The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [497]
In 1968 the prevailing fashion again mutated, as mobs of unkempt students demonstrated, half-angrily, half-playfully, across the world against any symbol of the adult, established order, from the Vietnam war to their university curriculum. As they mouthed the slogans of Trotskyite revolution, decorated their rooms with iconic posters of the dead Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and daubed walls with such graffiti as `make love, not war, this coincided with the news from the USA of the assassinations of two more `sixties dream heroes', Martin Luther King and President Kennedy's younger brother Bobby. The following year in California, the story of one particularly dark quasi-religious cult ended in hideous catastrophe, when Charles Manson, leader of `The Family, egged on his followers to an orgy of violence which led to the murder of the film actress Sharon Tate. By fearful symmetry, she was married to one of the decade's most obsessive creators of the imagery of sex-and-violence, Roman Polanski, the director of Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary's Baby (1966), centred on a pregnant young mother who gives birth to the devil (that ultimate inversion, the `Dark Child').
With these visions of a world turned to nightmare, the great 1960s hysteria was in fact running out of steam. Psychologically it had been one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of mankind (comparable perhaps only with the much more violent frenzy which gripped France in the 1790s). But the cultural legacy it left behind, in everything from the rhythmic beat of its music to the acceptance of sexual promiscuity, from the importance of drugs to the fashionable orthodoxy of an anti-establishment, `left-wing' attitude to authority was going to remain at the heart of Western life for many decades to come.
The decade which followed was like a prolonged hangover from the excesses of the 1960s. The self-destructive power of the mass-neurosis unleashed in those years was reflected in the deaths of several of its drug-addicted dream heroes, from Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix to Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Lesser stars continued to emerge to feed the collective youthful fantasy. New films, such as A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, Last Tango in Paris and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ratcheted up the sensationalism with which the cinema fed the appetite for the imagery of sex and violence. But the outlines of how the group-fantasy continued to evolve were all by now well-established. And in some respects the 1970s saw a reaction to the relentless neophilia of the previous decade, nowhere more conspicuously than in the widespread revulsion against the inhuman environments created by the megalomaniac architectural revolution of the 1960s. The gargantuan housing estates and concrete tower blocks which had so powerfully expressed the hubris of the sixties now came widely to be seen as ugly, soulless and a social disaster. Many films and television commercials reflected a sentimental nostalgia for the imagery of earlier times, before the modern age, when the world had seemed quieter, more ordered, more colourful and more innocent.
This nostalgia for the world as it had been before the rise of modern technology had already found expression in the late 1960s in the remarkable revival of interest in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, for its conjuring up of an entire pseudomythic world set in an imaginary pre-mechanical age, when battles were still fought with swords and axes, bows and arrows. Watership Down similarly became one of the best-sellers of the 1970s by conjuring up a natural world in which anthropomorphic animals could be portrayed as relying on basic human qualities, and in which the creations of modern human technology - cars, barbed wire, bulldozers - were seen as monstrous and destructive intrusions. Even in one of the most futuristically technological