The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [499]
Twenty years later, S.O.S. Titanic (1979) presented a startlingly different picture. No longer are the liner's occupants seen as a single community, united by a common danger. The privileged upper classes inhabiting the `above the line' world are now caricatured as cold, spoiled egotists, concerned only with saving themselves. The captain and his officers are shown as weak and vacillating. The only group now shown as warm, human and heroic are those trapped `below the line' in the bowels of the ship, notably the Irish, sentimentally portrayed as doomed victims of a heartless class system and arrogant British imperialism.
The shift of perspective reflected in these two versions of the same tale conveys how far the prevailing archetype of the time had changed. Up to the late 1950s Western society had still managed to preserve an idealised image of its own totality, corresponding to the Self. Vital to this had been those ruling masculine principles of order, discipline and hierarchy which archetypally constituted the `values of Father: The institutions and conventions traditionally regarded as essential to holding society together had generally remained intact. Importance was still attached to such concepts as `duty, `responsibility' and `good manners. The social order still rested on the respect accorded to `authority figures': from parents to political leaders, from teachers to policemen. A framework of sanctions still existed to uphold sexual discipline and the central importance of marriage, from laws prohibiting homosexuality to social taboos on promiscuity and adultery.
One of the more obvious features of the change which came over society after the late 1950s had been the extent to which all this was rejected. All that complex of `masculine' principles associated with duty, discipline, hierarchy, tradition and authority came to be perceived as oppressive and life-denying. The new ruling consciousness was one which promoted `below the line' values at the expense of those `above the line'; the attributes of youth over those of maturity; liberation over constraint; `lower class' over `upper'; the future over the past. A dominant archetype of the age - personified in such hero-figures as Elvis Presley or the Beatles - became that of the rebellious puer aeternus, `the boy hero' frozen in immaturity. No longer was it generally taken for granted that the ultimate goal of human life was to work towards the wisdom of age. What mattered in an age of incessant change was to remain in touch with the new: to aspire to a state of perpetual youth. And again, as we see from stories, wherever the archetype of the immature `boy hero' is in the ascendant, never far away is the archetype of the emasculating `Dark Mother'.
Certainly in all the transformation which had taken place in the 1960s and 1970s the `values of Father' had in many ways been replaced by the more liberal, more indulgent values of `Mother. This found every kind of expression, not least in the qualities shown by the political leaders of the time, as the dominant figures shaped by the war, such as Churchill, Eisenhower and de Gaulle, gave way to a new generation of politicians who seemed by comparison softer, weaker and more lightweight, typified in the new age of television more by a self-regarding concern with `image' than by strength of character.
What more than anything else lay behind the psychological change which had come over the Western world was a consequence