Stranger Than We Can Imagine (18 page)

After the Second World War science fiction films lost their youthful optimism. The fear of communism was apparent in B-movies such as 1956’s
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, a thriller in which the alien ‘other’ looked identical to everyday Americans. This was a film complex enough to be read as a condemnation of both communism and the paranoia of the anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Soylent Green
(1973) presented a vision of global warming, overpopulation and a resource-short world, which echoed the growing environmental concerns of the age. The
Godzilla
series of Japanese monster movies reflected the Japanese relationship with nuclear technology. Godzilla was originally a monster who flattened cities but, in the years after Hiroshima and before Fukushima, he gradually evolved into a friend and protector of the Japanese people.
The Matrix
(1999), meanwhile, portrayed humanity as trapped in a
virtual world and subservient to the computer technology it created.

In the second half of the twentieth century the adventure and excitement that Buster Crabbe represented were replaced by a growing unease. The genre now depicted harsh dystopias that individualism was unable to prevent. This did not affect the growth of individualism in the real world. On the contrary, its rise would continue onwards until the end of the century. The self-focused politics of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, who became prime minister in 1979, and her influence on President Ronald Reagan in the USA, would eventually make individualism the default political and economic perspective in the Anglo-Saxon world. But science fiction responds to subtler signals than politicians do. Like a canary in a coal mine, it is an early-warning signal. And postwar science fiction did seem to be warning us about something.

The script for George Lucas’s 1977 movie
Star Wars
was influenced by
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
, a 1949 book by the American mythologist Joseph Campbell. Campbell believed that at the heart of all the wild and varied myths and stories which mankind has dreamt lies one single archetypal story of profound psychological importance. He called this the
monomyth
. As Campbell saw it, the myths and legends of the world were all imperfect variations on this one, pure story structure. As Campbell summarised the monomyth, ‘A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.’

Campbell found echoes of this story wherever he looked; myths as diverse as those of Ulysses, Osiris or Prometheus, the lives of religious figures such as Moses, Christ or Buddha, and in plays and stories ranging from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and Dickens. This story is now known as ‘The Hero’s Journey’. It is a story that begins with an ordinary man (it is almost always a man) in a recognisable world. That man typically receives a call to adventure, encounters an older patriarchal mentor, undergoes many trials in
his journey to confront and destroy a great evil, and returns to his previous life rewarded and transformed. George Lucas was always open about the fact that he consciously shaped the original
Star Wars
film into a modern expression of Campbell’s monomyth, and has done much to raise the profile of Campbell and his work.

Star Wars
was so successful that the American film industry has never really recovered. Together with the films of Lucas’s friend Steven Spielberg, it changed Hollywood into an industry of blockbusters, tent-pole releases and high-concept pitches. American film was always a democratic affair which gave the audience what it wanted, and the audience demonstrated what they wanted by the purchase of tickets. The shock with which Hollywood reacted to
Star Wars
was as much about recognising how out of step with the audience’s interests it had become as it was about how much money was up for grabs. Had it realised this a few years earlier, it might have green-lit Jodorowsky’s
Dune
.

The fact that Lucas had used Campbell’s monomyth as his tool for bottling magic did not go unnoticed. As far as Hollywood was concerned, The Hero’s Journey was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Studio script-readers used it to analyse submitted scripts and determine whether or not they should be rejected. Screenwriting theorists and professionals internalised it, until they were unable to produce stories that differed from its basic structure. Readers and writers alike all knew at exactly which point in the script the hero needed their inciting incident, their reversal into their darkest hour and their third-act resolution. In an industry dominated by the bottom line and massive job insecurity, Campbell’s monomyth gained a stranglehold over the structure of cinema.

Campbell’s monomyth has been criticised for being Eurocentric and patriarchal. But it has a more significant problem, in that Campbell was wrong. There is not one pure archetypal story at the heart of human storytelling. The monomyth was not a treasure he discovered at the heart of myth, but an invention of his own that he projected onto the stories of the ages. It’s unarguably a good story, but it is most definitely not the only one we have. As the American
media critic Philip Sandifer notes, Campbell ‘identified one story he liked about death and resurrection and proceeded to find every instance of it he could in world mythology. Having discovered a vast expanse of nails for his newfound hammer he declared that it was a fundamental aspect of human existence, ignoring the fact that there were a thousand other “fundamental stories” that you could also find in world mythology.’

Campbell’s story revolves around one single individual, a lowly born person with whom the audience identifies. This hero is the single most important person in the world of the story, a fact understood not just by the hero, but by everyone else in that world. A triumph is only a triumph if the hero is responsible, and a tragedy is only a tragedy if it affects the hero personally. Supporting characters cheer or weep for the hero in ways they do not for other people. The death of a character the hero did not know is presented in a manner emotionally far removed from the death of someone the hero loved. Clearly, this was a story structure ideally suited to the prevailing culture. Out of all the potential monomyths that he could have run with, Campbell, a twentieth-century American, chose perhaps the most individualistic one possible.

The success of this monomyth in the later decades of the twentieth century is an indication of how firmly entrenched individualism became. Yet in the early twenty-first century, there are signs that this magic formula may be waning. The truly absorbing and successful narratives of our age are moving beyond the limited, individual perspective of The Hero’s Journey. Critically applauded series like
The Wire
and mainstream commercial hit series such as
Game of Thrones
are loved for the complexity of their politics and group relationships. These are stories told not from the point of view of one person, but from many interrelated perspectives, and the relationships between a complex network of different characters can engage us more than the story of a single man being brave.

In the twenty-first century audiences are drawn to complicated, lengthy engagements with characters, from their own long-term avatar in World of Warcraft and other online gameworlds to
characters like Doctor Who who have a fifty-years-plus history. The superhero films in the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ are all connected, because Marvel understand that the sum is greater than the parts. A simple Hero’s Journey story such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Hobbit
becomes, when adapted for a twenty-first-century cinema audience, a lengthy trilogy of films far more complex than the original book. We now seem to look for stories of greater complexity than can be offered by a single perspective.

If science fiction is our cultural early-warning system, its move away from individualism tells us something about the direction we are headed. This should grab our attention, especially when, in the years after the Second World War, it became apparent just how dark the cult of the self could get.

A still from Casablanca featuring
(second from left to right)
Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, 1942
(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty)

EIGHT:
NIHILISM

I
n the early 1940s a sign made from fifty-foot-high white letters stood in the Hollywood Hills. The letters read, ‘OLLYWOOD-LAND’. They had originally been built in 1923 to advertise the Hollywoodland housing development. When it was new, light bulbs had lit up ‘HOLLY’, ‘WOOD’ and ‘LAND’ in sequence, and there was also a searchlight underneath it in case fifty-foot-high flashing letters were too subtle. But twenty years later the lights no longer worked and the sign was in need of repair, not least because a drunk-driver had left the road above and flattened the ‘H’ with his car.

The fate of the sign in the 1940s echoed the story of Hollywood, which also had a troubled start to the decade. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and America’s entry into the war closed off a number of foreign markets. Many skilled filmmakers quit the industry and enlisted, including the actors James Stewart and Clark Gable and the director Frank Capra. But Hollywood recovered from these setbacks and continued crafting the dreamtime of the Western world. By the end of the 1940s the sign had been rebuilt. In order to refer to the district, rather than the housing development, it had become the now globally recognised ‘HOLLYWOOD’.

There was an urgency and boldness about the stories Hollywood told in this decade. They were unavoidably coloured by the psychological impact of the Second World War. There is little of the sentimentality associated with Hollywood from the 1950s onwards, and little of the whimsy that could be found in the silent era. Instead, stories were marked by a strong sense of purpose. Hollywood continued to produce escapist fantasies, but when filmmakers talked about love and loss, or betrayal or duty, they talked about
them plainly and honestly, to an audience with real experience of these states.

Television might have been slowly making its way into American homes, but it could not match Tinseltown for magic. Hollywood offered swashbucklers like Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power and the glamour of Ingrid Bergman or Bette Davis. There was entertainment from Judy Garland and Bob Hope, and Bugs Bunny and Lassie for the children. Hollywood was a place associated with wealth and elegance, with a hedonic sleazy underside. It is no wonder it seduced the world.

Hollywood was also an industry. The ‘Big Five’ major studios were MGM, Twentieth Century Fox, RKO, Paramount and Warner Bros. Each of these owned production facilities, theatre chains, distribution divisions and even the stars themselves. Each studio produced about a film a week. This mix of talent, experience and opportunity meant that the studio system could occasionally rise above art, and produce magic.

Casablanca
(1942) is the story of Rick Blaine, a bitter exiled American. Rick owned a nightclub in Morocco which was bright, spacious and stylish, but full of desperate or corrupt clientele. He had to decide if his love for a beautiful former girlfriend was more important than helping an influential Resistance leader escape from the Nazis. It was a story with everything thrown into the mix – love, duty, patriotism, humour, romance, danger, friendship and desire. Each of these ingredients was heightened to the degree that only 1940s Hollywood could manage.

The heart of the film lies in Humphrey Bogart’s career-defining performance as Rick. He plays a broken man, albeit a heavily glamorised one. He is a cynical and isolated anti-hero who repeatedly declares that he sticks his neck out for nobody. He gives his nationality as ‘drunkard’ and only drinks alone. It seems incredible now that the press release announcing the film’s production stated that the role would be played by Ronald Reagan, who was then a popular actor.

The importance of the nihilistic side of Rick to the strength
of the story was apparent from the beginning. The producer Hal Wallis sent an unproduced play called
Everybody Comes to Rick’s
to a number of writers and filmmakers to gauge their opinion, including the Scottish screenwriter Æneas MacKenzie. Although the play would need extensive work in order to pass the strict moral rules of the censor, MacKenzie recognised ‘an excellent theme’ in the story that focused on the character of Rick. As he explained to Wallis, ‘When people lose faith in their ideals, they are beaten before they begin to fight. That’s what happened to France [in 1940], and it happened to Rick Blaine.’ The final screenplay kept the idea that the character of Rick was a political allegory, but it aligned him more with post-Pearl Harbor America. When Rick tells the Chief of Police that ‘I stick my neck out for nobody’ he is told that this is ‘a wise foreign policy’, but the crime boss in charge of Casablanca’s black market asks him bluntly, ‘My dear Rick, when will you realise that, in this world, isolationism is no longer a practical policy?’