Something horrible is coming to 17 Cherry Tree Lane.
Something horrible is coming to 17 Cherry Tree Lane, the home of the Banks family. Anyone can see it: clouds are mounting on the horizon, the winds have shifted, the barometer is falling. Their neighbor Admiral Broom (Reginald Owen) warns Mr. Banks (David Tomlinson) that he’s “steering into a nasty piece of weather,” just as Broom had cautioned neighborhood chimneysweep Bert (Dick Van Dyke) that “storm signals are up at number 17.”
But this is no ordinary storm. Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) is coming.
If the last time you saw Mary Poppins you were under the age of 10, prepare to be startled upon a fresh viewing. I recently watched it with my kids, and like so many things revisited in adulthood, Mary Poppins proved altogether different from my memory.
The first thing you notice is that, despite her reputation as a paragon of patience, understanding, and love, Mary Poppins simply isn’t very pleasant. It’s not clear that we’re even meant to like her. For one thing, she’s highly and relentlessly critical of the children, Michael (Matthew Garber) and Jane (Karen Dotrice) — you slouch, she tells them, you’re slobs, your manners are deplorable, and when you let your mouths hang open you look like fish. She’s also largely humorless, never satisfied with anyone but herself, and terribly vain (she describes herself, quite sincerely, as “practically perfect in every way”). Furthermore, she’s a bully: When a line of nannies congregate outside the Banks’s front door to apply for the job, she conjures a violent windstorm to sweep them away.
Mary Poppins isn’t just rude and egostistical, she’s also faintly sinister. It isn’t simply that director Robert Stevenson (a Disney lifer whose final film, The Shaggy DA, is also surprisingly creepy), and screenwriters Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi (adapting from the P.L. Travers book series) choose a violent, foreboding storm to announce her arrival, although that certainly sets the stage. There is, in Andrews’ performance, something steely, unsympathetic and cold that makes even the magical things she does — sending toys leaping back onto shelves with a snap of her fingers, say, or jumping into a chalk sidewalk drawing — feel a little threatening. It’s not for nothing that this recut trailer works so well.
If we have a pervasive, collective sense of Mary Poppins as the most dreamily agreeable babysitter of all time, it’s presumably because she can perform magic (I suppose looking and sounding like Julie Andrews doesn’t hurt, either). But really, it’s remarkable how much is obscured by the magic and the singing. The children have fun with Mary Poppins, but she allows it only grudgingly. Bert is the real instigator—she only takes the children into the sidewalk drawing after he fails in his attempt to do so (“Why do you always complicate things that are really quite simple?” she scolds Bert), and when they find old Uncle Albert (Ed Wynn) floating helplessly at the ceiling thanks to a fit of giggles, she’s furious at Bert and the children for encouraging him, as if fun and laughter are somehow hazardous. This could be the key scene in the film, in fact. The lightness and giddiness are all things we associate with Mary Poppins. The first time we see her, she’s sitting in a cloud, presumably awaiting her next assignment, and between that and her magic umbrella, she’s strongly identified with the heavens. But on close inspection, none of that feeling really comes from Mary herself, and the fact is that her sensibilities are firmly earthbound. The frivolousness, fun and whimsy of childhood are everywhere in the movie, but only in spite of Mary Poppins who, it seems clear, would just as soon see the children dressed properly in their best Sunday suits, obediently awaiting her next command.
There’s very little on the screen to suggest that Mary Poppins is, or is meant to be, a real character, with feelings, dreams, a past or a future. She doesn’t suffer aspirations or disappointments, only annoyances (and many of those) and smug affirmations of her good sense and rightness, and she doesn’t want anything because she has everything she wants already. The “practically perfect” line is meant as a joke, I suppose, but it’s true: She’s perfectly in charge of the children, perfectly vain, and perfectly self-assured. “I never explain anything,” she haughtily tells Mr. Banks when he demands to know, quite reasonably, why he’s come home to find a small army of chimney sweeps performing a choreographed dance number in his living room. Mary Poppins is a closed circuit, perfectly self-sustaining, a machine without the capacity or need for love, either chaste or romantic (you could spend the entire film watching nothing but the sexual undercurrents between Bert and Mary, although they almost entirely flow from him towards her).
But if Mary isn’t meant to be a person, what is she? If she’s meant to represent something, then what? It’s not warmth or kindness — she makes it quite clear during her initial interview with Mr. Banks that her wages are a matter of great concern to her, and she holds the children at arm’s length. It’s not love, either: at the end of the film, as Mary begins to pack her bag (including her prized possession, a mirror), the children tearfully beg her not to leave, profess their love and ask, “Don’t you love us?” Mary replies, “And what would happen to me, may I ask, if I loved all the children I said goodbye to?” Andrews and the treacly music behind the dialogue do their best to inject a mood of sorrow into the scene, but there’s simply nothing else in the story or Andrews’s performance to support the idea that Mary Poppins cares about them in the least, to suggest that this hasn’t been, in fact, just another job.
By the end of the film, we’re meant to feel that Mary Poppins has taught the children — or more to the point, their parents — a valuable lesson, but it’s hard to say just what it is. Standing on the front step, ready to depart, Mary watches the kids run off to the park with their parents without so much as a goodbye, and her bird-shaped umbrella handle says, “Look at them! You know, they think more of their father than they do of you!” (By this point, it seems perfectly consistent that Mary Poppins has an easier and more natural relationship with an inanimate object than she does with actual people.) “That’s as it should be,” Mary replies, and again, Andrews gives her line readings a Disney touch of sentimentality. But again, because she’s been such a relentlessly unsentimental character, it rings hollow. So have they somehow learned, thanks to Mary’s eye-rolling and grumbling assent to various ill-advised adventures, to love their father, or he to love them? It’s a stretch.
Still, I can’t help but feel that there is some message in the film, even it isn’t the one that everyone seems to hear (in fairness, the steeliness of Mary Poppins hasn’t entirely escaped notice). Maybe I’m giving it too much credit. After all, the early 1960s were a strange, transitional time in American film. The studio system was moribund, and the new Hollywood of independent cinema, maverick directors and raw subject matter were rumbling below the surface, but still a few years from changing movies (John Cassavetes’ Shadows appeared in 1959, but Easy Rider didn’t come along until 1969). With few exceptions, major studio films were bloated and unfocused, designed by committee to make money, not statements.
Nevertheless, you could say that even a high-profile spectacle like Mary Poppins might have a message. After all, Mary represents discipline and, specifically, the idea of giving children less love, or at least what too many parents think of as love—namely, indulgence. What if Mary Poppins, a supernatural being if ever there was one in cinema, is the higher, less familiar idea of boundaries, consistency, and authority? Their parents, and specifically their father, have a strong sense of propriety, but that’s not really the same thing. As I said, Mary doesn’t try very hard to make us or anyone else like her, and maybe that’s the point: Maybe Mary Poppins is meant to suggest that love and indulgence are different things, and that sometimes love looks cold, efficient and decidedly unsentimental. Can a movie made in the 1960s and set in Edwardian England have something to teach 21st century parents? I think it can.
16 responses
The chilliness of Mary Poppins is most of her appeal for me. Ditto Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka. (That was my argument against Johnny Depp’s version…while Depp’s Wonka was weird, he lacked the unadorned chill of Wilder.)
W/r/t parenting…although I only have two examples of this (Mary Poppins and Ole Golly from Harriet the Spy — but always looking for more), there’s something to be said about nannies who show their upper/upper-middle-class charges that the children’s way of life is not the only way of life.
There certainly is, Amy. What interests me most about the whole phenomenon isn’t that MP is a bitch–that, if you watch the film, is plain to see, and I don’t think of the film as especially subversive. The telling thing is how modern parents have transformed her into their own warped, idealized concept of the perfect sitter: not strict, authoritative, and business-like, but exactly the opposite: indulgent, overly familiar, and given to whimsy. Those three descriptors, for me, capture the general failings of the modern parent, and it’s fascinating that one of the icier figures in children’s film history been so transformed in the collective imagination. It’s quite a projection, I think.
In the books Mary Poppins is even more complicated, the parents more hapless and disconnected. But isn’t the dead or absent parent, the complicated mentor, the scary adventure, etc. the norm rather than the exception in children’s literature? Fairy tales, Harriet the Spy, the Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Peter Pan, The Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Winnie the Pooh, Where the Wild Things Are, even Harry Potter……the list goes on and on. Children are distanced from parents or brought face to face with adult shortcomings while dealing with their own coming of age.
Mary Poppins may not be a convincing character in one sense…but what Travers does with her is endlessly fascinating. For all her toughness those children love her. She’s always there, even if she is rarely kind. That tells us a lot about how children respond to routine, order, structure, consequences. But there’s all that magic mixed up with it. One of my favorite chapters is the one in which the youngest Banks child arrives in the nursery and only Mary Poppins and the animals can understand her. The newborn is enraged to think that she will lose that language “like all the others” she also recites a beautiful passage about where she came from and what she is. Mary Poppins’ love for the child and of life –her magic qualities– is palpable even in the midst of Mary Poppins’ trademark irritability and impatience with everyone less perfect than she is…I guess it’s that conundrum that makes her so compelling.
I’ve got a story in the works that touches on all this, and my eldest shares my weakness for reading and re-reading Mary P…these lovely books are touchstones in our house. I see Mary Poppins as a myth rather like Peter Pan…I think it’s probably not so uncommon for myths to get muddled in the public consciousness in ways that are very different from their origins. Consider how many people are surprised at the harshness of the original fairy tales vs the sanitized Disney versions. But still….what a lovely thing writers like Barrie and Travers did, transforming their contemporary Edwardian world into a myth that is referred to again and again at so many levels of our culture. How many writers can do that?
Fascinating article!
I have always thought MP to be a model of decorum–and yet, she can let her hair down without totally giving into the experience; when the fun is done, it’s done–time to move on. By the end of the movie, the children, who have been downright horrible to other nannies, have learned the values of moderation and respect. Yes, it’s okay to play and have fun, but there is a time when that’s done. I believe this is the reason she’s upset at the tea party on the ceiling. Uncle Albert has totally surrendered to goofy-ness, which is neither healthful nor of value.
Your article, while fascinating, does fail to mention some of the sweeter moments in the movie, like when she sings the children to sleep or when she and Bert are at the cafe in the sidewalk picture. It’s also lovely how she encourages Michael to feed the birds, teaching him a lesson of generosity that heretofore had gone untaught in the Banks household.
As for not saying that she loves the children at the end, I stand by the perspective that it’s because she loves them so much…she has to make sure that they don’t switch the affection the children should hold for their parents (although, to me, they’re truly the least sympathetic characters in the whole movie) to her, the only person to take an active, responsible interest in them. I think she’s a practically perfect mother-model, myself, for all the reasons, Larry, you mentioned in your own comment. Too frequently are parents trying to be friends with their offspring, making them the center of a very small universe. As a teacher, I cannot tell you how disappointing and difficult this makes instructing children.
Mary Poppins could be warmer, yes, but what she is, by comparison, is not bad. You know this lady would come get you out of jail at 3 o’clock in the morning and then crack that parasol over the heads of any undesirables who might try to molest you on the walk home.
What a bizarre response. I’ve seen Mary Poppins many times both before and after the age of 10, and I never had the impression she was supposed to be nice, warm, pleasant, patient or any of the other adjectives you say are part of her collective reputation. She is the “perfect” sitter *because* she is stern, not in spite of it. She also has the special talent of letting the children believe that she is more strict and more opposed to nonsense than she actually is. The whole point is the balance of indulgence and discipline.
It also seems silly to quibble that she doesn’t seem like a real person. That is also part of the point — if she were real, she wouldn’t be perfect.
Rather than “cold,” I’d say she is cool — removed, impressive, powerful, attractive. That’s why everyone loves her, not because she’s “nice.”
“If we have a pervasive, collective sense of Mary Poppins as the most dreamily agreeable babysitter of all time”
hmm…i must have been left out of that collective. i wasn’t aware people had that opinion.
We should acknowledge that when we are children (and adults too, to a certain extent) we appreciate having someone around so steely and humorless and organized and intolerant of things being “wrong,” that we know *we* can be wholly without worry because *she* will take care of that for us.
When I was a teenager we always tripped on acid with one designated straight person — someone we could rely on so we wouldn’t worry we were about to end up in jail or a madhouse. The person did very little but tag along and laugh at us, but her presence made the trip a million times more enjoyable, because we could be more free, without worry.
Mary Poppins is this person, and the sadness comes from the fact that she gives up her own happiness and joy so she can provide this security-service to others, that she lives in a world of magic and fancy but can never be the person who lets go and enjoys it.
From a less theoretical point of view, I think kids growing up with parents, grandparents, and teachers who were all survivors of the world wars and probably not the most emotionally forthcoming people in the world could use fictions that show healthy normal kids being raised by cold, distracted people — that portray it as restraint, not distaste or emotional abuse.
Evelyn, the film, for me, definitely has that feeling of an adapted work, and I couldn’t help but wonder while I was watching it what had been left out and how it had all been stitched together. I purposely remained ignorant of the book series so I could consider the film on its own, but not you’ve got me wanting to check out the books.
Molly, thanks for the kind words. I agree that there are many sweet moments in the film, but for me they tend to ring hollow. The scene where she sings them to sleep, for instance, is interesting in the way it’s shot and the performance of Andrews. Mary is never, if memory serves, in the frame with either of the children during that scene, she doesn’t leave her chair, and her attitude is one of icy manipulation–the whole song, “Don’t Go to Sleep,” is classic reverse psychology. Likewise, Andrews plays it determined and focused rather than soft and sweet. All of this is easy to miss in the honeyed beauty of Andrews’ voice and the sweetness of the song itself, but the scene is a great example, for me, of her coldness. I don’t mean to say she’s being unkind (quite the contrary–I wish I could get my kids to sleep so easily), simply un-indulgent and unresponsive to their (in this scene) emotional blackmail.
Elisa and Matt, we may have to agree to disagree on this point, and of course I can only speak to my own experience. Parents I know have often referred to good babysitters as being like Mary Poppins, and what they mean is: sweet, kind, and loving. It might be interesting to examine–if one could–how her perception has changed. It could be that to past generations of parents, she was appealing for the very same reasons some modern parents might find her unappealing: her authority and power.
Amy, I like your whole observation. You’re going to give Gregory Maguire ideas about writing Mary’s side of the story.
A powerfully written piece, Larry. Mary Poppins has always gnawed at me, and I think you’ve nailed why. There may be also something about the Technicolor (not sure is MP is technically in Technicolor, but parts of its are garishly colorful) glare of the movie, and its severe lighting that also horrifies, like some fever dream. It’s tempting to reconsider films like MP (and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and others) as disguised horror films, sick and wonderful products of the adult imagination.
Yeah, Nick, there’s something about the “IGNORE YOUR TV AND LOOK AT ME” saturation of Technicolor (and its brethren) that makes films seem just visually frantic, isn’t there? And why do children’s stories suggest the weirdest, most troubling undercurrents? Put them together and you’ve got a double whammy of creepiness.
She may have been a high level practitioner of magic looking to indoctrinate wealthy children into being her loyal followers. Then as powerful adults she utilizes them in her diabolical plans for global domination!
Her ‘coldness’ seems to hint that she is an being of some form that has disguised as a nanny to countless families and children. This then contradicted by The look of withheld sorrow with her umbrella pointing out her ‘cold’ facade. Altogether there is a feeling in my mind that she is trying to be their nanny, but Bert keeps bringing out her true fun-loving side. Also all her actions are focused on the father of the family and not the kids. As in the movie starts with it seeming that the children need fixing but Mary puts in place this situation were mr. Bank’s loosens up and acts like a father.
Mary poppins was my first crush. I only notice as an adult how attractive she is when she’s haughty and bossy. It explains many of my relationships have been with stern, unsympathetic bossy women. Maybe Mary Poppins was an archetype imprinted on me as a small kid.
If someone described a babysitter to me as “like Mary Poppins” then I would picture a babysitter who is able to control children whilst simultaneously earning their respect and affection.
I’ve never seen Mary Poppins as *cold*. She’s firm, like she says in the beginning of the movie. Although there are a few places that she bugs me, most of the time I can see her logic. She’s trying to keep the kids safe. And there are many times she is very cheerful and smiling (Bert helps with that). And at the end during her conversation with the parrot umbrella handle, you can see she does love the kids. She never explicitly tells them she *doesn’t* love them, either. She probably was trying to hide her emotions so the kids wouldn’t be sadder than they already were. Personally, I love Mary Poppins.
Despite your view on Mary, you HAVE to love Bert. He’s awesome.
Clearly you have not read the books. They’re very dark and even sinister at times. Mary Poppins in the film is an angel in comparison.
As always…
Read the books.
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