by Jorge Molina
Today Mamma Mia! turns a decade old. The film opened exactly ten years ago, on July 18th, 2008. And this weekend, what is perhaps the most unexpected sequel in the franchise factory that Hollywood has become will open.
I could write a piece about some sort of legacy, or about what a monstrous hit it was when it opened (becoming the highest grossing live action musical ever, and the highest grossing movie in history in the U.K. at the time). I could attempt an oral history on why I firmly believe this was the most fun any group of actors has ever had on set, or an objective reexamination on why this silly and often senseless movie works so effortlessly.
But I want to get a little more personal. Because ten years ago, that movie changed the way I looked at myself and my life...
If you follow me on Twitter (which you frankly should, just saying), there’s no way you will have missed that ever since a sequel was announced last summer, I’ve made Mamma Mia! my brand. I’ve freaked out over every inch of footage, picture from set, rumored song, casting announcement, and plot point. But it’s not just a gimmick that I’ve somehow managed to ride for twelve months.
I was fifteen when the first Mamma Mia! opened. I first heard about it when a film magazine in Mexico featured it on its annual summer preview issue. It wasn’t a full spread; it was barely a paragraph in a corner. Under the picture of Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan back to back during “S.O.S.”, the phrase “based on the Broadway phenomenon” immediately caught the attention of young closeted me.
I’ve always liked musicals. The reasons for why are for a completely separate piece, but by the time Mamma Mia! opened, I had already discovered Chicago and Moulin Rouge! in the aisles of my local Blockbuster, and was eager to consume more of the genre.
The movie opened in Mexico a couple of months after the U.S., so I was just beginning my freshman year of high school in September of 2008. Me and my friends went to the mall on a Friday night because that’s all my suburban town allowed for. And I suggested we watched this movie, claiming I had heard it was good, but didn’t know much else about it.
I was lying.
The movie started, and it was a musical alright. Right from the first scene with Amanda Seyfried singing “I Have a Dream” as she deposits the three letters for her three potential fathers in a mailbox. My friends next to me groaned. I had not mentioned to them that this was a musical.
The movie kept going, and I found myself enjoying it in a way I hadn’t enjoyed anything before then. I was overwhelmed by joy, but a joy that I knew I couldn’t make explicit. A joy that I was ashamed to feel. The moment the dream sequence in “Money, Money, Money” kicked in, and Meryl, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters were running around in a yacht wrapped in flowy fabrics, something shifted inside me.
I had never fallen in love with something so quickly and so deeply, and I had never felt so strongly that I shouldn’t have. I spent the rest of the movie suppressing my gasps and tapping feet, because if my friends somehow discovered how much I was enjoying it, I would be exposed. When the movie ended, I rolled my eyes alongside them, and apologized for making them see it. As soon as they left, I went straight to the record store and bought the soundtrack. I listened to it on a loop for no less than a full year. I bought the DVD the day it came out; I still own that copy.
It would take me years to understand what it was that I feared being discovered in that theater. Mamma Mia! was the first movie that showed me that there was a way of liking something that felt different, and that my entertainment taste was somehow deeply linked with a part of my identity that I wasn’t ready to face yet.
Afterwards I kept my love of this movie at arm’s length, crediting it as my biggest guilty pleasure. It wasn’t until the sequel was announced last year, and I got more overwhelmingly excited than I ever expected to be, that I went back and realized (and understood) why my love for it ran so deep.
I’ve been out of the closet for five years now, and I can now clearly see that the movie was the very first piece of entertainment that detonated my queer radar in a way that could be felt in the moment. I knew from the first scene that I was seeing this in a different way than everyone else in the theater. I felt something as the women danced through the pier in “Dancing Queen,” as Dominic Cooper’s abs shined in the sun, as Christine Baranski asked a boy if his mother knew that he was out. I was full of joy and guilt.
The release of the sequel feels, in a way, like the end of a chapter of my life. Watching that first movie in the theater was the kick start of a slow, sometimes painful process; a period that is now behind me. It’s coming to me now as a touchstone to look back and see how my life has progressed and how much I’ve changed.
So when I walk into Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again this weekend, I will be enjoying it openly. I will be gasping when I feel like it, and sing along to the songs I’ve memorized. I'll tap my feet, and let the joy overwhelm me. Because now I am free to do so.