The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [547]
Although there was a general tendency for the films, plays and novels of the time to become more violent and sexually explicit, and for their narratives and imagery to become more fragmented and surreal (e.g, the Beatles films A Hard Day's Night and Help!, The Knack, What's New Pussycat?), there were of course exceptions. Two major Hollywood successes of these years were My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965), based on more conventional musicals dating from the earlier tradition of the 1950s.
12. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: What Happened to the American Dream (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961). His epigraph was taken from the Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch: `Technology ... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.,
13. Solzhenitsyn offered his analysis in a speech at Harvard University in June 1978.
14. This was well illustrated by one of the books which helped to inspire the `women's movement, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970). The book laid all its emphasis on the ability of women to compete with men in terms of the `masculine' functions of the psyche, while dismissing the 'feminine' functions as unimportant. Greer was eager to claim, for instance, that women could outperform men in `cognitive abilities like counting, mathematical reasoning, spatial cognition, abstract reasoning, set-breaking and restructuring'. She followed this by listing women who had successfully competed with men in the business world, and like other feminists of the time she laid great emphasis on the `clitoral orgasm; centred on the female equivalent of the male sex organ. But of the 'feminine values, Greer was witheringly scornful. Women who became nurses, for instance, were only fooled by men into `feeling good because they are relieving pain' so that they could be overworked and underpaid (which left them `tired, resentful and harried'). As for the intuitive function which is crucial to objective understanding, she dismissed this in typically `pseudo-masculine' terms as no more than `a faculty for observing tiny insignificant aspects of behaviour and forming an empirical conclusion which cannot be syllogistically examined'. Greer unconsciously revealed the roots of her own difficulty in relating positively to either the `masculine' or `feminine' components of her personality by describing how she was the child of a weak, self-centred father and a domineering mother. She was thus not provided by either of her parents with a mature gender model.
15. In many ways the emergence of this collectivist new orthodoxy recalled Plato's description in Book VIII of The Republic of the final stages of his political cycle where, as `democracy' becomes increasingly obsessed with the `rights' of those below the line, it mutates into 'tyranny. There were many signs of a new phase of 'tyranny appearing in western societies at the end of the twentieth century, not least in the increasingly technocratic nature of government, manifested, for instance, in the rise of the European Union.
16. A rare exception was the massacre by which the scriptwriters eventually ended Dynasty. The origins of using the appeal of stories to keep an audience spellbound in this way went back to the nineteenth century, when magazines serialised novels by authors such as Dickens or Hardy in regular instalments, each ending on some highpoint of emotional suspense to ensure that readers would buy the next issue. Certain authors developed this technique for getting their readers hooked by producing a whole sequence of novels centred around the same group of characters. In this sense Trollope's Palliser novels constituted high-grade `soap opera, as later did Galsworthy's novels about the Forsyte family and Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time.
17. In 2004 a poll carried out among young people by the Anglican Mothers' Union found that