As society has renewed its desire to be cruel, we turn inward to our comforts, looking for warmth
‘Trying to remember your first Abba song is like trying to pinpoint the moment you first felt the touch of another, or began to breathe.’‘Trying to remember your first Abba song is like trying to pinpoint the moment you first felt the touch of another, or began to breathe.’few weeks ago I moved out of the crumbling home I’d built for myself in a dilapidated Sydney sharehouse and found myself living alone for the first time. The shock of being by myself was bruising.
‘It’s difficult to look upon yourself as an icon’: Abba’s Agnetha Fältskog on fame, family and her secret songs. You don’t really encounter Abba for the first time. Trying to remember your first Abba song is like trying to pinpoint the moment you first felt the touch of another, or began to breathe. They’re sort of always; an essential property of the universe.
But watching Mamma Mia!, I was struck by something that I had perhaps known, in some instinctive way, but not actively realised – Abba are also very, very sad.The scene that clicked it for me happens early in the film. Donna, played by Meryl Streep, peeks her head out of a trapdoor and is confronted, shockingly, by three suitors from her past. They’re all older now but, in her mind’s eye, they haven’t changed – we see them as mustachioed, long-haired Lotharios.
Even the more upbeat songs, like the deliriously woozy I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do consider the terrible sacrifice of love; the way it locks us into patterns, the way it changes us.“Love me or leave me, make your choice,” that song opens. And later, when the narrator asks if her beloved can feel it too, there’s an aching gap where the answer should be. It’s easy to imagine the song being sung to someone who has finally given into their own emotions and accepted they are in love too.
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