Mary Poppins (1964) is Secretly a Movie About Work, Not Just Magic

Guest post alert! Jeremy here, and I’m very excited to welcome a talented new writer to the team this month: Nellie Beckett, a Baltimore native and multi-faceted storyteller whom I’ve been lucky to know for a couple years now. We’re both volunteer readers for our beloved Sidewalk Film Festival’s screenplay competition, and I always love trading notes with her every spring about the gold and the turds alike. Nellie pitched me this piece a couple months ago, and I knew that it would not only be brilliant, but it would be the perfect thing for Labor Day weekend. (I was right.) Take it away, Nellie!

Mary Poppins was one of the only VHS tapes I owned as a child. My mother was famously strict on screens; we didn’t have cable, we occasionally had limited access to PBS, and we were only allowed to watch The Wizard of Oz once a year so that it would still be “special.” But she let us kids watch Mary Poppins an unlimited number of times.

After more than a quarter century, I felt I was prepared to watch it for the first time with adult eyes. But what struck me on this viewing was not the proto-feminism  or the deep Jungian symbolism or even PL Travers’ obvious occult influence (although I could write long articles on any of those topics). I was compelled by the fact that, at its core, Mary Poppins is a movie about work.*

Before Mary arrives, we meet our narrator, working-class hero Bert. Gallons of ink have been spilled about Dick Van Dyke’s atrocious Cockney accent, which to my disappointment didn’t even include any Cockney rhyming slang, but there’s much more to this character. Bert is playing a Rube Goldberg-esque instrument, entertaining the Londoners of Cherry Tree Lane with customized poems and songs and passing the hat for “a copper or two.” Bert is the classic independent contractor, supplementing his art and music with the grueling work of chimney sweeping. A sweep is as lucky as lucky can be, he tells us—he sings the praises of the autonomy and dignity of his work. “I does what I likes, and I likes what I do,” he declares in “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” The life of a sweep is tough, sure, but it also offers a bird’s eye view of a magical London.

Once we zoom into 17 Cherry Tree Lane, we see that the Banks family is in crisis. Katie Nanna, the nanny, is quitting. The children have run away. The household staff, resentful of their extra tasks, is in an uproar. And flighty suffragette Mrs. Banks is too concerned with her activism to notice.** Mr. Banks posts an ad for a new nanny, and Mary floats in on the east wind. She immediately negotiates her contract with Mr. Banks—few children’s movies ever have this candor about the negotiations of work let alone the job description or the boss/worker relationship.

Mary’s first order of business after being hired is directing the kids to tidy the nursery. With the wisdom of years of childcare and teaching behind me, I sensed that the children are longing for the benevolent authority of meaningful and visibly productive work. “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.”*** This sentiment seems fully sprung from the psyche of Uncle Walt himself, who allegedly had a particular soft spot for his highest-grossing feature film.

When Bert isn’t sweeping or singing and playing, he’s creating a gorgeous pastel tableaux on the sidewalks of Cherry Tree Lane. Bert, Mary, and the kids jump into one of his chalk drawings, and they’re transformed into Edwardian dress-up outfits. It’s not just a fantasia. It’s a jolly holiday—a break from work. Mary has a parasol, Bert has a boater, and their perfect white outfits don’t suffer a speck of chalk or mud from the racetrack. The dream is a day of leisure at an empty carousel and café.

The workaholic white-collar dad is an eternal archetype, and Mr. Banks adds some extra nominative determinism: He works in Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, after all. Work gives meaning and shape to life while the absence of meaningful tasks causes the most grief. Even the old beggar woman on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral has a task (feeding the birds).

Mary is often described as sweetness and light, but even as a child, this felt wrong to me. While she’s not as prickly in the film as she is in the book, she's not at all cuddly here, even as background characters sing her praises. When she packs her bags to leave at the end, Jane plaintively sniffs “Don’t you love us?” Mary responds: “And what would happen if I loved all the children I cared for?”

She’s leaving her work at work. Spit spot! Her work is a calling, sure, but she still clocks out. Can you have a work/life balance when it’s not even clear if you’re mortal?

Work might be fun, magical, fulfilling, or a grind, but it’s the fabric of our adult lives regardless. And Mary Poppins illustrates it more clearly than any children’s movie I’ve ever seen.

*It seems like a fitting film to write about for Labor Day weekend, even if it is an American holiday!

**In the early feminist blog days, I’d see “Sister Suffragette” hailed as a feminist anthem. While I am eternally grateful for the brave women who fought for the vote, Mrs. Banks is not necessarily a serious or sympathetic character. She’s more akin to that classic Dickensian archetype Mrs. Jellyby, a mother foolishly concerned with the problems of the world while her family suffers.

***“A Spoonful of Sugar” echoes an earlier classic Disney song, “Whistle While You Work,” from Snow White.