distrusting the story
27 Feb 2012 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouFor some inexplicable reason (as in, no idea how I followed whatever links to end up there), this evening I ended up on a wiki page about the film, Mary Poppins. I have never liked this film, although as a kid I liked Julie Andrews well enough that she often saved films for me that I'd otherwise detest. But Mary Poppins, hm. And although CP calls this an example of a severe reinterpretation of the text (and one mostly unsupported by the text), it's still there, in my head, all these years later.
First, let's get this out of the way: Dick Van Dyke does the worst Cockney accent. Despite being born-and-raised American, when I finally saw Mary Poppins, I assumed he was from somewhere else in America, and not British (or Cockney, allegedly). This is because I'd already been to England and met several lovely elderly Cockneys while we were in London, and Dyke didn't talk anything like them. Plus, he was completely comprehensible, and right there, I knew he couldn't be really British, because you had to listen hard when someone from London spoke or else you couldn't figure out a word of it. Even the people in Aberdeen were easier to understand, with a little work, than the taxi drivers and bed/breakfast keepers we met in London.
So there's that level of a wrong note (so to speak), but there are deeper levels. One is that before I ever saw the film Mary Poppins, I'd read Kingsley's Water-Babies. (Later I saw some of the so-called filmic/animated adaptation of the book, and was disgusted with the fact that it was nothing like the book.) Water-Babies made a huge impact on me; while I was used to Dickens and his thorough applications of bathos for the sake of making his young protagonists (ie Oliver) sympathetic, Dickens also had later movies to deal with where Fagin and his crew were iffy and dirty but hardly, y'know, freaking terrifying like Oliver Reed. But Water-Babies pulls no punches about the life and tasks of its chimney sweep protagonist, and at the young age of maybe six or seven, trying to imagine a life of a chimney sweep came very close to giving me nightmares. If there is anything on this planet that I would never, ever, ever wish upon any child, it would be cleaning chimneys.
And then there's the song by Mrs Banks, about being a suffragette. I guess I was maybe nine or ten? when I finally saw Mary Poppins, and I already knew what suffragettes were. (Thank you, Mom, the feminist.) Except that in the movie -- relatively straightforward and crowd-rousing lyrics aside -- the movie-Mom wasn't treated like a hero. She was treated like a ditz who, I don't know, did suffragette-ing on the side, on Sunday afternoons, like a weekly hobby to keep herself busy between doing wash on Tuesdays and having other ladies over for high tea on Thursdays. And maybe some silver-polishing on Saturday morning. Or whatever upper-class British ladies did, which (in my admittedly young and inexperienced opinion) seemed to amount to a lot of dabbling. And looking ornamental.
But the film's pivotal role -- and the real bearer of any moral message -- is Mary Poppins herself, and she seems to treat (or so I recall) Mrs. Banks as though Mrs Banks is little more than a twittering ditz, and mostly useless. I knew my American history and that women fought for a long, long time before they got the vote, so I figured in Britain it was probably similar, and that (at the time) a lot of men saw women wanting the vote as something that should never happen, and would never amount to any good. So I completely expected Mr Banks' dismissive reaction to his wife's activism; it was Mary Poppins' dismissiveness that really baffled me, and then annoyed me. I mean, if Mary Poppins is supposed to be so smart, why would she a) treat another woman like she's stupid, and b) not respect and support a woman trying to make life better for all women?
Thus I was already a bit iffy on the film, first time I watched it, but the clincher was the song, Chim Chim Cher-ee (link goes to lyrics). It's in a minor chord, and compared to the way the entire film is done in bright pastel and ice-cream colors (including those incredibly stupid animated sequences), it's strangely wrong. It's also horribly wrong and double-layered, if you'd read Water-Babies and knew what conditions young chimney sweeps really faced, even as late as the Edwardian period.
Like these lines from the song:
I knew already that a chimney sweep's life was -- in three words -- short, nasty, and brutal. I found it repugnant and incomprehensible not only that the rooftops could be filled with smiling dancing chimney sweeps, but it also wasn't lost on me that the entire production seemed staged for the sake of convincing two sparkling-clean, and nanny-sheltered, rich little kids that, oh, if you really want to be happy, you'd be happiest as a chimney sweep. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It felt like some kind of minstrel show, where the lowest put on a song-and-dance to convince the highest that, hey, we're all happy here. You can be secure in your privilege, because we don't hate you for having everything we don't (including some basic modicum of safety and chance of living past your tenth birthday).
The minor chord is especially important here, because it's somewhat threatening, and foreboding, and doesn't resolve with the same intuitive 'emotion' as a major chord. It's only a partial resolution, in a way (though musically, yes, I think it's still technically a full resolution). It feels like a dirge, just sped up. It's still mournful, and that undermines the lyrical assurance that we're all happy here.
It's the last bit, sung by Bert, that really got me, though:
I might not have had the vocabulary as a child, but I wasn't so young (nor unread) that I couldn't grasp the concept of a liminal world. The sweeps are neither on the ground nor in the sky, at the juncture that's neither fully day nor night, compared to the rest of the film which is placed squarely under the bright lights. And I'm not certain, but I could swear the dance segment (with all the sweeps) is one of the few that's shadowed, without the bright ice-cream-parlor colors of the rest of the movie. It's just fat on the fire that the song is presented as a production meant solely to entertain two high-privileged kids who'll go home to soft beds and days without risk of an agonizing young death from inhaling lungfuls of soot every day.
Thing is, that song entranced me as a kid, because it hinted at things the rest of the movie disdained to show. It also felt like in one melody line, it had peeled back the movie's entire artifice -- from the way Mrs Banks' suffragette aspirations are ridiculed as the hobby of a dilletante ditz with too much time on her hands, to the cheerful assurance that a guy at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder could be happy to be so low, to Mary Poppins' own apparent annoyance with most of the other adult characters.
I wanted to see the story that occupied that space half in shadow and halfway in light, instead of the artificial buoyancy of the Disneyified film I got, but it felt like Mary Poppins' actual role wasn't as a protector or somewhat eccentric nanny. Instead, her role seemed to be to show the children only a certain type of magic, one prettified and somewhat controllable (or at least, controllable when she snapped her voice and insisted everyone behave). In her world, things had their proper place -- including unruly children and bored housewives -- and her job was to enforce that, while providing a sugary veneer that'd make everyone willingly swallow the so-called medicine.
Except that this one scene, the chimneysweeps were hinting at everything else, and that everything else was something big enough that it couldn't always be kept under pretty wraps, that it could sneak in sideways and curl itself around you like a wisp of smoke. Like the undersides of things, I can remember suspecting while watching the film, the undersides of things are much bigger than any smothering blanket Mary Poppins might throw over to keep your eyes closed to what else is there. In a way, for all Mary Poppins' supposed-magical touches, all she really did was confirm what every kid already knows (and was probably expressed much more kid-like and multi-layered in stories like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Kids already know the world is an amazing and magical place because it's all new to them, double for kids lucky enough to be born to privilege and thus with more chances to be exposed to a wider swath of experiences.
But the chimneysweeps' lyrics hinted at the real magic, the kind that -- like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- is never more than only barely controllable, if not utterly chaotic. It's something neither fully day nor fully night, dangerous and unexpected and probably not in ice-cream colors. Mary Poppins' disinterest in, and disdain for, that kind of magic is part of the reason that all my love for Julie Andrews can't make that movie bearable for me.
Because Mary Poppins isn't part of the magic; she's part of what wants to hand you some kind of pastel-chalk pap and tell you that's Appropriate Magic, which isn't really a magic at all. The real magic doesn't fit in boxes like that; it's neither on the ground nor in the sky, neither in the day nor the night, it's something that goes by its own rules. And Mary Poppins is, if nothing else, an entire bundle of rules where everything is one or the other.
Maybe if you fall for the surface and figure it's new-to-you and this makes it magical, then Mary Poppins is a kind of magic, but to the child I was, she was an icon of anti-magic, of the very worst kind. She pretended to magic while teaching you that the real dreams -- like of chimney sweeps who might ever want to be something other than everyone's soot-covered lucky charm, or housewives who want social and political equality -- are dreams that aren't acceptable, because they break the rules.
Mary Poppins isn't a trickster. She's the anti-trickster. As a child I realized that instinctively, and distrusted her for it. Give me El-ahrairah any day.
Slight tangent but worthy of note, for me: I only vaguely recall the very 1860s-era prejudice in Water-Babies (against Irish, Americans, Jews, and Catholics, apparently). But I do recall the clear "anything is possible" attitude, though I didn't realize until reading the Wiki entry that Kingsley was a friend of Darwin's.
First, let's get this out of the way: Dick Van Dyke does the worst Cockney accent. Despite being born-and-raised American, when I finally saw Mary Poppins, I assumed he was from somewhere else in America, and not British (or Cockney, allegedly). This is because I'd already been to England and met several lovely elderly Cockneys while we were in London, and Dyke didn't talk anything like them. Plus, he was completely comprehensible, and right there, I knew he couldn't be really British, because you had to listen hard when someone from London spoke or else you couldn't figure out a word of it. Even the people in Aberdeen were easier to understand, with a little work, than the taxi drivers and bed/breakfast keepers we met in London.
So there's that level of a wrong note (so to speak), but there are deeper levels. One is that before I ever saw the film Mary Poppins, I'd read Kingsley's Water-Babies. (Later I saw some of the so-called filmic/animated adaptation of the book, and was disgusted with the fact that it was nothing like the book.) Water-Babies made a huge impact on me; while I was used to Dickens and his thorough applications of bathos for the sake of making his young protagonists (ie Oliver) sympathetic, Dickens also had later movies to deal with where Fagin and his crew were iffy and dirty but hardly, y'know, freaking terrifying like Oliver Reed. But Water-Babies pulls no punches about the life and tasks of its chimney sweep protagonist, and at the young age of maybe six or seven, trying to imagine a life of a chimney sweep came very close to giving me nightmares. If there is anything on this planet that I would never, ever, ever wish upon any child, it would be cleaning chimneys.
And then there's the song by Mrs Banks, about being a suffragette. I guess I was maybe nine or ten? when I finally saw Mary Poppins, and I already knew what suffragettes were. (Thank you, Mom, the feminist.) Except that in the movie -- relatively straightforward and crowd-rousing lyrics aside -- the movie-Mom wasn't treated like a hero. She was treated like a ditz who, I don't know, did suffragette-ing on the side, on Sunday afternoons, like a weekly hobby to keep herself busy between doing wash on Tuesdays and having other ladies over for high tea on Thursdays. And maybe some silver-polishing on Saturday morning. Or whatever upper-class British ladies did, which (in my admittedly young and inexperienced opinion) seemed to amount to a lot of dabbling. And looking ornamental.
But the film's pivotal role -- and the real bearer of any moral message -- is Mary Poppins herself, and she seems to treat (or so I recall) Mrs. Banks as though Mrs Banks is little more than a twittering ditz, and mostly useless. I knew my American history and that women fought for a long, long time before they got the vote, so I figured in Britain it was probably similar, and that (at the time) a lot of men saw women wanting the vote as something that should never happen, and would never amount to any good. So I completely expected Mr Banks' dismissive reaction to his wife's activism; it was Mary Poppins' dismissiveness that really baffled me, and then annoyed me. I mean, if Mary Poppins is supposed to be so smart, why would she a) treat another woman like she's stupid, and b) not respect and support a woman trying to make life better for all women?
Thus I was already a bit iffy on the film, first time I watched it, but the clincher was the song, Chim Chim Cher-ee (link goes to lyrics). It's in a minor chord, and compared to the way the entire film is done in bright pastel and ice-cream colors (including those incredibly stupid animated sequences), it's strangely wrong. It's also horribly wrong and double-layered, if you'd read Water-Babies and knew what conditions young chimney sweeps really faced, even as late as the Edwardian period.
Like these lines from the song:
Now, as the ladder of life 'as been strung
You might think a sweep's on the bottommost rung
Though I spends me time in the ashes and smoke
In this 'ole wide world there's no 'appier bloke
I knew already that a chimney sweep's life was -- in three words -- short, nasty, and brutal. I found it repugnant and incomprehensible not only that the rooftops could be filled with smiling dancing chimney sweeps, but it also wasn't lost on me that the entire production seemed staged for the sake of convincing two sparkling-clean, and nanny-sheltered, rich little kids that, oh, if you really want to be happy, you'd be happiest as a chimney sweep. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It felt like some kind of minstrel show, where the lowest put on a song-and-dance to convince the highest that, hey, we're all happy here. You can be secure in your privilege, because we don't hate you for having everything we don't (including some basic modicum of safety and chance of living past your tenth birthday).
The minor chord is especially important here, because it's somewhat threatening, and foreboding, and doesn't resolve with the same intuitive 'emotion' as a major chord. It's only a partial resolution, in a way (though musically, yes, I think it's still technically a full resolution). It feels like a dirge, just sped up. It's still mournful, and that undermines the lyrical assurance that we're all happy here.
It's the last bit, sung by Bert, that really got me, though:
Up where the smoke is all billered and curled
'Tween pavement and stars is the chimney sweep world
When there's 'ardly no day nor 'ardly no night
There's things 'alf in shadow and 'alfway in light
I might not have had the vocabulary as a child, but I wasn't so young (nor unread) that I couldn't grasp the concept of a liminal world. The sweeps are neither on the ground nor in the sky, at the juncture that's neither fully day nor night, compared to the rest of the film which is placed squarely under the bright lights. And I'm not certain, but I could swear the dance segment (with all the sweeps) is one of the few that's shadowed, without the bright ice-cream-parlor colors of the rest of the movie. It's just fat on the fire that the song is presented as a production meant solely to entertain two high-privileged kids who'll go home to soft beds and days without risk of an agonizing young death from inhaling lungfuls of soot every day.
Thing is, that song entranced me as a kid, because it hinted at things the rest of the movie disdained to show. It also felt like in one melody line, it had peeled back the movie's entire artifice -- from the way Mrs Banks' suffragette aspirations are ridiculed as the hobby of a dilletante ditz with too much time on her hands, to the cheerful assurance that a guy at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder could be happy to be so low, to Mary Poppins' own apparent annoyance with most of the other adult characters.
I wanted to see the story that occupied that space half in shadow and halfway in light, instead of the artificial buoyancy of the Disneyified film I got, but it felt like Mary Poppins' actual role wasn't as a protector or somewhat eccentric nanny. Instead, her role seemed to be to show the children only a certain type of magic, one prettified and somewhat controllable (or at least, controllable when she snapped her voice and insisted everyone behave). In her world, things had their proper place -- including unruly children and bored housewives -- and her job was to enforce that, while providing a sugary veneer that'd make everyone willingly swallow the so-called medicine.
Except that this one scene, the chimneysweeps were hinting at everything else, and that everything else was something big enough that it couldn't always be kept under pretty wraps, that it could sneak in sideways and curl itself around you like a wisp of smoke. Like the undersides of things, I can remember suspecting while watching the film, the undersides of things are much bigger than any smothering blanket Mary Poppins might throw over to keep your eyes closed to what else is there. In a way, for all Mary Poppins' supposed-magical touches, all she really did was confirm what every kid already knows (and was probably expressed much more kid-like and multi-layered in stories like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Kids already know the world is an amazing and magical place because it's all new to them, double for kids lucky enough to be born to privilege and thus with more chances to be exposed to a wider swath of experiences.
But the chimneysweeps' lyrics hinted at the real magic, the kind that -- like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- is never more than only barely controllable, if not utterly chaotic. It's something neither fully day nor fully night, dangerous and unexpected and probably not in ice-cream colors. Mary Poppins' disinterest in, and disdain for, that kind of magic is part of the reason that all my love for Julie Andrews can't make that movie bearable for me.
Because Mary Poppins isn't part of the magic; she's part of what wants to hand you some kind of pastel-chalk pap and tell you that's Appropriate Magic, which isn't really a magic at all. The real magic doesn't fit in boxes like that; it's neither on the ground nor in the sky, neither in the day nor the night, it's something that goes by its own rules. And Mary Poppins is, if nothing else, an entire bundle of rules where everything is one or the other.
Maybe if you fall for the surface and figure it's new-to-you and this makes it magical, then Mary Poppins is a kind of magic, but to the child I was, she was an icon of anti-magic, of the very worst kind. She pretended to magic while teaching you that the real dreams -- like of chimney sweeps who might ever want to be something other than everyone's soot-covered lucky charm, or housewives who want social and political equality -- are dreams that aren't acceptable, because they break the rules.
Mary Poppins isn't a trickster. She's the anti-trickster. As a child I realized that instinctively, and distrusted her for it. Give me El-ahrairah any day.
Slight tangent but worthy of note, for me: I only vaguely recall the very 1860s-era prejudice in Water-Babies (against Irish, Americans, Jews, and Catholics, apparently). But I do recall the clear "anything is possible" attitude, though I didn't realize until reading the Wiki entry that Kingsley was a friend of Darwin's.
The book had been intended in part as a satire, a tract against child labour, as well as a serious critique of the closed-minded approaches of many scientists of the day in their response to Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution, which Kingsley had been one of the first to praise. ... In the book, for example, Kingsley argues that no person is qualified to say that something that they have never seen (like a human soul or a water baby) does not exist.
How do you know that? Have you been there to see? And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were none ... And no one has a right to say that no water babies exist till they have seen no water babies existing, which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water babies.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 06:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 07:45 am (UTC)One evening when I was very, very pregnant with the boy, his dad was out at class and I plopped myself on the couch to channel-surf. I happened upon Mary Poppins - the scene where the children apologize to their father for getting him in trouble at work and try to give him their allowance money to make up for it. And let me tell you, I started bawling and could not stop. I knew I was being stupid and hormonal and it did not matter because omg-those-children-love-their-daddy wahhhhhh.
After about five minutes of gut-wrenching sobbing I changed the channel to find something less tear-jerky...came across a high-speed car chase, and immediately started bawling again because that boy's poor mother must be utterly horrified by his behavior right now.
Yeah. Pregnancy hormones. They're a real bitch.
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 04:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 08:48 am (UTC)The mother is held up to ridicule, yes. But the words of song are surprisingly true (Our daughters' daugthers will adore us as they sing in grateful chorus, 'Well done, Sister Suffragette'). It provided an interesting discussion point with my now five-year-old a year ago. It's a real mix.
Mary herself isn't a trickster, but nor is she a force of order. To me, she's almost exactly the same as the female title character in Eleanor Farjeon's 'Tom Cobble and Ooney': the fairy's child who is rebelling, but who can't actually stop being herself. She'd like to be what she sees as 'respectable', but she's naturally magic and can't help being so. She thus introduces chaos accidentally without trying to (note the nursery clean-up song, in which the boy gets shut in the cupboard).
I think your critique of the politics of the sweeps' song is excellent, but also, I like the way the movie makes it clear that the working classes have relationships of their own that the upper classes may be entirely unaware of (how does Bert know Mary, when she arrived the way she did?) and may never actually understand, despite the apparent control over the servants' lives that existed.
But then, I'll forgive a lot of a movie that makes it clear that men need to nurture and love to be happy, and that women without jobs may end up frustrated and fighting for change.
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 04:12 pm (UTC)I recall that scene with the boy in the cupboard, and took it slightly differently -- that he was one more thing that was "not in place" and everything would find its place, or die trying. Roughly. Like a wrong puzzle piece, he'd get shoved into the puzzle and made to fit, or else. (Though I'm not familiar with Farjeon's work, that is a trope I've seen in plenty of other stories. I don't know if I'd had enough experience with it as a kid, or enough to recognize it, to have caught onto that subtlety in the movie.)
I don't recall getting an impression of anyone having control over the servants' lives, to be honest. In fact, it's almost more like the servants run everything and the people ostensibly in control (Mr Banks, Mrs Banks) are absolutely clueless. Mrs Banks is right there and she's a dithering waste of air, and Mr Banks is too busy with his job to even pay attention to what's going on at home. But then, that impression was laid with Mary Poppins coming in and practically taking the job as though it were already hers, and the Banks having little to no say about it.
Overall, there's enough problematic about the movie that makes me think Disney should just stop making movies. And, I don't know, try their hand at theme parks or something.
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 11:32 am (UTC)She explicitly said no animation, and Disney himself apparently brushed her off when she asked what those awkward animation sequences were doing there then.
The role of Mary Poppins became to uphold the idea of the patriarchy the men of Disney wanted, not what was actually normal for Victorian England. Apparently they are a entire series of books where Poppins continues to be the sole care provider and everyone is fine that because *that was entirely normal.* The anti-feminist "women should stop trying to get rights and take care of their children" theme was wholly invented by the Disney team.
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 04:02 pm (UTC)And as I recall, that's pretty much what happened right up to "An Unmarried Woman" in 1978.
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 08:31 pm (UTC)The books are incredible, and worth reading, in much the same way that Barrie's original Peter Pan is-- disturbing, adult and complex.
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 11:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 01:07 pm (UTC)Perhaps less distrust of the story and more the acknowledgment of parallel truths or even that the truth is not what adults tell you. You saw it. There is evidence after the fact. It doesn't matter if MP refuses to confirm it.
As for MP, I see her as only being able to be her true magic self in the other worlds.
The chimney-sweeper parts are inexcusable, even as irony.
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 02:34 pm (UTC)Interesting, in that there's an element of Blackface as well, of course. Might be interesting to tease that out a bit.
Also, though I haven't seen it in a long time so can't remember her clearly, but there might be something to be made of the odd "bird lady," who always struck me as a tragic figure.
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2012 08:48 pm (UTC)In Dick van Dyke's defense, he revealed on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me (last year I think) that the Disney studio got him an accent coach who was not only very Irish, but had no more idea of what a cockney accent sounded like than did van Dyke himself. One got the impression that he has yet to live it down.