The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [506]
In 1981 Thatcher was joined in championing the `values of Father' by President Ronald Reagan, who had first won fame in the 1940s and 1950s by playing `masculine' roles in Hollywood films (he was thus the first major political figure in history to have founded his career on acting out characters in fictional stories). Their partnership through the 1980s was defined not least by their opposition to the `evil empire' of Soviet Communism, now under such pressure from its internal contradictions that by the end of the decade it was disintegrating. Almost Mrs Thatcher's last act as a world leader was to supply the masculine resolve which persuaded Reagan's successor President Bush to deploy overwhelming military force against that archetypal `monster-figure' and tyrant Saddam Hussein.
With her departure, Western politics settled back to their domination in the 1990s by `mother's boys, the first generation of leaders whose coming to adulthood had been shaped by the values prevailing in the late 1960s and 1970s. Conspicuously lacking in any firm moral `centre, these were exemplified by the vain, promiscuous President Clinton, and later by the puer aeternus figure of Tony Blair who, as much as any politician before him, relied on projecting a fantasy-image of himself which bore scant relation to reality.
The `feminisation' of men and the `masculinisation' of women had already become a central feature of that new ideological orthodoxy which was sweeping the Western world under the name of `political correctness'. In psychological terms, this was a 'left-wing' phenomenon and one of the most remarkable developments of the twentieth century. The kind of self-righteous intolerance once associated with the more puritanical forms of religion and the more extreme forms of Socialism now reappeared to promote the `rights' of women, homosexuals, racial minorities, the disabled and any group of people who could be portrayed as being `below the line' and therefore discriminated against. Closely allied to this was the new social pressure for the power of `Mother State' to be used to regulate to protect its citizens from any conceivable risk, however imaginary. The key to the nature of this new secular puritanism was the degree of self-righteous inflation it inspired in its adherents. Like their religious and political forerunners they presented a classic study in `ego-Self confusion. Unconsciously they were using the belief that they were acting in the name of selfless moral principle simply as a cloak for asserting their ego, and as a means to enjoy feelings of moral superiority. In the cause of `toleration' and promoting collective `rights, they had become possessed by a fanatical and humourless intolerance.15
So deeply did political correctness permeate the ethos of the time that it inevitably found reflection in storytelling, in no respect more obviously than the urge to reverse what became known as the `gender stereotyping' which had characterised stories since the dawn of civilisation. An early example, as we saw, was the science-fiction horror film Alien (1979), a classic Overcoming the Monster story in which the archetypally masculine role of the monster-slaying hero was deliberately given to a forceful heroine, representing the `new woman'. Many other examples were to follow, not least in the role of monster-slayer played by the heroine in The Terminator (1984).
As became evident, however, to defy the unconscious pull of the archetypes is not easy. We saw, for instance, how in The Silence Of The Lambs (1991), the