The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [496]
One of the most acclaimed `art films' of 1962 was the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's Eclipse, a drifting nightmare which ended in a cloud covering the sun, throwing the world into a silent twilight. Through 1963, as Macmillan's Conservative government disintegrated in a cloudy miasma of rumour and scandal, the hysteria surrounding the Beatles, the epitome of `classless, `irreverent' youthful energy bubbling up from socially `below the line, grew ever more deafening. In Washington in September another `dream hero' of the early 1960s, Martin Luther King, led a million protestors through `above the line' Washington in an unprecedented demonstration for the civil rights of America's black minority. Then, on 22 November, after a year when the headlines had been dominated by one sensation after another, came the most shocking moment of the post-war era: the assassination of President Kennedy.
In the aftermath of this eruption of `shadow, America's own mood turned darker. Over the next two years, it was to become dominated by race riots in her cities and, increasingly, the catastrophe unfolding in Vietnam. But in these same years it became obvious that the psychic upheaval which began at the time of rock 'n' roll in the mid-1950s had produced a remarkable change in the character and mood of Western life, nowhere more obviously than in London.
As obsessive attention centred on its classless `new aristocracy' of pop singers, model girls, actors, photographers and dress-designers, it emerged in 1964 and 1965 that Britain was leading the way in promoting that bubble of image-based fantasy which caused London to be hailed as `the most swinging city in the world'. On the surface there was an almost child-like innocence about the crazes and fashions which swept through London's boutiques, discotheques and glossy magazines, from the dazzling patterns of Op Art to the shiny PVC uniforms, mini-skirts and little white boots which depersonalised young girls into throwaway sex toys, But in an earlier chapter we traced how this remorseless pursuit of novelty was accompanied by the drift of plays, films and novels into an ever more sensational twilight world, preoccupied with sex and violence and culminating in November 1965 in the spectacle of young men stoning a baby to death in its pram.I I
By the beginning of 1966, a curious change of mood was taking place. The new craze among the pop culture's elite was the psychedelic drug LSD, which helped to inspire a new interest in the imagery and message of Eastern religions. As the now bearded and kaftanned Beatles sat at the feet of their guru, the Maharishi, and strummed their sitars with Ravi Shankar, they had travelled a long way in just five short years from the leather-jacketed suburban teenagers who had first earned a living together imitating American rock 'n' roll in the nightclubs of Hamburg's red-light district.
Psychologically what was happening was that, for those at the heart of the fantasy bubble, the untrammelled egotism it represented had now gone so far that it was producing that familiar unconscious reversal. The archetype of the Self was returning in an `inferior' form. The craze for `Eastern mysticism' represented a form of `ego-Self confusion, whereby the ego, having wearied of all the novelties of overt ego-gratification, now wanted a sentimental version of its ego-transcending opposite. In 1967 this took on more widespread form in the craze which swept young people across the Western world for the hippie bells, joss sticks, `peace and love' of the `flower power' movement, which had