rich by investing in the stocks of America's leading companies; the heyday of Henry Ford's `Model T, when for the first time millions could afford to buy motor cars. It was the age when those soaring skyscrapers, pioneered in the years before 1914, now turned the Manhattan skyline into one of the most powerfully familiar images in the world. It was the first heyday of telling stories through the medium of the cinema, making Hollywood the world centre of mass-entertainment, peopling the fantasies of millions with the dream images of the first `movie stars'.
The thread running through all these manifestations of the spirit of the age was their sanctioning of a newly assertive kind of self-expression, nowhere made more visible than in the rivalry of those New York developers to outvie each other in raising the tallest structures ever seen, culminating at the decade's end in the New Empire State building. This was accompanied by a radical transformation in the appearance of women, as the long flowing dresses, elaborate hairstyles and parasols of pre-war times suddenly gave way to the leg-revealing short skirts, cropped hair and flaunted cigarette holders associated with the young flappers of the jazz Age. Never in history had there been such a dramatically sudden change in women's fashions. But the new `mannishness' of their short hair and emancipated attitudes was matched by a corresponding `feminisation' of their male counterparts such as Rudolf Valentino, whose rouged and powdered image aroused mass-hysteria when, in films like The Sheikh, he was magnified by the silver screen into the romantic heart-throb of the age.
In counterpoint to all this `mass-individualism, the 1920s was also marked by an extraordinary wave of Utopian idealism, its tone set by that which inspired the League of Nations itself, as the supposed guarantee of a new age of international peace and brotherhood. In the mid1920s, the statesmen of France and Germany dreamed of joining together to build a new `United States of Europe'. In Russia, after the horrors of revolution and civil war, Lenin's Bolsheviks were setting out to create an ideal Communist society, of a kind the world had never seen before, in which all the oppressive old hierarchical order centred on the `Little Father', the Czar, had been torn down, and where all its citizens would now be equal.
In Paris the visionary architect Le Corbusier dreamed of tearing down all the old historic cities, starting with Paris itself, and replacing them with his Utopian new `City of the Future', planned down to the tiniest detail, in which vast, shining white concrete skyscrapers would stand amid grass and trees. For millennia, centred on great temples and cathedrals, the city had been a symbolic image of human totality, the Self. Le Corbusier's vision of his `radiant city, laid out on a perfect four-sided geometric grid, surrounded by woods and fields, was a projection of the same archetype. But by a telling inversion, instead of having a mighty cathedral at its heart, the ultimate focal point of Le Corbusier's city was its central transport `node'; the intersection of its grid of motorways, with above them its main railway station and central airport. Instead of his city being centred on a cathedral spire and high altar, symbolising some ultimate point of inner peace and union with the `One, its centre represented the point of maximum external noise and restlessness.