MARY JO MURPHY ESSAY

The choice, in Miltonic terms, is between Mirth and Melancholy. There is “Mamma Mia!,” the singalong cinematic travel brochure that set a box-office record in June for the opening of a musical. And then there is “The Dark Knight,” which, safe to say, set no toes a-tapping on its way to the biggest movie opening ever.
It’s a choice we all make from time to time, if only to put everyday lives at a fair remove while we spend two or three hours at the movies. A youthful Milton described that polarity perfectly in the call-and-response of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” poems he wrote in 1631 or 1632 that pit the merry man against the pensive one.
It’s hard to say who “won,” but there is a hint in the final couplet of each poem: “These delights, if thou canst give,/ Mirth with thee, I mean to live,” the poet writes in “L’Allegro.” In “Il Penseroso,” on the other hand: “These pleasures, Melancholy, give,/ And I with thee will choose to live.” No “if” there; did Milton throw his lot in with Melancholy?
If so, he would not be the first to head happily for the dark. Certainly, literary ears have always seemed more attuned to the nightingale’s song than the lark’s. But escapism of one sort or another is for everyone, not just sad poets, and for many people the light beckons. Why do some people prefer to sing a peppy Abba song in the happy knowledge that the heroine will get her guy in the end (“Mamma Mia!”), while others opt to hang on every malign word that issues from Batman’s nemesis (“The Dark Knight”)?
“The tricky part of picking light or dark is that either choice will inevitably evoke the other,” said Dr. Phillip Freeman, a Boston psychiatrist. “If you want something light because you are feeling bad, you will likely find the inevitable sadness in the comedy. If you are feeling tense and want to go see things blown up, you may be surprised to find yourself caught up in the silly melodrama tying the explosions together.”
Dr. Fred M. Sander, a New York psychoanalyst , points to Freud’s essay “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage” for an explanation on the lure of the dark. “The spectator is a person who experiences too little, who feels that he is a ‘poor wretch to whom nothing of importance can happen,’ who has long been obliged to damp down, or rather displace, his ambition to stand in his own person at the hub of world affairs,” Freud wrote. “He longs to feel and to act and to arrange things according to his desires - in short, to be a hero. And the playwright and actor enable him to do this by allowing him to identify himself with a hero. They spare him something, too. For the spectator knows quite well that actual heroic conduct such as this would be impossible for him without pains and sufferings and acute fears, which would almost cancel out the enjoyment.”
Dr. Sander says that all plays and movies have a therapeutic function, whether we think so or not. In a way, he said, that makes the moviegoing experience “very much like a dream.”
Dr. Freeman tells of studying under the filmmaker Marcel Ophuls as a college student during the Vietnamprotest era. “The Sorrow and the Pity,” Mr. Ophuls’s documentary about the French Resistance and the Vichy collaborators, “exposed some of the darkest sides of the war experience,” Dr. Freeman said. “But during my time with him he never tired of arguing that the greatest service of filmmakers to the war effort was provided by the Marx Brothers and wanted nothing more than to make musical comedies. As a college student I strongly disagreed with him. Now I am less certain.