Mary Poppins - the only analysis you will ever need

Mary Poppins (1964) is a film in which the happy ending includes a man killing his boss and thereby securing promotion to the board of directors of an international bank. It is not your typical children’s film. 

I have set out below - at some length, I should warn you - the crystallised form of various thoughts I have had about this, my favourite film.

The Ironic Genius of Mary Poppins

I. IRONY

The irony of “Mary Poppins” is most immediately evident in the way that two of the songs are sung. (All the songs in the film are very good, but the way they are presented often takes them into the realms of excellence.)

First, we have “Sister Suffragette”. Let’s start with the lyrics:

Cast off the shackles of yesterday
Shoulder to shoulder into the fray
Our daughter's daughters will adore us
And they'll sing in grateful chorus
Well done sister suffragettes!

Stirring and well-chosen words, set to a suitably catchy yet martial theme. How many parents get their little girls to sing the song as they march about the living room, all the while congratulating themselves for raising strong independent women?

But the song is sung by Winifred Banks, a woman who is clearly far from being a strong independent woman herself. On the contrary, she is entirely dependent on her husband and quite happily subservient to him. She relies on her staff of strong and capable women – the cook, the maid, a series of nannies – but she is no feminist role model. But note that the film does not punish her for this. Her emotional journey is not to learn to live up to her egalitarian ideals.

What does this mean? Are to believe that Votes for Women! is not a worthy cause? Of course not. Universal adult suffrage is up there with motherhood and adult pie: it’s a slam dunk of a moral crusade. That was as true in 1964 as it is today.

No, the film is far more subtle than that. For the moment, let’s just note that Mrs Banks first sings the song in the midst of a domestic crisis to which her dilettante-ish political hobbies have rendered her oblivious.

(Before leaving “Sister Suffragette”, remember that “Mrs Pankhurst”, the one name that occurs in the song itself, ended up as a Conservative Parliamentary candidate, and that it was, as we all know, a Conservative Government that extended the franchise to women on equal terms to men. Do not suppose that we should be ignorant of these facts when listening to the song.)

The second song is “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank”. This too is a song in which the lyrics and tune are potentially entirely sincere, but their message in the film is undercut by the messenger. Unlike the wonders of the advance of female suffrage, however, the wonders of international finance capitalism are not taught in schools and so perhaps the point needs a little more justification.

The messenger problem is obvious. We have a set of ridiculously pompous men in suits, all of whom are greedy and grasping, and one of whom is particularly old and silly (Mr Dawes senior). We can see that that Mr Dawes senior is practically salivating at the prospect of getting his hands on Michael Banks’ tuppence. We are right to distrust anything these characters say.

But this is “Mary Poppins”. That is to say: it’s more complicated than that. Listen to the message that George Banks gives to Michael – and recall that George Banks is his father and not a man whom the film leads us to think should be generally disbelieved.

You see, Michael, you'll be part of railways through Africa,
Dams across the Nile, fleets of ocean Greyhounds,
Majestic, self-amortizing canals,
Plantations of ripening tea!

All from tuppence …

Here you have the romance of international capitalism in a nutshell. All these wondrous things – these marvels of the modern world – these improvements in commodious living for the scattered peoples of the earth – all are financed by the recycling of savings into loans or, to be specific, by banks. When you put your money in a bank in a world of globalised finance, you help, in your small, tuppence-y way, to create employment, opportunity and great big amazing things in the less-developed parts of the world. In the words of George Banks, you will be a “part of” that. Is that not worth a little song?

(Here, and I digress only slightly, we see the contrast between the True Believing Socialist and the True Believing Capitalist. The True Believing Socialist pays his taxes happily, feeling that he has done a good and noble thing because, although it hurts him, that money will go to schools’n’hospitals, and he knows that he is therefore a better person than the True Believing Capitalist. The True Believing Capitalist invests her money happily, knowing that she is no better than the next person because it doesn’t hurt her a bit to do so, but happy also because she knows her money is helping to build a better world, full of better schools’n’hospitals, as well as lovely railways and canals. Which is a more pleasant and liberal attitude? I leave that as an exercise to the reader. Is that even the right question to ask? I leave that as another exercise.)

Two songs, therefore, which can be sung straightforwardly and sincerely, but which the film gives to us with a slant and a level of irony. What idiot said that Americans can’t do irony?

But the irony goes deeper than that.

II. FEED THE BIRDS?

Mary Poppins is an important character in the film. (The clue is in the title.) She is “practically perfect in every way”. And yet, as Michael Banks very quickly spots, “We’d better keep an eye on this one. She's tricky.”

You want tricky? How about a lullaby that starts “Stay awake, don't rest your head” and continues in the same vein? Mary Poppins tells untruths with a straight face: for example, she tells George Banks that it was his idea to take the children to see his work. Indeed, if you listen carefully you will notice that very little that Poppins says in the film is entirely straightforward: e.g., to Michael, “You know best, as usual”, or to the children after their outing in the chalk picture, “A respectable person like me in a horse race? How dare you suggest such a thing”. The film even ends (spoiler alert!) with Poppins, her eyes filling with tears, being caught out in another untruth:

Umbrella:  That's gratitude for you. Didn't even say good-bye.

Mary Poppins:  No, they didn't.

Umbrella:  Look at them. You know, they think more of their father than they do of you.

Mary Poppins:  That's as it should be.

Umbrella:  Well, don't you care?

Mary Poppins:  Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking.

Umbrella:  Is that so? Well, I'll tell you one thing, Mary Poppins, you don't fool me a bit.

Mary Poppins:  Oh, really?

Umbrella:  Yes, really. I know exactly how you feel about these children. And if you think I'm gonna keep my mouth shut any longer, I--

Mary Poppins:  That will be quite enough of that, thank you.

Can we believe a word she says?

Before I answer that question, let’s look at the biggest set-piece sermon Poppins delivers, namely the wonderful song “Feed the Birds”. No device in the fields of sound or cinematography is left unused in the effort to persuade us that this is a sincerely delivered and important moral lesson.

But what is the lesson? That we should be feeding the pigeons of London? As ane fule kno, the pigeons of London have a lovely life. You might as well collect old clothes and cans of corned beef for the poor bankers of Goldman Sachs. “Feed the birds and what have you got? Fat birds”: Mr Dawes senior’s riposte is unanswerable. Man and pigeon live happily in harmony without little old bird women to help them.

No, you have to look deeper. What does the little old bird woman actually do when she comes to the steps of St Paul’s (in the heart of the City of London, just beside that bank that finances railways through Africa)? What do the saints and apostles see her doing? That’s right: she sells her wares. She engages in capitalism. “Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag”: the price she charges for these crumbs is insistently repeated.

The saints and apostles smile when we care for the bird woman, not the birds. When we see the bird woman in the film, she is not the clear-voiced Julie Andrews, but an unappealing old woman. The children – and us the audience – have to be brought to care for her. “Feed the birds and what have you got? Fat birds”? Perhaps, but there are two sides to every capitalist transaction, as Mr Dawes should know. The crumbs make fat birds – but what about the tuppence? That tuppence is going to feed an old woman who has been reduced to selling overpriced bags of crumbs in the street. I doubt it will make her very fat.

Note that no one asks us to give money to the little old bird woman. She is not to be a beggar. Instead, we are asked to pay attention to her (“listen, listen, she’s calling to you”) and to trade with her.

Perhaps you only care about the birds. That is the message that children susceptible to sentimentality and scared of poor old ladies will hear. So be it, but taking that message to heart will at least help the old bird woman, and help her in a real and practical way.

On the other hand, if you don’t buy her spiel about the little hungry bird-babies, perhaps you think there’s a certain hypocrisy involved: you are being asked to buy crumbs you don’t want for birds who don’t need them. But that hypocrisy allows the bird woman to maintain the self-respect and dignity that comes from having earned her money honestly. That’s no small thing, especially in the City of London.

Mrs Banks wants to give that woman a vote. Mr Banks just ignores her. Only Mary Poppins asks us to notice her and to engage in trade with her on her terms.

This, then, is another paean to capitalism, but of a very different kind from "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank". Poppins asks us to welcome into our hearts a capitalism overtly based on a sentimental concern for little bird babies or, more fundamentally, based on a concern for the poor – and not just a concern for their material welfare, but concern for their dignity and self-respect too.

What Mary Poppins is selling us here is, as Michael Banks well knows, tricky. It’s a subtle business, this thing that we might call Capitalism on the Steps of the Cathedral. It is a capitalism that knows what capitalism is for. A self-aware form of capitalism.

III. ON THE ROOFTOPS OF LONDON

Staying with capitalism for a moment, we should notice that the wonderful things that the Dawes’ bank finances are a well-chosen set: Nile dams, African railways, ocean-going ships, tea. This is international capitalism in the age of the British Empire.

Mr Banks starts the film telling us what a pleasant life he leads in the heart in the British Empire. But it is not just pleasant for him. No one that we see is oppressed or exploited in this world. The servants are respected and valued. Even the chimney sweeps make a decent living.

But this is Mary Poppins: there is always more to see. No, not a grubby underside of oppression, but something rather more interesting.

You will recall that the main characters go up on the roof of the Bankses’ house. There Bert shows them the amazing sight of Imperial London in all its glory: “on the rooftops of London, coo, what a sight”, he confides, “There's the whole world at your feet. And who gets to see it, but the birds, the stars and the chimney sweeps?” (Here, perhaps, is another clue that we should not pity the birds: do we pity the stars?)

London, we see, is unintentionally beautiful. It has a beauty hidden from the movers and shakers on the ground below but revealed to the lucky chimney-sweeps above. Even the smoke from the chimneys is part of the beauty. Is there a better metaphor for capitalism than a city made beautiful by a million individual choices motivated by nothing more than enlightened self-interest?

(Is London “the whole world” as Bert suggests? Near enough. The Bankses never leave London – the children have quite enough fun jumping into (or pretending they are in?) a chalk picture of the countryside. They need never leave London. Mr Banks too can finance tea-planting on the foothills of the Himalayas without leaving his desk. Only Poppins leaves London, and she does so with tears in her eyes.)

The importance of the capitalism of the British Empire of which London is the capital – nay, the whole world – is reinforced in the course of perhaps the most inventive and powerful passage in the whole film. I refer of course to the scenes that culminate in George Banks’ shocking dismissal.

I will come back to these scenes below. But for the moment it suffices to recall that Mr Banks has been called before the directors of the Dawes’ bank in order that, as he is well aware, he will be ceremonially ruined. And at that point, he manages a joke.

Mr. Dawes: […] In 1773, an official of this bank, unwisely loaned a large sum of money, to finance a shipment of tea to the American colonies. Do you know what happened?

Mr. Banks: Yes, sir. Yes, I think I do. Uh, uh, as the ship lay in Boston harbour, uh, a party of the colonists dressed as Red Indians, uh, boarded the vessel, behaved very rudely, and, and threw all the tea overboard. This made the tea unsuitable for drinking, even for Americans.

That joke (in an American film, let us recall) immediately makes us think of England’s place in the world in 1910. It also gives weight to something Mr Banks has said, not long before, that otherwise might seem a bit silly.

“A man has dreams of walking with giants. To carve his niche in the Edifice of Time.” In another film, we might be encouraged to laugh at someone who thinks that working in a bank is carving a niche in the Edifice of Time. But we are not laughing at Banks at the moment he delivers the line: his life is in ruins, and we are meant to feel for him. Then, in that dimly-lit boardroom later that evening, we see that he is right. His bank (his father’s bank before him) financed the very cargo that started the American War of Independence. That’s a big deal. Those railways through Africa are a pretty big deal too.

At this point, it’s worth comparing George Banks with the other prominent fictional George who is a sympathetic representation of finance capitalism, namely George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. Bailey runs what we in the UK would call a building society: his defence of his work would not be an appeal to the romance of plantations of ripening tea but rather the provision of modest homes to modest people. Now, that’s good work too (isn’t it?), but of a very different kind from Banks’. Indeed, we are repeatedly told that Bailey’s life is small, circumscribed and very far from leaving any niches on the Edifice of Time. The moral of Bailey’s life is that that’s all OK because “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” The universe – in the shape of Clarence – notices even the smallest kindnesses.

George Banks is quite different. He doesn’t learn to love his smallness. On the contrary, we learn to rejoice in his bigness and even to celebrate his promotion to the small coterie of giants in the world of finance.

IV. TO BE AN ENGLISHMAN IN 1910

You would be missing a lot of the point of the film if you missed its support for various traditional values. “Tradition, discipline and rules”: Mr Banks sings, and Mary Poppins agrees.

I have given you the film’s nuanced but ultimately supportive view of capitalism above. For another such value, let us take masculinity. We have seen Mrs Banks’ proto-feminism held up to gentle scrutiny, but more obviously we have the example of Mr Banks himself. When Banks prepares to face his fate, he does so, one might say, like a man. The children give him the fateful tuppence, and he thanks them. He's about to be ruined, but he won't show fear or ask for sympathy, and he tries to protect his children.

“You've got your mother to look after you. And Mary Poppins, and Constable Jones and me. Who looks after your father? Tell me that. When something terrible happens, what does he do? Fends for himself, he does. Who does he tell about it? No one! Don't blab his troubles at home. He just pushes on at his job, uncomplaining and alone and silent.” That's how Bert puts it to the children. Whether or not that is entirely true as a matter of description (even Bert has to use irony in delivering a sermon), it is The Magnificent Seven-like in both its portrayal of strong, silent masculinity and its stress on reverence for one’s father: remember the scene with Charles Bronson reprimanding children for calling their fathers cowards?

Capitalism, masculinity – and then there’s bourgeois family life. Mary Poppins is a creature (“Perhaps it’s a witch”, Michael says) with inexhaustible magical powers. Yet all these powers are devoted to making slight improvements to the home life of a middle-class British family that was not unpleasant to start with. That is clearly a worthy use of her powers, the film tells us, even though it comes at some personal cost to her emotional well-being.

Moreover, it is not just the Banks family. In a mysterious line early on, Bert sings “But I feel what's to happen, all happened before”, and we feel that he is right. The film ends with Bert saying, “Good-bye, Mary Poppins. Don't stay away too long.” What Bert is saying is that there are other middle-class families with a hard-working father, an indulgent wife and 2.4 far-seeing children who deserve the minute attentions of the supernatural. We also see that Bert’s romance with Poppins must remain forever unconsummated because those families comes first. And yet we see that this is as it must be.

In the joyful exuberance of the end of the film, Mr Banks is “a-kissing” Mrs Banks and the children’s lack of gratitude to Mary Poppins goes unpunished. Moral: the happiness of the bourgeois family is the highest good.

So there we have it: capitalism, the Age of Men, hearth and home, the British Empire – all’s well with the world in 1910?

Not quite.

One simply cannot set a film in the heart of the happy British Empire in 1910 – and openly tell us that it is 1910, rather than a pseudo-Edwardian neverland – without placing a layer of irony between the characters and the audience. It’s not as leaden an irony as setting something in that glorious summer of 1914; no, it’s a better and more subtle irony than that.

When we know that it is 1910, we can’t help wondering how many of the prefects at Michael’s school are soon to be facing German machine guns with nothing but Mr Banks’ stiff-upper lipped masculinity and well-thumbed copies of A Shropshire Lad to protect them. We know that female suffrage was the fruit of female labour during a world war, and that the contribution of suffragettes is open to debate. We know that the Dawes’ bank’s investments are no longer on parts of the globe coloured pink. Mr Dawes senior says “While stand the banks of England, England stands. When fall the banks of England, England falls!” while, with more irony, he fails to stand and succeeds in falling (Britain? England? Quite the appropriate Imperial nonchalance appropriate to 1910), but we know that England fell and those tea-despising Americans took over Pax Britannica.

What do we do with that knowledge when we watch the film? Does it diminish Mr Banks’ success, or cast a prospective shadow over the happiness of the family at the end of the film? Does it undercut or even negate the celebration of tradition, discipline and rules, stiff-upper-lipped masculinity and the bourgeois family?

I think not: no more than Mrs Banks’ personality undermines the case for female suffrage. Remember that the film ends with the title character suppressing her tears, but it’s still a happy ending. This family – this world – may well end in tears too, but that is not to say that it is not a good and happy place.

In order to understand this, we need to see precisely how the good things that the film shows us – Votes for Women!, capitalism in all its forms, Imperial London at the height of its glory, real men carving Niches in the Edifice of Time – fit together.

V. A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR

If there is one obvious moral that the film as a whole presents, it is that “just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”. What does that really mean?

First and most obviously, it means that the medicine has to go down. “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun”: the jobs must be done; the nursery has to be tidied. “The robin feathering his nest has very little time to rest”: Poppins does not tell him to take things easy; no, that robin has to carry on with his work.

The same is true of George Banks. The film never tells him to stop working. The happy ending is not about him giving up the bank to be an artisan baker, or even to start up a special ethical bank for the hitherto unbanked chimney-sweeping and bird-seed-selling classes. As I have said, his promotion is a cause for joy.

So what is the spoonful of sugar? A metaphor, clearly. But a metaphor for what?

Here we reach what I consider to be the fundamental message of the film. Mary Poppins arrives to teach the children – and their parents too – and indeed all of us – the importance of seeing that all the good things of this Earth will pass away, but they are nonetheless good and to be enjoyed. Moreover, we must see this clearly: it is right that we are able to step outside our commitments to our work or to noble causes, and to see that they are not the ultimate good things in life. But that is not to say that they are not good things.

This is most clear in the case of George Banks and his reaction to his dismissal. The sequence is illustrative of the point. After having prepared himself to face his fate at home, we see him walking through the quiet and deserted streets of London, and finally entering the overwhelming inner sanctum of the Bank. Again, no effect of sound or cinematography is spared in this sequence, first showing us a man, alone but brave, embarking on a solemn business, and then in showing us the might and power of what he is facing; when he finally meets the board, the directors are seated in dim light in a huge room, rather more convincingly scary than the baddies in the latest Star Wars films.

Then the final humiliation. We see Banks’ buttonhole ripped up, his umbrella turned inside out (a director calls out “No!” before this awful step is taken) and his hat punched through. It is an inventive way for a man to be disgraced, making an outward display of his fallen position in society. We are meant to be shocked, and any child of right feeling will be shocked when seeing it for the first time. We are meant to feel that Banks has been ruined.

But he reacts by realising that his position at the bank, for all its many undoubted virtues, its opportunities to build railways in Africa and to carve niches in the Edifice of Time, is not as important as the love of his family. This is his redemption: to see his dreams in ruins and, wonderful dreams though they are, to realise that there is more than his dreams that he should care about.

Banks completes the evening by spending tuppence on paper and string and mending the children’s kite. Capitalism provides the materials, we might say, but love provides the labour.

Mrs Banks shows us that she too is able to step outside her commitments, by sacrificing her Votes for Women! sash to be a tail for the kite. She started the film neglecting her family for her cause; she ends it not by neglecting her cause for her family – she has not abandoned the cause of universal suffrage any more than Mr Banks has abandoned his career – but rather by seeing where the cause fits into the grand scheme of things, a scheme that puts love in a higher place than even such wonderful things as banking and voting.

Finally, we meet the directors of the bank flying their kites, and we hear that Mr Banks’ wooden-leg-named-Smith joke has killed Mr Dawes senior, last seen floating ceiling-wards à la Uncle Albert. Banks offers his condolences but is told by Mr Dawes junior, “Oh, no, nonsense. Nothing to be sorry about. Never seen him happier in his life.” Even death needs to be put into perspective.

Capitalism, equality, life - these are great things, but not, ultimately, the most important things.

VI. THAT’S AS IT SHOULD BE

Let me draw the threads together.

Irony is inherent in Mary Poppins. We see this first from “Sister Suffragette”, towards the beginning of the film. But the song tells us that this is an affectionate irony: we are not to dismiss noble causes because of their supporters, nor to dismiss people for their failures to live up to their ideals. We can hold in our heads both the importance of the ideal and affection for the real.

The real is valuable. Capitalism (carried out properly), work and the whole panoply of tradition, discipline and rules are Good Things. So are political ideals, such as universal suffrage. They are not the ultimate ends of life, but they are good nonetheless.

Moreover, they are good even though they pass away. This is particularly clear of unambiguously good things: Mary Poppins’ time with the children must end; childhood famously “slips like sand through a sieve”; and even life on earth itself – that of Mr Dawes senior – will end. Indeed, the whole world – the whole Age of Men that the Banks family inhabit and enjoy – will be swept away by the World War that we know, as the Bankses do not, will shortly be upon them. Or perhaps it is better to think of it being washed away, like chalk paintings on a rainy London street.

There’s a strain of existential thought that holds that the only appropriate attitude for people to adopt to life given the knowledge that they are insignificant entities in a vast and uncaring universe is an ironic detachment, recognising that life is ultimately absurd.

That is not the irony that Mary Poppins teaches us to embrace. The impermanence of the valuable things in life is not a reason to consider that life is, at root, absurd or meaningless. Irony in the sense of some level of detachment from even the important parts of everyday life is, so the film tells us, part of a life fully lived: Mr and Mrs Banks experience moral growth by realising that their work and social justice commitments are not ultimate commitments, that is to say, by adopting a more ironic attitude towards them.

But, contrary to the existentialist’s cold irony, Mary Poppins give us a warm and affectionate irony based on there being something that stands behind the good but transient things of this world, something which is of ultimate value and to which the other good things of life should bend the knee. That, quite clearly, is love.

I asked earlier whether we can believe anything Poppins says. Yes, we can. When Poppins says “That’s as it should be” – that the children think more of their father than of her – she is speaking the truth. The family ends the film recognising that love is more important than anything else. That’s as it should be.

September 2017