I just watched the Mamma Mia! Movie yesterday, alone as usual. Couldn’t convince anyone else to go, but I thought it was a worthwhile watch.
Hmmm.
To put it frankly, I wasn’t too impressed. Mamma Mia! the Movie is not something I would like to watch again. I have mixed feelings about this show. On the one hand, I do know that it’s a hit musical, and based off a hit band, so I wonder whether it’s just me. On the other hand, I was really hoping for something better than this. Now, I hadn’t seen the musical or known much about it prior to this, and I’ve heard of ABBA but wasn’t too familiar with their songs. So I went in to the cinema essentially with a blank slate, but prepared to be entertained.
It started off well… the opening song of “I have a dream” and the catchy “Honey honey” song still ring in my head today. The young lead actress, Amanda Seyfried, can sing. Not as attractive as, say, Amy Adams (of Disney’s Enchanted fame), but she can sing. And the premise sounded interesting – three possible fathers, all invited to the daughter’s wedding in hopes of finding out who’s the real Dad. And sometimes, I really liked the direction and scene composition, like when the daughter’s greeting of her two best friends is parodied a short while later by the mother’s greeting of her two best friends. (Talk about a generation gap!)
But that’s about it.
I found the whole girly-girl thing with the greetings a little childish, but I could accept that. What I didn’t like were the theme of the show and the earthiness of the characters. The whole show belongs to a liberal culture of sex, drugs and disco… and yet, I realised that this is part of modern British culture now. In fact, it reminded me very much of London’s presentation at the end of the Beijing Olympics. Crude, earthy and vulgar – very different from the refined image of sober British citizenry that I still persist in clinging onto. The mother’s a self-admitted slut, the daughter eventually treats not getting married as a perfectly legitimate alternative, there’s rampant sexual themes being displayed here and there (particularly in the male-female performances), and one of the fathers is homosexual.
So I wondered… is it possible I’m misjudging this, based on the movie? Perhaps the movie adaptation is just not that good compared to the musical. The issue with me watching the movie is that it’s a 4th-degree transfer of information. I view the movie, the movie is based on the musical, the musical places a story around the ABBA songs, the songs themselves were written to reflect the culture of their times. So for me to experience such profound dissonance, it’s possible that something was lost in translation during one or more of those steps.
I mean, Pierce Brosnan can’t sing well, and Meryl Streep just looks too old and unattractive. And the use of the ensemble dances just look weird in a movie, where you have all these random people creeping up out of nowhere to join in the dance for no reason. (The Dancing Queen sequence, for example, ends up with a parade of women throughout the island… WHY?)
But then again, that could also be a problem with the musical itself… after all, the musical was written as a jukebox musical, to feature the songs of ABBA. If you try to wrap your writing around a bunch of songs with different themes and subjects, you’re bound to create a very stretched and farfetched story to cover the situation. Instead of the songs smoothly flowing into the story, with a reason behind everything, to make a concerted whole, you have this unholy mess with a scattered plot and people breaking out into song even when the situation doesn’t call for it. The emotional narrative of the story narrative and the songs are not in sync.
And then, you go back further, and you think… okay, maybe the transition to movie screwed it up, and the transition to musical screwed it up, but what about transition from pop culture into song? Surely that must have been okay, considering the popularity of ABBA worldwide? And there I’m of two minds. ABBA was clearly a disco-generation band. And if you consider similar musicals set around that time (including Grease, which I also didn’t like), you notice a trend… sex and disco dancing. I believe ABBA caught the spirit of their times well. I just don’t like that spirit. It’s a cultural clash on a most fundamental level. I belong to an older, more conservative culture, one in which God was still important, and the human soul – rather than the human body – was the thing to treasure.
Contrast Mamma Mia! with Les Miserables to see the difference. The latter talks about the salvation and penitence of the soul, one man’s quest to redeem himself from past mistakes, sacrifice for clashing principles. The former also has past mistakes… but how does it treat them? The characters are selfish and self-centered, trying to manipulate each other to fill their own desperate needs… the daughter sets up the entire wedding scheme just to look for her father, and the mother uses the daughter to assuage her own loneliness. And in the end, it’s just all wrapped up neatly, with everyone having a happy ending, with no change of character! Mamma Mia’s message seems to be “You can be happy just the way you are, you don’t have to bother becoming better. Just forget and ignore the past, since it hurts. Live life so that YOU can be happy.” Les Miserables, on the other hand, says “You have made mistakes in the past, but you have been redeemed. The past will still haunt you, but work out your salvation and be a blessing to others, in order to present yourself worthy to God. There are things in life worth living and dying for, beyond yourself.”
Both speak to the human condition, but what a difference.
In this, I see the eternal clash of culture between theism (belief in God) and humanism (focus on man). Mamma Mia, though it talks about the human condition (in fact, more so than Les Miserables), offers no real solution except a very contrived happy ending. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
And yet, what I’m starting to realise is that I’m in a distinct minority. In fact, I do believe that the majority of the world today views Mamma Mia with pleasure and shares in its worldview. I may be the only one experiencing cultural dissonance. How else would you explain the popularity of shows like Grease and Mamma Mia? The world has turned its focus to wholly revolve around the satisfaction of and preoccupation with self. There is no cause worth living for except making yourself happy. I’ve seen this and I’ve heard this in my interactions with many people, including my colleagues and friends. In fact, it’s come to the point where God Himself is on trial. “If God does not make me happy, I will not believe in Him.”
How spoilt we have become.
If there’s one thing good I can say about Mamma Mia!, it is that it has opened my eyes to the immense strength of world culture that I’m preparing to fight against, in my Christian Values Media. It’s not going to be an easy task.
