Mary Poppins Revisited
Jimmy O’Connell
The first time I ever saw a film in a cinema was in the Fairview Grand Cinema. It was Mary Poppins. I am not sure how I persuaded my mother to take us to see it, but I’m sure there was some peer pressure involved as most of my friends had seen it and said that I should see it as well.
It was a spectacularly entertaining experience. I remember we loved to sing ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, ‘Chim Chimney Chim Chimney’, and the heart-touching ‘Feed the Birds’ from the scene in Trafalgar Square where the old lady calls out to the two Banks children that it costs only Tuppence a bag.
On my first trip to London, as an 11-year-old, the highlight was feeding the pigeons in that very same square.
The story features a nanny who enters the life of the Banks children, quite randomly, at a time of a weather change.
She eventually leaves just as the wind changes in the last scene of the film, when the children, together with both parents, go flying kites in the local park.
The theme of the film is simple. Mary Poppins enters the lives of the Banks children to teach their parents that they, the parents, ought to stop focusing all their time and attention on making money and supporting the suffragette movement.
The father is a banker in a top London financial institution, who, through the intervention of Mary Poppins, realises that flying a kite with his children was more valuable than spending all his time acquiring money.
As for the mother, she was wasting her time with those suffragettes, and feminists generally.
All that went over my head as a child who was more interested in the magic of the music and the fantastical exploits of Mary Poppins herself.
Now as an adult, I see a different story, or an underlying narrative, or rather, subliminal messaging, which, as it turns out, is very Walt Disney-ish.
No doubt Disney wanted to portray a family that reflected his values, what we now call, ‘family values’. Which of course is admirable, except, from what we know of Mr Disney, he did not necessarily live by those values.
In fact, if he had been alive today, most likely he would have been a Trump voter, as he had a reputation for being virulently anti-communist. He testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) where he branded some of his former animators as communist agitators.
Although Mary Poppins was released in 1964, nothing much has changed since. We live in a society that pays lip service to true family, even humanitarian, values, and denigrates the historical attempt to further women’s equality and equality generally.
What we, film-goers, seem to do, all too often, is to allow ourselves the pleasure of experiencing, for a few hours, the cosy illusion of living in a happy, carefree, society, but on leaving that theatrical space we return to lives that are the very antithesis of what is projected on the screen.
The characters of our favourite entertainments, such as the reformed parents of the Banks children and the efforts of the heroine, Mary Poppins, to influence others, are pure fantasy and we learn that soaring kites, as well as ideals, crash quickly when the wind changes and we are challenged to live by values we claim to honour and expect others to live by.
Jimmy O’Connell is a member of Inklings Writing Group, who meet on Tuesdays at 11am and Wednesdays at 7.30pm in the Annebrook House Hotel, Mullingar. Lovers of writing welcome.