A 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. I walked around the rooms of my new home, idly picking things up and putting them down again. I was, quite suddenly, forced to confront something I’d long known but tried to ignore – sometimes you have nowhere to turn but yourself.
I don’t think I’m alone in that reckoning. The vibes, as they say, are bad out there – the world appears to have renewed its desire to be cruel. And so many of us turn inward, seeking shelter and instead finding, terrifyingly, us. Faced with that gnawing ache of self-reflection, unsure of what else to do, I put on the 2008 motion picture Mamma Mia!
We all have our comforts. Since I was a teenager, mine has been Abba. 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 there; an essential property of the universe. In 200 years’ time, when the last human guts another over a fight for clean water in a burning world, they’ll have Voulez-Vous stuck in their head.
What had sustained my love for the band was their clean, uncomplicated warmth. Songs like Does Your Mother Know are lab-grown to blot out every other thought in your head. You don’t listen to Abba, Abba happens to you, hooks laid down across the supple flesh of your brain until it’s flattened into a contented pancake.
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. That quote from William Faulkner applies: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Donna starts to sing, belting out the film’s title track. “Here I go again,” she says, her voice vibrating with a barely suppressed hysteria. And there it was, something that had always been present but had been obscured by the song’s everywhere quality: this, I realised, is a song about a woman who cannot help herself, who is being dragged, helplessly, by her desire, into the past. Why did F Scott Fitzgerald bother writing all those words about boats being beaten back by the current? He could have just written, “I suddenly lose control / there’s a fire within my soul.”
Indeed, if Abba has a thesis, it is this – that as human beings we are fragile, affected ceaselessly by forces inside us that we can neither comprehend or control. This can cause us great joy. One of life’s cleanest pleasures is being affected by another. But it can also cause us great pain. One of life’s cleanest sorrows is being affected by another.
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. But it’s just as easy to imagine that the addressee of the song will say “no”; that they will turn away. That what follows, when those last lurching notes ring out, is a parting, not an embrace.
Do not mistake me. I am not suggesting that next time Super Trouper comes on at karaoke I will necessarily break down into tears (though I might – like I say, things are pretty bad out there at the moment). I am merely suggesting that if the main activity of our lives is submitting, openly, nakedly, to one another – which I believe it is – then Abba know the sting of that submission better than most.
Art comforts us. Sometimes it does that through distraction – by turning our eyes away. But sometimes, it trains our attention. It focuses our eyes. It says, uncomplicatedly: this is the way the world feels to me, and I think it might feel that way to you too. It says: “So when you’re near me, darling / Can’t you hear me?”
• Joseph Earp is a critic, painter and novelist. His book Cattle is out now
