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By Root 5229 0

attempt to give the archetypal hero-role to a'new woman' was subtly undermined when the power of the repulsively dark but devilishly charming and clever male villain eventually proved too much for her. She ended up being outwitted and allowing him to escape. Basic Instinct (1991) carried the sexual inversion to its ultimate, by featuring a wholly dark heroine, possessed by her negative animus, who succeeds in mastering and making a fool of the inadequate hero. But even here, so remorselessly did the film attempt to turn the archetypes upside down, that its makers could not quite bring themselves to press their inverted logic to its full conclusion, leaving the ending tellingly ambiguous.

Equally revealing of the underlying power of the archetypes was the way some of the more popular films of this period managed to challenge the new orthodoxy of the times head on. Crocodile Dundee (1986) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968, new version 1999), for instance, each featured a heroine who was a model of the new, assertive `post-feminist' career woman. But in each story the hero manages to display such a masterful combination of `masculine' strength of character with `feminine' emotional intelligence that this eventually proves enough to free the heroine from the stifling grip of her animus. Her suppressed femininity is brought to life, and hero and heroine are united in an archetypal happy ending.

Another aspect of how storytelling reflected the psychological twilight of the time was the extraordinary popularity in the second half of the twentieth century of the `soap opera, simple, untaxing dramas regularly broadcast on radio or television portraying the everyday lives of a community of `ordinary' people. From the 1960s onwards, no form of television entertainment attracted a larger or more devoted following, from I Love Lucy through Dallas to Friends, from Coronation Street and Eastenders to Neighbours.

The most obvious feature of the soap opera was the way it used the power of stories like a mental drug, addicting its audiences and keeping them hooked by playing sentimentally on their emotions. Soap operas exploited all the basic archetypal material of storytelling by reducing it to a mechanical formula, designed to set up a continual stream of teasing or heart-tugging suspense. Boy meets girl. Boy betrays girl. Can they make it up? Man intent on behaving badly seeks to deceive. Man is caught out in his deception. Will he get away with it? Not only is every situation in a soap opera stereotyped, so is the language in which it is couched. No character ever speaks except in cliches. In real life `ordinary' people often use unex pected or quirky turns of phrase. In a soap opera they never say anything which has not been said a million times before. But in plot terms the most significant characteristic of soap operas is that their stories never truly resolve. The aim of the industrial process which creates them is to produce an unending succession of emotional cliff-hangers, to keep the audience switching on to see what happens next - whereas the archetypal purpose of any proper story is that it must eventually work up to a full-scale climax, followed by a conclusion which resolves everything that has gone before.16

Related to the soap opera, although less mechanical in its construction, was its more obviously episodic counterpart, the situation comedy, usually centred on the life of a particular family or a small group of people who had for some reason been brought intimately together. A study carried out in the late 1980s of the 25 most popular situation comedies on American television which centred on the life of a family found that in 24 of them the most intelligent and sensible member of the family was the mother, followed by her children, The stupidest family member, most prone to act foolishly, was the father.

At the end of the century this was echoed in the most popular cartoon sitcom ever produced by American television, The Simpsons, where the self-deluding schemes of the father, Homer, made him the perpetual fall-guy.