The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [490]
As early as 1940, Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose wove out of the tragedy of Dunkirk an extraordinary parable of light and dark, centred on a hero who was portrayed as completely light, in a world where darkness seemed to reign supreme. Yet even in his death, ran the message of the story, life and light were triumphant (as in the story of Christ). In the same years, welling up from the unconscious of an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon literature, was that huge story of how two little, very English heroes, Frodo and Sam, eventually saved Middle Earth from the terrifying monster whose world-conquering ambitions were casting such a shadow over it from the east.
Nowhere, however, was the change which had come over storytelling more immediately obvious than in the cinema, In 1942 Noel Coward, whose pre-war plays about drug-addiction and divorce had made him synonymous with modern `decadence, came up with one of the most robustly patriotic films of the war. In Which We Serve moved audiences with its tribute to the selfless courage of those enduring terrifying ordeals at sea, and the equally selfless strength of character shown by those they loved at home. Other popular wartime films drew on Britain's history to centre on such manly national heroes from the past as Nelson, Pitt the Younger and Henry V, in Laurence Olivier's unashamedly morale-boosting version of Shakespeare's play. Carol Reed's The Way Ahead (1944) told the story of how a group of British soldiers rebuilt their morale after defeat at Dunkirk, to end with their part in the victory over Rommel at El Alamein. The Way to the Stars (1944) hinges on the love between a young RAF bomber pilot and his wife, representing the `eternal feminine, who is left alone with their baby son, after her husband, like so many of his comrades, has made the supreme sacrifice in a raid on Nazi-occupied Europe.
Of course to the inhabitants of those German cities which between 1942 and 1945 allied bombers were reducing to rubble, as for those once all-conquering German armies now in retreat all over Europe, the plot they were caught up in was very different. It was that of Tragedy, as Hitler's fantasy gradually moved from its dream stage to frustration in 1941-1942, then to the nightmare which, from 1943 onwards, closed in on Germany from all sides.
Archetypally, a significant moment of the war came in the Soviet Union in 1942, when Stalin, reeling from his Red Army's initial catastrophic reverses, dropped the slogans of Communism and appealed to all the most atavistic patriotic instincts associated by his people with `Mother Russia'. Persecution of the Church ceased. Army officers could again wear uniforms to mark them out from their men. The Russian people were now engaged in `the Great Patriotic War'. At least in propaganda terms, Stalin had reversed something of Communism's `dark inversion, and sought to play on precisely those archetypal emotions centred around the collective symbolism of the Self which for two decades he had done everything to root out and destroy.6
When America's entry into the war was precipitated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, it did not take long for her national mood to go through much the same transformation as that which had already overtaken Britain. Her people became caught up by the same sense that they were involved in a cosmic struggle for the forces of light against darkness. There was the same realignment of archetypal values, soon reflected by Hollywood, reinstating to a place of honour those masculine virtues which were now identified with heroic young American servicemen, and the firm, `fatherly' leadership of their President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1945 the image of US Marines raising the Stars and