Kalokairi Calling: Mama Mia! and 'Redesigning the American Dream'

Nowhere does the aphorism that "all politics are personal" apply more potently than to America's so-called "culture wars", where anything seen to be remotely touching on conceptions of the family becomes not just the stuff of political campaigns, but the difference between personal fulfillment and a lifetime of frustration and unhappiness. Whether one is talking about childcare, employment equity, reproductive rights, sexual diversity or gender relations we're not concerned strictly speaking with the family as such, but with all those structures on which men, women and their families must depend, be they based in public policy or how we design our cities.

So when the popular culture appears to be staking out new territory in this debate -- and having a great deal of fun at the same time -- it's worth paying attention.

The recently-released ABBA musical Mama Mia! is gloriously set on the fictional Greek Island of Kalokairi where taverna owner Donna (Meryl Streep) is preparing for the wedding of her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). While Donna has invited her two long-time friends and bandmates Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters), Sophie has secretly invited three men, each of whom she suspects might be her biological father.

Mama Mia! stands out not only for its sunny lightheartedness (many reviewers are saying silliness) but also for what others see as its unabashed feminism. The leading characters -- all women -- drive the action, deal with the world on their own terms and leave the men in the film mostly scratching their heads. Significantly (and unusually for Hollywood) the most sexual of the characters are the three women in their 50s, who cavort unself-consciously about the island singing and raising temperatures. At one point they even inspire an entire village of women and girls to dance their way to the beach to the tune of "Dancing Queen."

The strength and independence of the film's female characters, as well as the nonchalance with which the film deals with Donna's sexual history, have gained the attention of feminist writers, who see in the film a wonderfully subversive social critique as Sarah Seltzer explains:

"It's hard to imagine a movie that's come out recently that is, at its core, as offensive to the right wing's so-called family values. The film's women -- including a mother and daughter -- accept each other as sexual beings. Donna isn't punished for her earlier promiscuity, and Amanda isn't forced to get married despite her clear sexual maturity. The concept of three men revolving around a matriarchal family core is celebrated."

While the power of the women in the film is indeed refreshing, I think what is more remarkable still is something larger: that these women have a community with whom to be empowered, and a physical setting that helps to make such empowerment possible.

Let me first admit that I realize looking for cues to social behavior in a musical is a dodgy proposition. Furthermore, this is an adaptation of a stage musical, so its conventions are particularly theatrical. Indeed, the film comes very close to meeting Aristotle's famous "Three Unities" of time (it takes place over approximately 24 hours) place (one island) and action (one plot). The Greek villagers also act very much like a chorus, commenting on the inner lives of the main characters.

Even granting all these things, what we see in the taverna and village on Kalokairi is to most North Americans quite foreign: an extremely dense social environment where families live in close proximity, where everyone knows each other, and the visual and auditory permeability of the village means that everyone also knows each other's business (which of course is being sung at full volume, but still). Donna has many local people who either work for her or are there to help her, and would have surely been there to assist her in raising Sophie. The public realm is plentiful and attractive, offering several venues for ritual and celebration. And of course, there are no cars, save for three in the opening scenes that deliver the characters on site. Indeed, the entire feel of the film is so pre-industrial that, given a few changes in costume and music the essential story could be told in almost any historical period.

But the essential element that lends such joie de vivre to the film is that it is ultimately about a community of people, one that nonjudgmentally accepts one another and is there to celebrate life's passages and transitions together.

The contrast to the urban loneliness in that other big "chick flick" of the summer, Sex and the City, is striking, as Jane Becker notes:

"The women in 'SATC' are a good 20 years younger than their counterparts in 'Mama', but they seem infinitely less happy. They sit around coffee shops and trendy restaurants discussing their unhappiness. The women in 'Mama' sing and dance. Christine Baranski kicks ass on the dance floor, Julie Walters chews through the scenery and Meryl…well, Meryl does a split in the air after bouncing off a bed. When I grow up, I want to be them."

The sadder contrast still of course is not to other another movie, but to what many of us actually experience: increasingly isolated lives, raising families as islands unto themselves in larger islands of subdivisions, cut off from any semblance of actual community. Parents (often unaided mothers) are expected to meet all the needs that were once met by community, and institutionalized social supports that might make a huge difference for millions of families -- such as affordable and accessible childcare -- are unhelpfully fraught with controversy.

Kalokairi may as well be on another planet.

But there are alternatives. In 1980, architect and historian Dolores Hayden asked, "What Would a Non-Sexist City be Like?" and her proposals for Redesigning the American Dream share much in common with Kalokairi: closely-set multifamily housing sharing common facilities such as kitchens and child care, locally employed and equitably paid on-site staff to help out, attractive social gathering and play spaces, and a community of families to assist in looking after children.

The other term for this of course is the village -- how we once all lived before industrialism and bloated urban expansion scattered us apart. The irony is that the conservative agenda behind the "family values" debate is promoting a "traditional" family model that is in fact an historical aberration. For the past half-century, through a combination of social policy and urban planning decisions guided more by myth than reality families have been forced into unprecedented, community-eroding isolation. As Hayden and other feminist architects, planners and geographers have been pointing out for years, these patterns have served the needs of women and families very poorly.

Now, however, this social experiment appears to be reaching a terminal phase. Between the devastation brought about by the current foreclosure epidemic and surging gasoline prices, many are predicting that the suburbs will be the slums of the future. The need for us to reconsider how we live with and among one another is becoming ever more acute, and economic and resource considerations are going to require us to move past the pointlessness of debating what constitutes a "real" family, or the proper values by which to raise one.

The good news is that our need for community is built into our social DNA. What may be attracting audiences to the world of Mama Mia! is not so much the message that women can have identities independent of a particular man, but that all of us can be a part of something larger than ourselves.