Escapism…Would you like that with milk or black?

John Milton (author of Paradise Lost)

In a rather clever and nicely written short piece in the Week in Review section of the NY Times, Mary Jo Murphy writes about the two oppositional forms of escape–mirth and melancholy. She gets these from Milton (yeah, Paradise Lost Milton). And what are the most well-used means of escape in America? For Murphy, it’s still the movies; hence she is speaking of two particular films that are currently showing which sort of embody this typology of escape–Dark Knight and Mamma Mia!.

(Sidebar on writing: God damn it; she’s good. I always read writing in either the Weekend NY Times or the New Yorker and feel that mixture of jealousy and astonishment at how tightly people can weave high and low together so easily, stuff like Milton and big-budget Hollywood films. I have a few misgivings with her argument but I gotta give props when they are due.)

Now, Murphy’s question is why do some prefer mirth and others prefer melancholy, or as she puts it:

Why do some people prefer to belt out 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 that smeary rictus on the face of Batman’s nemesis (“The Dark Knight”)?

She outlines a few different perspectives to come at this question. First, psychoanalysis, which suggests that people who say they are into mirth, or belting out Abba (John McCain is an Abba fan.) go into the movie to actually experience the very opposite–melancholy. In other words, according to psychoanalysis, whichever we pick, we are encountered with both.So the search for one form of escapism is futile since there is an inevitable trace of the melancholic in the mirthy, and vice versa?

Are we just into the opposite of what we think we are? What is this–opposite day? Not exactly.

Another perspective Murphy presents is from cultural geography, which suggests that culture is in itself escape from an animal state of being. So any cultural form, be it films or novels or episodes of the Wire, is escape. But specific to the mirth vs melancholy question, it seems that more people are attracted to the dark side to escape it. What? Yi-Fu Tuan, the cultural geographer from the article explains:“If we are the agent of death, we’re not likely to be the victim of death…It’s not logical, of course.”

I think he nailed it because he doesn’t fall into the trap of saying that films are escapist but newspapers, for example, are not. So we escape in culture to escape not only from our everyday life–the 9-5, school, friends, etc. but also to escape death. How…religious. Murphy quotes Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, who says, ““culture depends for its very existence on leisure, and leisure, in its turn, is not possible unless it has a durable and consequently living link with the cultus, with divine worship.” Cultus –> Culture. Brilliant.

The question remains (click for the Gangstarr song of the name same): is culture always and forever, for all posterity, divine worship in the same way? Don’t the way films look in 2008 as opposed to 1908 make a difference in the type of divine worship? Do the fact that technologies used to produce culture are wholly different make a difference in how escapism works?

What I mean is: don’t you have to ask the technological question with regard to culture and escapism? Murphy poses culture and escape to be constants but can anyone say that watching The Wire on your laptop gives the same experiential effect (and affect) as reading about the drug trade in a social science or journalistic text? I feel like the elephant in the room is “experience.” Are we meant to assume that there is a singular experience for all who see a film?

Is “escape” the same for everyone?