The Nanny Diaries

Posted by davidkalat on August 6, 2011

Recently I rejoined the traditional nine-to-five workforce after close to 14 years as a stay-at-home father. It was a momentous step and one that changed more than just my life–we hired a nanny to take over my childcare duties. This occasioned my daughter to draft a list of requirements that included: “must not smell of barley water” and “must understand that reference.”

Yeah, she’s my daughter all right!

The thing of it is, she hadn’t even seen Mary Poppins in years, but it had left enough of an impression that she could call out references like that anyway.

We were fortunate enough to hire, if not the actual Mary Poppins, at least a credible 21st century alternative. And in her honor, I’d like to pay tribute to a movie so engaging and memorable that it lives on almost a half century later, in the memories of succeeding generations of fans.

One aspect of Mary Poppins deserving of more attention than I can spare it here is her magical transgression of space: from her ability to extract an impossible quantity of material belongings from a tiny bag to her ability to enter into a world drawn in chalk on the sidewalk, ordinary physical limitations don’t apply to her.

This is in fact a common feature of British children’s fiction. You can enter Narnia through a wardrobe, Wonderland exists inside a rabbit hole, the train platform to access Hogwarts can be found in the space between other platforms, the TARDIS is bigger inside than out–English notions of whimsy question the limits of physical space.

By contrast, American children’s fiction questions not the boundaries of the physical world but the boundaries between the human and animal domains–American whimsy is all about talking animals. (With the pointed exception of Snoopy–an anthropomorphic dog who doesn’t talk, and lives atop a doghouse with TARDIS-like interior dimensions).

I’m not sure what to make of any of that, maybe some intrepid scholar will write a thesis on it someday.

I tend to misremember this sequence and mix it up with a similar scene in Willy Wonka involving the Fizzy Lifting Drinks. Both sequences entail childish adults encouraging real children into misbehaving in a way that results in floating into the ceiling.

Love Ed Wynn, by the way. One of these days I’m gonna stage an Ed Wynn film festival. Here he is with the Three Stooges (you’ll want to turn your volume down on this YouTube clip–and since WordPress has been deleting YouTube clips unexpectedly of late, if you need it, here’s the direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ucrt91zhn8)

A long time ago I had the ambition of being an animator, and when I first saw this sequence I remember gasping at the unprecedented technical achievement.

Well, “unprecedented” only because I was unfamiliar with earlier cartoon/live-action blending attempted by Disney and the Warner Brothers’ animators, among others. But it was rare enough to induce gasps in ordinary audiences back in the 1970s and early 1980s. Now, no longer.

This sequence used to just slay audiences. Nowadays its pioneering and daring blend of live action and animation is no longer audacious, much less terribly impressive in itself.

I’ve always admired the subtle romantic subplot between Mary and Bert. I don’t care that Dick Van Dyke’s faux-Cockney is so sloppy, because he’s so imminently charming in every other way. They both flirt–and refer to previous instances of flirtation, a romantic past! Nothing really comes of it, but that’s the point. I like the way it introduces the idea that children’s caretakers have lives of their own, existences that predate and extend beyond the immediate sphere of their childcare duties.

I remember thinking this at the time, back when I was a kid. I didn’t give a lot of thought to what Mary and Bert got up to in their time off, but I do recall thinking that if the world’s greatest nanny had a life beyond the nursery, then by implication it meant that the kids did too–that a child’s life was not bounded by their relationship to the adults in their life (parents, caretakers, teachers). This was a liberating thought.

Mary leaves at the end because the family no longer needs her–her work is done, and the parents are now able to better fulfill their family responsibilities.

This is most obviously represented by the father’s transformation from a grumpy banker into a delirious free-spirit. Speaking as a (former) stay-at-home dad, the film’s celebration of the importance of an engaged father has always resonated with me… But there’s something dangerous here. The film needs Mary Poppins to come in and “fix” this dysfunctional family because both parents are failing–not just the distant, autocratic father but the flighty and self-absorbed mother. And how does the film choose to depict her failure as a mother? By showing her obsessed with feminist causes–she’s too concerned with women’s rights to take care of her own children!

Oooooooohhhh…….

This is a movie from 1964–the year after Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique was published, in the pitch of the battles over birth control medicine, equal pay legislation, and the rise of Women’s Lib. The caricature of a 1920s suffragette does not emerge in this context without baggage.

This remains a touchy issue today. Being a man, I was always an outsider to the Mommy Wars. My choice to stay at home with my kids never implicated anything beyond myself and my family. Sure, the have been fitfully eruptions of activists advocating for stay-at-home dads, but these well-meaning idealists do a poor job even of connecting their own like-minded souls, much less having any larger cultural impact. I never once encounters anyone who viewed my decision to stay home as having any political significance at all. And, more importantly, I had the freedom to make that choice for myself either way without anyone thinking the less of me.

Had I stayed at work, no one would have accused me of being a bad father. For that matter, I could have actually been a bad father, a real-life Mr. Banks, and no one would have called me on it. But women are trapped either way. No matter what they choose or why, there will be others who will condemn them for it.

Calling anyone a bad mother is risky business, and to equate being a feminist activist seeking to expand women’s opportunities outside the home with being a “bad mother” is an especially regressive stance for what is otherwise a featherweight family comedy.

So I rankle a bit at this casual implication that Mrs. Banks is shirking her motherly responsibility because she’s misdirecting her energies into championing women’s rights, or that her suffragette struggle is to be ridiculed.

It’s a minor thing because the thrust of the film is about reforming Mr. Banks, and I’m not going to praise his pre-Poppins personality. He needed fixing. I just kinda wish that the delightfully ridiculous Glynis Johns could have been ridiculous in a different way.

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10 Responses The Nanny Diaries

Posted By dukeroberts : August 6, 2011 11:59 am

For the time period in which the movie was set, the crusading suffragette was a fair target. If she wasn’t out earning money to help pay for the family’s necessities and lifestyle she should have spent more time at home with her kids. I think that is true of any decade.

Posted By Doug : August 6, 2011 3:55 pm

David: “I’m not sure what to make of any of that, maybe some intrepid scholar will write a thesis on it someday.”
Another example of ‘impossibly expanded space’ is found in the fine-but-not-for-children book, “The Number of the Beast” by Robert Heinlein. A small spaceship has a magic ‘loo.
Heinlein was a scholar, and that was his thesis work on the subject.

Posted By Tom S : August 6, 2011 7:51 pm

@Duke
Why should her sole responsibilities be to children and family? If stay-at-home mothers weren’t allowed to be suffragettes, how would they ever have gotten any representation? Would you have the same objection if she had been out working for charity?

On another topic, there’s a bit in a Neil Gaiman story, where there’s a Mary Poppins book that never got written that I’ve always really liked:

‘She picks it up and opens it to the middle, and reads the story waiting for her. Jane and Michael go with Mary Poppins on her day off, to Heaven, and they meet the boy Jesus, who is still slightly scared of Mary Poppins because she was once his nanny, and the Holy Ghost, who complains that he has not been able to get his sheet properly white since Mary Poppins left, and God the Father, who says,

“There’s no making her do anything. Not her. She’s Mary Poppins”

“But you’re God” said Jane. “You created everybody and everything. They have to do what you say”

“Not her.” said God the Father once again, and he scratched his golden beard flecked with white. “I didn’t create her. She’s Mary Poppins”‘

(I’m sorry if this double posts, but it didn’t seem to go through the first time)

Posted By GeneRasputinHole : August 6, 2011 10:41 pm

I don’t think the film is making the argument that crusading for women’s rights in itself was making mrs. banks a bad mother. only that her doing it to the degree that it took her away from being able to interact with her children in any meaningful way WAS. both parents are being presented as having the same essential flaw, which is that they put their own interests and aspirations AHEAD of their children’s need for parental nurturing.
Surely a film that depicts such a strong female lead character as Mary Poppins can’t be against the idea of women as equals. Yes, it does make light of the behavior of Mrs. Banks and her suffragette companions, but not in a mean-spirited way- whenever I saw it growing up, I just thought of it as being playfully nostalgic about the time period in which it was set. I never thought of it as saying “silly women! votes are for men!” That never seemed to me to be the target of the ridicule, or the point of the story. It was that adults can get so caught up in jobs or causes that may even be important ones, but that if they neglect the most important responsibility they have, their children, then the other causes are indeed silly or selfish. It’s not arguing against women’s equality any more than it is arguing that men ought to all quit their jobs and fly kites all day. It is just making a plea for balance in the lives of parents, to remember to put in the time and care it take to raising their child and give them a loving environment to grow up in.

Posted By Marc Edward Heuck : August 7, 2011 9:41 am

I’ve always been fond of Mr. Banks. When he is “tricked” into taking the children to the bank, he is so full of (albeit very Britishly muted) glee as he explains his work to them, and why he thinks it is of such great consequence, and when he thinks his career is lost, you do feel badly for him because he just wants what all of us do – to be part of something that he can take credit for and will outlast him – and it’s just a matter of Bert reminding him that his legacy is in his children, not in his job.

Speaking of poignance, I get misty seeing Bert say, “Don’t stay away too long, Miss Poppins,” like a suitor who knows and kinda respects the fact that his love will not settle down, but still aches when she’s not around all the same.

It took me years to realize that John Hughes’ WEIRD SCIENCE is really just a more ribald retelling of MARY POPPINS, which I think is why that film too possesses a charm and sweetness that would not be expected from its premise, and why it’s maintained a following for so many years.

Posted By jbryant : August 7, 2011 3:37 pm

MARY POPPINS has given me a couple of great movie-going memories. I first saw it at a drive-in with my family when I was 6 or so. It must have made quite an impression, because the next big wind that came up found me leaping off the roof of the family Oldsmobile, umbrella in hand. To this day, I swear I flew around the yard for a minute. Years later, when my mom came for a visit to California, we went to see a sing-along screening of MARY POPPINS at the El Capitan theater. The singing of the audience may not have been that great, but the movie still was.

Posted By DBenson : August 8, 2011 2:27 pm

The suffragette thing was just a clever device. If Mrs. Banks had been preoccupied with social life, she would have come across as superficial and selfish — and perhaps an uncomfortable rebuke to matrons of any era. A career would have been too implausible for the period, and a tad controversial for even the 60′s. And to have her as a stay-at-home but incompetent mom, waiting to be improved or even supplanted by Mary Poppins, would be another movie altogether. As a suffragette, Mrs. Banks is busy doing something positive and socially acceptable (women who weren’t feminists still embraced the right to vote) that can still be played for laughs.

There are are couple of versions of how the “Sister Suffragettes” song came to be. The main ones:
– Walt Disney had trouble convincing Glynis Johns, who thought she was up for title part and not interested in Mrs. Banks. Walt Disney assured her they had a big number that was perfect for her . . . then ordered the Sherman brothers to write one fast. They reportedly reworked a discarded number intended for Mary.
– Ms. Johns accepted the part, later talking Disney into giving her character a number. Again, the Sherman brothers got the call and produced a new song.

Posted By Jenni : August 9, 2011 4:09 pm

I was always impressed with the casting dept. for their choices of the actors playing the father, Mr. Banks, and the son because they really looked like father and son, to me.

Posted By cozeph jotton : August 14, 2011 12:32 am

* Two random thoughts: Isn’t it astonishing that Julie Andrews’ two most famous roles were both very extreme ideotypes of “a woman who is better with kids than any woman could possibly be!” — and yet whereas TSOM is concerned with her path towards real fulfilled womanhood (if you’re THAT good with kids maybe being a nun isn’t the way to go!!) — whereas Mary Poppins will always be a supernatural figure — and will never be a normal human being — ultimately she’s a superheroine or good witch type …

* And the second thought is just whether there can EVER be such a thing as PURELY GOOD magic — or does ALL magic have a hint of lurking evil? … Or put another way, how far is the distance — as the nanny flies ha ha — from Mary Poppins to Billie Whitelaw!

Posted By dukeroberts : August 14, 2011 2:57 am

Oh gosh. Billie Whitelaw was like Satan’s Mary Poppins, wasn’t she? Creepy.

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