The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [493]
The prevailing archetype in the societies of the West was again about to go through a startling change.
5. The re-emergence of the ego (I): 1955-1980
The psychic upheaval about to engulf the Western world first showed in the younger generation. By the mid-1950s various films were catching a newly restive mood now affecting many of those on the verge of adult life, who 10 years earlier would have been preoccupied with fighting World War Two. In 1953 The Wild One featured Marlon Brando as the leader of an aggressive gang of leather-jacketed `tonup kids' descending on a California town (and ended with him being accused of murder). Two years later teenage American movie-goers were hypnotised by a new young Hollywood star James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), playing a speed-crazed hero who ended up killing himself in a car crash (only months before Dean died in identical fashion in real life). Across the Atlantic Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni (1954) centred on a bored, sensation-seeking bunch of Italian teenagers, showing, like the contemporary `Teddy boy' craze in Britain, that, as the shadows of the war receded, the new hunger for excitement was not confined only to America.
The first real sign of the scale of the earthquake to come, however, was the reaction in 1956 to the movie Rock Around the Clock, starring a group known as Bill Haley and the Comets (who had briefly featured the previous year in a film about violence in a New York slum school, Blackboard Jungle). Their music aroused such excitement that it set off riots. In south London a mob of three thousand `Teddy boys' rampaged through the streets for several hours, leaving a trail of devastation. Within months Haley was overshadowed by another new cult hero, Elvis Presley, the epitome of rampant young male sexuality. The pounding beat of rock 'n' roll became the most feverish craze in popular music since the 1920s.
At much the same time, apparently unconnected, a new play in London, by an unknown young playwright, became overnight the theatrical sensation of the year. John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, showing its bored, angry, `lower-class' young hero Jimmy Porter in a seedy Midlands flat, ranting at the middle-class, Establishment values which he saw as suffocating English life, was unlike anything audiences had seen before. It was hailed by critics like Ken Tynan as roaring like a gale of fresh air through the stifling conservative conventions which had dominated English drama since the war. Soon Osborne and other new, young, `below the line' writers, such as the novelists Kingsley Amis and John Braine, had been dubbed by the press as `angry young men'.
A remarkable feature of the last four decades of the twentieth century was the extent to which they would be characterised by a set of values and attitudes which came into being in the space of just a few years, between the middle of the 1950s and the late 1960s. Already by the mid-1960s it was being observed that a `revolution' had taken place in the Western world, exemplified in everything from popular music, the rise of `youth culture' and `sexual liberation' to the new omnipresence of television and the rise of the `consumer society. The transformation this had brought about in the way people thought and behaved