“Mary Poppins”: Radical Elevation in the 1960s

Anyone with a childhood penchant for Julie Andrews’s Mary Poppins or a grown up’s interest in popular culture, reception studies, youth studies, film history, or the 1960s will find Leslie H. Abramson’s new book, Mary Poppins: Radical Elevation in the 1960s, engaging and provocative. Abramson innovatively situates that decade as the overarching interpretative paradigm for Walt Disney’s film adaptation of Mary Poppins (1964). Earlier scholarship traced the film’s intergenerational connections between the burgeoning women’s movements of the 1910s and the 1960s, turning, as Anne McTeer does, to explore the film’s portrayal of the 1960s ideal of the nuclear family. Building on this scholarship, Abramson draws a differently rich picture of how this blockbuster film encapsulated the decade’s concerns in ways that may not be immediately apparent.From one perspective, this book can be read as taking as its apotheosis a debate between film historians about whether historical films are a product of their own era more so than the era of their source text or the era they depict. Abramson argues that the adaptation and reception of Mary Poppins was “strongly shaped by its historical context” by placing the film at the center of the “youth-associated concerns and attitudes of the 1960s” (6). The book traces fascinating parallels between the book’s original setting and production in the post-Depression 1930s, the Disney film adaptation’s updated setting in Edwardian 1910, and the film production’s own decade—but with an eye always towards the 1960s. Indeed, Abramson is most interested in exploring how the decade’s antiestablishmentarianism, counterculture, and social movements manifest through the narrative of the film’s adaptation and reception. In doing so, the book situates Mary Poppins as a powerful—and likely underappreciated—influence upon the baby boomer generation.The first three chapters explore the source text’s transition from page to screen, enabling Abramson to trace the extent to which creative tensions about the adaptation and reception of texts underpin this process. The first chapter puts forward a compelling case for a reading of the film’s adaptation as being oriented towards the anti-war, civil rights, and feminist movements of the 1960s, as well as drug cultures and the social upheaval surrounding the nuclear family. The second chapter argues that the unorthodox lifestyle of Australian expatriate author P. L. Travers, who penned the original Mary Poppins book series between 1934 and 1988, anticipated the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. In a narrative that may be familiar to audiences from Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks (2013), the third chapter explores Walt Disney’s turbulent, decades-long mission to secure the rights to the text and its subsequent adaptation.The next three chapters advance Abramson’s reading of the film adaptation and its reception, centering much of her analysis around the characterization of the Banks children. The fourth chapter juxtaposes the film’s depiction of the past against the audience’s experience of the 1960s, deftly comparing Dick Van Dyke’s characterization of Bert with folk singer Bob Dylan, British colonial history with the Cold War, and the Banks family patriarch with the Organisational Man. The fifth chapter observes the manifestation of greater tension between the children’s emergent “radical elevation” and the Banks patriarch’s persistent authoritarianism. Finally, the sixth chapter envisages the film’s immense popularity as a rationale for exploring how its reception encapsulated “contemporary tensions between the mainstream and counterculturalism” (95). While Abramson identifies some older commentators as unsettled by the film’s incipient feminism and resistant to an adaptation they interpreted as unfaithful and sanitized, she sees greater identification with the antiestablishmentarianism, counterculture, and social movements of the 1960s as having mediated its reception among youth audiences.Although some of the parallels Abramson observes between the film’s adaptation and reception during the 1960s may already be evident to keen-eyed Mary Poppins audiences, fans, and scholars, other insights are stunning in their perceptiveness. This book extends, for example, the existing reading of Admiral Boom as an arbiter and relic of the old colonial order to observe how the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank’s Board of Directors continue to express avowed investment in colonialism. Abramson’s investigation of the film’s reception also presents archival evidence about the resonances that youth audiences found between the film and contemporary drug cultures, including a button pin emblazoned with “MARY POPPINS IS A JUNKIE” (105). This breadth ensures that the book moves well beyond discussion of well-trodden sequences as “Sister Suffragette,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” and “Step in Time.”Most often, Abramson reads expressions of resistance to and transcendence of mainstream society, culture, and politics in Mary Poppins. This is what she describes as the film’s “radical elevation,” as per the book’s title. Only the racism inherent to the use of blackface in the “Step in Time” sequence is read truly critically. Yet other scholars have suggested less generous readings, instead finding traces of pro-imperialism and anti-feminism in the film’s representation of its chimney sweeps, suffragettes, and nuclear family. Although Abramson discusses how Mary Poppins operated as an arbiter of Disney’s cultural imperialism and product commercialization, her focus on the film’s subversive qualities somewhat elides media scholar Janet Wasko’s conclusions about the growing importance of the cultural industries to the Disney enterprise. Abramson does concede less transcendence in the film’s conclusion, however, noting:Additionally, Abramson acknowledges that the Poppins character of the novels “both subverts and upholds the imperialist system” (27). Perhaps the same may be said of the film’s narrative.Mary Poppins: Radical Elevation in the 1960s advances a convincing argument indicative of how and why this Disney film captured the decade’s zeitgeist in ways that later Disney live-action animated films such as Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) would not. In an argument that brings an additional layer of depth to scholarship about Mary Poppins, Abramson details the moments where the 1960s permeates the film’s adaptation and reception with clarity and originality. This makes the book vital reading for film students and scholars, especially those interested in the baby boomers, the 1960s, and youth culture. When revisiting the history, adaptation, and reception of such an influential bastion of popular culture as Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins, the enchantment lies in myriad readings.