The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [491]
Then, in August 1945, came another unforgettable image for all mankind: that of the fireball and mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima. Guided by the ambiguous `spirit of Loki, Homo sapiens had finally learned how to unlock the most basic power of the universe, to bring the greatest war in history to an abrupt end.7 The shock which forced the surrender of Japan saved many more lives than those lost in the pulverisation of two of her cities. Even the firestorm which engulfed Dresden in the closing weeks of the European war might have seemed justified when allied troops uncovered the unimaginable horrors of the extermination camps in which Hitler and his followers had murdered millions of victims. By a collective demonstration of that combination of archetypal qualities required in any hero of myth, the `monster' had finally been overcome. But as humanity stumbled out into the dawn of a fragile peace, it was haunted by the knowledge that advancing consciousness had now called into being a monster potentially even more terrifying, with the power to destroy life many times over.
In many ways, the realignment of the prevailing archetypes which had so changed the mood of the Western world during the war years persisted through the decade that followed. America assumed the role of the west's superpower, the bastion of freedom and democracy against the new `dark empire' of Communism which had taken over half of Europe, followed by the country containing a quarter of the world's population, China. Toughened by war, America's leaders, under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, seemed appropriately masculine and mature for their new role. And, as her economy again took off into the greatest material prosperity the world had ever known, her storytelling mirrored a society still at home with those conservative values of the Self which were symbolised in Norman Rockwell's covers for the Saturday Evening Post, showing an idealised family of loving father and mother gathered with their smiling, well-dressed children round the Christmas tree in a neat, `all-American' suburban home.
From It's a Wonderful Life (1946) through High Noon (1952) to Ben Hur (1959), the ethos which governed post-war Hollywood movies still held to those values by which stars such as James Stewart (himself a wartime bomber pilot), Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, John Wayne and Charlton Heston could be shown as men who were unmistakably masculine, brave, decent, good-hearted, chivalrous to women. Their unmistakably feminine counterparts, in flowing calf-length `New Look' dresses, were stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day, Kim Novak, Sophia Loren. Similar values shaped the Rogers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter musicals which so dominated post-war entertainment, such as Oklahoma, South Pacific, The King and I, Paint Your Wagon, Kiss Me Kate and Call Me Madam. Sentimental they may have been, but in almost all such stories, the uplift of the archetypal happy ending, the uniting of hero and heroine before the curtain fell, had become almost synonymous with storytelling.
In Britain, amid the austerities of the immediate post-war period, a new Labour government seemed to continue that sense of communal idealism generated by the war, as it set out to build a selfless, fair new world supposedly dedicated to the interests of all `the People: In the early 1950s, Churchill returned to 10 Downing Street, to preside over his country's gradual return to prosperity. In 1953, the ancient pageantry surrounding the Coronation of a new young Queen, attended by representatives from Britain's Empire and Commonwealth, projected an extraordinary image of a worldwide `family, gathered together to pay homage to the archetypal symbols of its collective Self. British society,