One of the most popular Hollywood films of the mid-1980s, Crocodile Dundee (1986), began with the dramatic arrival by helicopter in the remote Australian outback of a young American woman journalist. Sue Charlton was everything a thrusting professional woman in the post-feminist age was meant to be: forceful, resourceful, self-possessed. In addition she was the daughter of her New York paper’s rich proprietor, and girl friend of its ambitious young editor, which in storytelling terms makes her the modern equivalent of a ‘king’s daughter’ being wooed by a ‘prince’.
The heroine has travelled to this tiny, dusty settlement in the back of beyond in the hope of interviewing a legendary local hunter, Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee. The first half of the story shows him taking her out into the bush, introducing her to all the dangers of the wild, from man-eating crocodiles to deadly snakes; and watching with wry amusement as her confident metropolitan persona crumbles when confronted with these fearsome monsters. She becomes a frail, helpless woman, looking for protection to this masterful hunter, with his teasing sense of humour. So completely does she fall under his spell that she decides to take him back to New York to show him life at the centre of modern urban civilisation. Here we meet her boyfriend, who treats Dundee with impatient disdain as some kind of primitive, ‘below the line’ freak. As the hero wanders through the city, the film contrasts his simple, unspoiled, good-hearted strength of character, as a ‘natural man’, with the unnatural state of the urban jungle around him, where perversion, violence and drug-taking rule, and where everyone seems morally and spiritually deformed. Such is the world represented by the heroine’s boyfriend. Finally, as a grand ‘above the line’ party is thrown to announce the couple’s engagement, Dundee cannot bear the thought of her marrying this pampered, vain monster who corresponds only to her outward career-girl persona. Next day he vanishes off into the city, disappearing down a subway. In a state of shocked ‘recognition’, the heroine heads off in desperate search for him, eventually descending into the ‘inferior realm’ of the subway station, where she sees him at the far end of a platform jammed with people. In the closing scene, by way of verbal messages passed along the packed crowd, the two proclaim their love for each other. The crowd is drawn into the spirit of this remarkable declaration, bursting into rapturous applause as Dundee walks on people’s upturned hands to join her. As they finally come together it seems the whole world is at one with their joy.
In terms of its plot, Crocodile Dundee is a perfect example of Comedy – with the heroine seemingly doomed by her outward persona to marry the dark figure; until the recognition brings her to see, in the nick of time, that in her true feminine self she belongs with the true manly hero. Like countless stories before it, the film ends with its own modern version of the ancient fairy tale formula, ‘they got married and lived happily ever after’.
We so take it for granted that this should provide a perfectly satisfactory happy ending to a story that we scarcely pause to reflect on just how odd this should be. Obviously in real life we do not look on marriage as an ending, certainly not in the all-resolving way in which it is presented as the conclusion to so many stories. It is more a beginning, a landmark along the road to a new state of life which may bring not only rewards but also all sorts of new challenges and problems.
Yet the fact remains that in stories the image of a wedding, or at least the bringing together of a man and a woman in a state of loving union, is the most complete form of happy ending we know. Something deep within us recognises this image as the moment of supreme fulfilment, when everything is at last complete and whole, when all the uncertainties of the story are resolved, when all its shadows have been lifted, and where hero and heroine are at last at one with each other and with life.
What we are about to look at in this second part of the book is what this great archetypal union really stands for, and why so many stories shape themselves towards this central concluding image. In fact what we are about to see is how, in order for the hero and heroine to reach this goal, they must be shown as representing a specific set of qualities. Only then, when we have built up a picture of the conditions which must be met for a story to come to a complete happy ending, can we move on, in the third part of the book, to see just why it is that so many stories should, in different ways, fail to reach such an all-resolving conclusion.
The first step towards this lies in focusing at last on a crucial element in storytelling which we have so far touched on only obliquely. Up to now we have concentrated on the structure of stories. What we must now look at in the same way are the characters who appear in stories. Just as we have seen how much of the seemingly almost infinite variety of storytelling resolves in the end down to providing variations on just a handful of plots, we now similarly see how all the host of characters who teem through storytelling ultimately resolve down to just a handful of basic archetypal figures. As we see what each of these figures stands for, and the nature of their fundamental relationships to the hero or heroine, so we arrive at the central key to understanding what stories are really about.