The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [509]
As the twenty-first century began, three particular ways could be singled out in which the urge to see life in terms of stories might help to shed light on the state in which mankind now found itself.
The first was that, thanks again to technology, stories were now more freely accessible than ever before in history. One of the more prominent forms this took, although not normally recognised as such, was the unprecedented ubiquity of `news'. Never had people been bombarded with such a plethora of `stories, reflecting the daily drama of human life as it unfolded in all parts of the globe. But obviously only the tiniest fraction of what was actually going on in the world was deemed worthy to be considered as `news'. It was noticeable how much of what was considered appropriate for this treatment - political dramas, tragic accidents, the committing of crimes, the doings and misdoings of celebrities - was now presented through the new intimacy made possible by the modern media as if it were a kind of continuous soap opera. And the values which lay behind this were much the same as those which determined the contents of fictional soap operas. What made `news' were not the routine events of life but anything unusual which disturbed the order of the human world; anything which conjured up images of conflict, dissension, violence or abnormality, as was reflected in those familiar trigger words done to death in newspaper headlines such as `crisis, `storm, `row, `rift, `shock, `horror, `crackdown, `blitz, `bombshell'. Just as in a soap opera, there would always be room for episodes which played sentimentally on the public's emotions: a man and woman in love; the birth of a baby; an act of heroism. But essentially the purpose of `news' was to appeal to the fantasy-level of the mind, in much the same way as a fictional story might do, by setting off a stream of titillatory mental sensations. And, just as in their fictional counterpart, this was most effectively achieved by conjuring up almost any image which represented some assertion of the ego which violated the totality of the Self.
Inevitably many of the fictional stories of the time reflected the same values, and with them all the ego-based obsessions, confusions and immaturities of the contemporary world. But what might have been thought remarkable was the degree to which, despite all the shattering changes which had taken place in how people now led their outward lives, the underlying patterns of the tales which held their attention were much the same as those which had held their ancestors spellbound for thousands of years.
Nothing might have seemed more peculiarly modern, for instance, than the `interactive' games millions were now able to play on their computer screens. Yet the form many of these took was only too familiar. The player would identify with a 'hero' (or a super-feminist heroine, such as Lara Croft), through whom he or she would then have to overcome dragons and super-villains, venture on complex quests or thread the way through some treacherous labyrinth, in order to reach the ultimate goal of the game - which might well be the need to free a Princess (or mankind) from the clutches of a Monster.
In the years around the turn of the new millennium a series of stories which had begun being scribbled out by a single mother living on income support struck such a chord with millions of readers and cinemagoers across the world that, within less than a decade, they had made their authoress J. K. Rowling one of the richest women in Britain. Yet with their combination of wizards and magic, trolls, overcoming monsters, quests, light triumphing over darkness and a seemingly ordinary little hero turning out to be extraordinary, the essential symbolism of the Harry Potter stories was again entirely familiar.
Most remarkable of all was the impact between 2001 and 2003 of the three-part film version of The Lord of the Rings, a phenomenon which had no real parallel in the history of the cinema.
The circumstances in which this