Soots Me Just Fine

The basic point behind ‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface is a simple one: the Mary Poppins movies, past and present, don’t do enough to distance themselves from the racial attitudes of the 1930s and 40s, when the Mary Poppins books were written and set and when early Disney movies and animated shorts openly played on the tropes minstrel shows.

Unless we learn something radically different about quantum mechanics and/or relativity at some point, the past is the past, and it will always be as it was. The only thing that we can do about it now is either recall, forget or misremember it, and it’s pretty much a given that any one of us must do some combination of those three. But pretty much anything else we chose to do with the past is optional; such as constantly worry that it's due to make a comeback.

While ‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface purports to be a brief lesson in the history of the novels that birthed the movies and the media company that created them, it reads as a sort of ghost story, conjuring up supposedly frightening images from the distant past to indict a movie of the present, not for trafficking in those images, but for not making a clean enough break with them.

By the end of the piece, I wondered what I was intended to get out of it. Unlike activists who loudly decry things that they see as harmful, there was no statement that there was anything really wrong with it. Even the idea that the bad old days may make a return was only lightly touched upon; the final sentence references “Nothing’s gone forever, only out of place,” and leaves it at that. Which left the whole piece seeming bland and watered down.Which perhaps is what drove the impression that it was meant the be a takedown of Mary Poppins Returns.

But it wasn’t really even strong enough for that. If there were any real, substantive themes that ran through the piece, they were that Mary Poppins author P. L. Travers never recanted, only buried, the racism present in the books and that the Walt Disney Company had no qualms about presenting the biases of the day as entertainment. Which is fine as far as it goes. But Ms. Travers has been dead for the past two decades, and there are few, if any, indications that the Walt Disney Company has been working to poison the minds of America’s youth with imagery older than their grandparents.

And so the whole thing comes across as yet another exercise in the idea that in order to transcend the past, it must not be forgotten but expunged through active denunciations. That words like “pickaninny” and “Hottentot” must never be allowed to slip from the collective memory, lest they somehow become fashionable again. (As an aside, I’m somewhat fascinated with the apparent idea that there is some secretive cabal of people who are waiting for the racially-charged terms of the past to fade from society’s memory, simply so that they can be recycled into slurs that allow the bigoted to communicate in public without being caught at it.)

The only way that much of the past can ever live up to the standard of the present is via forgetfulness or forgiveness. Neither of which some people seem particularly inclined to give. But remembering and holding a grudge does what, exactly? The dead don’t care what we think of them, and can’t bring themselves into line with our ideals, even if they do. And while there may be virtue in vigilance, it comes at a cost; few look forward to never being able to rest.

Despite the fact that the World Wide Web is vast to the border of infinity, ‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface seems like a waste. There is nothing in it to act upon and the facts it conveys don't leave one enriched for having learned them. The notoriety it garnered its author is unlikely to last as long as the images it claims are only out of place.