The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [495]
In the wider world there was an awakening desire for liberation among all those who saw themselves as `below the line, such as the black population of the USA and those countries which could now look forward to independence from European colonial rule. When Britain's prime minister Harold Macmillan remarked, as the new decade of the 1960s began, that `a wind of change' was blowing through Africa, he might have been speaking not just of Africa but for humanity as a whole. A new archetype was in the ascendant, which everywhere was promoting the imagery of youth, vitality, freedom, excitement and the future against structures of thought and behaviour which seemed suddenly oppressive and to belong to a dead past. It was the power of this new imagery over people's minds which was now going to shape their thinking in everything from social attitudes to politics for a long time to come. And as usual nothing reflected the psychic upheaval more vividly than the way in which this new age told stories.
As the world stood on the edge of the 1960s, one group of storytellers who picked up the new mood to particular effect were the young film-makers of the nouvelle vague in France. Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959), Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Pianist (1960) and Jules etJim (1962) were strange dream-like narratives which each began in a mood of reckless youthful euphoria. But each then gradually turned to a puzzling nightmare, ending abruptly in a sudden, shocking death.
In Britain in 1960 it was appropriate that it should have been that most `daring' novel of the 1920s, Lady Chatterley's Lover, which reappeared to become the focus of the new battle for sexual liberation. But it was telling that the essence of this battle against the `reactionary prudes' and `killjoys, at a time when Playboy magazine was pioneering the drive to make pornographic pictures of naked women socially acceptable, lay in the urge to enjoy not so much sexual gratification itself as the mental image of sex.10 In the same year, the impact of Hitchcock's Psycho was so great because its central image of a naked young woman being sadistically stabbed to death provided such a shocking contrast to the decorous image of womanhood familiar from films of the post-war era.
However, the event of 1960 which most vividly reflected the arrival of the `Sixties dream' was the American presidential election which, thanks for the first time to the power of the televised image, led to the replacement of America's oldest-ever President with her youngest. John F. Kennedy's charismatic good looks and `dynamism' immediately made him the new decade's first `dream hero' (as the novelist Norman Mailer excitably put it, `Superman comes to Supermarket!'). Within months this had provoked growing tension between the glamorous new young leader of the free world and his ageing counterpart in the Soviet Union, Nikita Khruschev. In 1961 Kennedy's failed invasion of the Soviet empire's satellite in Cuba was followed by Khruschev's Berlin Wall, provoking the worst crisis of the Cold War. In October 1962 came the even more dangerous crisis when Khruschev's dispatch of nuclear rockets to Cuba brought the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe.
The mood of the times was becoming ever more feverish. In November 1962, within weeks of the Cuba crisis, London saw the premiere of the first James Bond film Dr No (coincidentally featuring a monstrous villain who, from his lair on a Caribbean island, planned the nuclear destruction of the West). This coincided in London with a clutch of nightmarishly sensational new plays (referred to in Chapter 27),