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09 Aug 08

CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World: Kalokairi Calling: Mama Mia! and 'Redesigning the American Dream'

Michael Dudley, who only the other day came out with a brilliant analysis of The Dark Knight, now looks at Mama Mia! across a range of feminist texts as well as some urbanist readings. Fascinating stuff, a must-read...

citystates.typepad.com/...mama-mia-car-fr.html - Preview

michael_dudley city_states_blog movies popular_culture feminism mama_mia!

Nowhere does Tip O'Neill's famous 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.
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.
6 more annotations...
- 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.
- 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).
- 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."
- In 1980, Delores Hayden famously asked, "What Would a Non-Sexist City be Like?" and her proposals for Redesiging 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 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.