Saving Mary Poppins

[calimac]

Mary Poppins first taught me the harm that a movie adaptation can do to a book, and the hollowness and meaninglessness of saying that "the book is still on the shelf."

I was seven when the Disney movie was released. It might be the first movie I ever saw in a theater. I loved it. It was bright, witty, and warm-hearted, and the songs were terrific.

Not too long afterwards, my mother, for whom the first two books, Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Comes Back, had been childhood favorites, gave me copies as a present.

I didn't like them at all, though I didn't tell my mother that. The reason is that they were entirely different from the movie. Yes, yes, London, Banks family, mysterious nanny, magical adventures. But that's just plot. It was the spirit of the story that was different, which gave me an unpleasant feeling of "What is this? This isn't the Mary Poppins I know." Because what I knew was the movie.

The basic difference is that Disney had decided that a spoonful of sugar would make the medicine go down. The movie was sweet where the books are sour. Book-Mary is much stricter and more distant than Movie-Mary; yet, oddly, the children are much more devoted to her. Reading the books after the movie was like taking a swig of what you think is orange juice and getting grapefruit juice instead, and offering them to a kid who liked the movie was like serving meat loaf made from another recipe instead of the one he knows and likes, both unpleasant experiences I'd actually had.

You may be thinking, but movies and books are always different. Well, this is how I learned that. I was seven, remember. What I also learned is that you set your standards by what you know. If you know the movie, your standard will be the movie, and it's the book you have to try to assimilate. Whether you'd have liked the book better or not if that was what you knew first, you'll never know and it doesn't matter.

Here's somebody in spring 2001 trying to explain that about The Lord of the Rings.

In the case of Mary Poppins, it wasn't until some 15 years later, when I was taking a college class in children's literature and revisiting other childhood reads, some of which were favorites I thought I'd outgrown, that I re-read the books and was able better to appreciate them for what they were - because, after so long, the movie's impact had faded from my mind. It no longer stood in the way.

They're still not favorites of mine, though. Would I have liked them better if I'd read them before the movie? I liked the other books of her childhood that my mother gave me, in particular the Pooh books, which, thank the Lord, I read before Disney poured several heaping spoonfuls of sugar all over them.

I don't know, but I might have. I suspect that P.L. Travers was thinking of me, and children like me, when she bristled so at the changes Disney made to her characters and her tale. She knew that it doesn't matter if the book is on the shelf, if the movie is in the head. It doesn't matter how good the movie is - in fact, the better the movie as a movie, the more harm it can do - if it doesn't replicate the spirit of the book.

This is why I was so eager to see the new movie Saving Mr. Banks, which I did on Saturday. I wanted to see what the Disney people would do to that story. In the new movie, Travers gets some of her innings in - much of this was taken from audio tapes of the actual scripting sessions - but, whether she did so in real life or not, in the movie she never gets to explain why this is so important.

Instead, Saving Mr. Banks is a "curmudgeon redeemed" story. The closest parallel I know is Billy Crystal's Mr. Saturday Night. Like it, Saving Mr. Banks is shot through with flashbacks attempting to explain how the curmudgeon got that way. Unfortunately, as P.L. Travers was a real person, and real people are not that simple, the movie never gets the causes and the effects to line up, despite heavily rewriting both from history. The flashbacks become a kind of giant non-sequitur that feels as if it's about somebody else. (And Colin Farrell as her father is playing Wastrel 101.)

Movie-Travers grouses and whines for the sake of setting herself up as a curmudgeon. Eventually, she's wooed under the spell of the Disney version by the songs, as apparently she was in reality - and why not, they're great songs - and Saving Mr. Banks ends with her attending the premiere. She laughs, she cries, she kisses her book goodbye.

That's not what happened in reality. Travers was furious. Disney had outwitted her and made changes where he'd let her think she had control. She realized she'd been right to resist, and swore never to allow it again, and that is why Mary Poppins remained a one-off and never became a Disney franchise.

In Saving Mr. Banks, Disney's final selling point to Travers comes when Tom Hanks looks Emma Thompson straight in the eye and promises that he will make a movie that viewers will love and cherish as much as her books. That's right. That's exactly what he did.

But because he either did not, or would not, understand the spirit of the books he was adapting, he co-opted them, he ruined them, he replaced them with his own spoonful of sugar. And the books lost readers like me.

Comments

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I can recall reading the books as very separate from the movie, with their own "feel", when I was a kid, but then again, I have very little visual imagination, so I rarely visualize characters when I read. I have a much more visceral reaction to their internal characteristics, so I tend to react much differently to books and to movies. Movies are pretty spectacle, while books are... I don't know, the real deal?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

We're really passing each other like ships in the night, here. I too consider myself to have little visual imagination, and I don't think visually (instead, I think spatially), but the result of that is that the spectacle aspect of films is what I least respond to in them. I treat them as stories, just like books, only told in dramatic form, which, the speed of its flow not being under the control of the reader, I feel more as if it's grabbing me.

I'm not sure if you're saying that the different "feel" of the books and the movies enabled you to keep them separate in your mind. I try to do that now, of course - I favor treating Jackson's movies as entirely unconnected with Tolkien's books, and the newest one has been a great boost to that argument - but, as a kid, I found this gap to be absolutely disconcerting. To keep it from getting even longer, I left out mention of the two other strongest cases of my childhood where a movie made me unable to appreciate the book: Peter Pan and Oliver Twist.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Luckily, I somehow conflated the best of both PP's. I can now read Barrie and see it illustrated with Disney stills, or occasionally animations. As Lewis almost said about Snow White, the Wicked Queen looks like we always knew she'd look, but never hoped to see her so well portrayed.

In defense of abridgements and adaptations in general, how many people want their young children taking at face value the end of the chapter where Peter kills Hook then later has "one of his bad dreams" so Wendy has to sit up and hold him? Early Disney did the two-level thing better: simple stereotypes for the young, better irony for the old.

Neither Barrie nor Disney invented those colorful archetypes -- mermaids, pirates, etc. Both authors were copying from the same neo-Platonic originals, for their different audiences.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Using archetypes is not the same thing as retelling another author's story, much as fanfiction advocates would like to conflate them.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Not to dispute your point for a moment, I've seen evidence that other things than movies can have that effect. I'm fairly active on the newsgroups at Steve Jackson Games, which, naturally, sometimes get onto discussions of fantasy. So I have seen a number of people who dislike Tolkien, or are mildly contemptuous of him, or don't get why anyone makes such a fuss about him—not from comparison with the films, but from comparison with more recent fantasy writers who are working in a genre he helped create, but whom they find more accessible. The expectations of fantasy supported by Terry Goodkind or Robert Jordan or their like seem to get in the way of people valuing Tolkien for what he was doing.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's certainly possible. Anything can distract a reader, though movie adaptations of the same book are, by dint both of being adaptations of the same book and by dint of being movies (a very powerful story-telling medium) are the most effective of doing so.

I expect there are, however, also cases where this person would never have liked Tolkien anyway, and would never have read him if not fooled into thinking that he's anything at all like these other authors. This is not new: Tolkien has been wrongfully assimilated into Sword & Sorcery for decades now. L. Sprague de Camp wrote an essay in the 70s calling for stories of mighty-thewed warriors who didn't snivel over their internal neuroses, like the Conan stories. But he included LOTR as an example. Conan would have considered even Aragorn a rather sniveling fellow, and wouldn't have grasped the idea of Frodo as a hero at all. [I'm quoting from an in-press but yet-unpublished article of my own here]

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

May I post a link to your essay in a facebook discussion?

The starting point is a Harlan Ellison rant about how disgraceful Disney and Saving Mr. Banks is, not to mention that Travers never forgave Disney.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Use the Blogger copy, if you please. Easier for outsiders to access, especially if the Russians go on the rampage again.

I watched the rant. For a guy who claims not to be prone to obfuscation, Harlan has a remarkably difficult time either getting to, or staying on, the point. I think one could edit out almost everything but the last two minutes.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

I too found the sour Mary a shock after Disney's sweet Mary, but somehow I was able to put that aside and enjoy the books anyhow. The stories that they tell are more interesting than the ones in the movie and stuck in my head just as much or more than the movie (the zoo! the Pleiades! the gingerbread shop! Michael's bad day!), which is saying a lot because I LOVED the movie and the songs in it.

What I thought was especially shameful, though I'm sure I didn't think of this until I was a teenager, was that Disney changed the whole focus of the story to be about Mr. Banks and his conversion from a proper British banker to a feel-good Americanized father. It's true that the original books don't have a strong story arc and are mostly a collection of separate incidents, so they needed something to tie them together. But ugh. Travers was right to be furious.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's an aspect of Saving Mr. Banks that I didn't discuss in the post, which was long enough already. As the title suggests, in the movie Disney finds the key to Travers' psyche by realizing that Mary Poppins has come to save the father - i.e. really Travers' father.

There's two problems with this, though. First, of course, is that in the books this doesn't happen. Mr. Banks is neither as distant as he begins in the Disney MP, nor as feel-good as he ends in it. In the books, he's in favor of Mary Poppins from the very beginning, but she has little to do with him directly.

The other problem is that the psychoanalysis doesn't match onto the flashbacks. The character in the movie who's supposed to be the original of Mary Poppins, whom I think is Travers' aunt (mother's sister), though I'm not sure, comes but she doesn't in any way save the father, who is dying prettily of TB.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

This definitely sounds like a movie I won't bother seeing!

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

It sounds like adding insult to injury!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

By the way, the part of the book I liked best as a child was Maia's Christmas shopping. I learned the Pleiades from that chapter, and it assisted my budding interest in astronomy.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I remember that! I grew up with the books and don't want to see the movies. And will not see PJackson's movies that are "from the title by J.R.R.Tolkien".

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Disney changed the whole focus of the story to be about Mr. Banks and his conversion from a proper British banker to a feel-good Americanized father. It's true that the original books don't have a strong story arc and are mostly a collection of separate incidents, so they needed something to tie them together.

There seems to have been a lot of that going around. Rilstone did a good long filleting of the soap opera family drama that the movie added to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I don't remember the name of the film expert who said the whole unifying focus of E.T. was Eliot's alleged conversion from tactless to tactful!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The family drama was the least offensive thing about the LWW movie. The worst was inflating a battle that Lewis describes in about two sentences to take over a third of the movie. That's what made me suspect that the director was Peter Jackson under a pseudonym.

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

I read the books first because they were loved by my mother - her father heard Alec Wolcott's review on the radio and thought she'd like them, and she did - and I hated the movie. That wasn't Mary Poppins! Mary Poppins is mean! (and yet compelling.) I was nine, but I was embarassed by the dancing chimney sweeps and the general corniess of it all. My mother hates it too.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My mother enjoyed the movie. She was just happy to see her childhood favorite brought to life on screen.

I think that's a common type of reaction. I've certainly met lots of people excusing Jackson's Tolkien that way.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

With Lord of the Rings, I came to the books as a young hippy chick studying early English literature and somewhat in awe of Prof JRRT, so later, I couldn't stomach the films at any price. I take your point entirely- what you experience first is likely to matter greatly.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I took that in the reverse direction. Everything I know about early English literature I was inspired to learn because my appetite had been whetted by Tolkien. I even like Beowulf. Who says it's boring? It's far less boring than many a Victorian three-decker. In fact, I like Beowulf enough that I did this.

My colleague in Tolkien studies, Michael Drout, who's also an Anglo-Saxon scholar, says that half the Anglo-Saxonists currently in practice originally got in interested in the field because they'd read Tolkien's works.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I certainly don't say that Beowulf is boring!

I read Tolkein because I started out as an Anglo Saxonist before the sideways shift into history. I'm told this shift happens a lot.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I would have said, the richer, more detailed experience matters more, though of course one's age at encounter is part of that.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I've re read LOTR many times since then with increasingly deeper understanding but that first experience still lives with me- I forgot to eat, forgot lectures (tsk) forgot to sleep until I'd completed reading that 1076 page one volume yellow jacketed paperback which I eventually read so often that it fell apart. :o)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I had already met elves and such, in Lewis and elsewhere, so I wasn't so taken with Tolkien.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Other way about for me- I knew Lewis for his books on mediaeval literary theory such as 'The Discarded Image' (Lord, I was such a serious child :o) and had never been that struck by his novels. Tolkien did lead me to Eddison though.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I began Lewis in juiior high with his light apologetics and Miracles. (I saw the same problem that Anscombe saw, but cut him some slack for it.) Not impressed by LWW then, thought he had run out of ideas and was borrowing from post-Christianity or something.

Loved The Discarded Image*, Eddison, Charles Williams. Of course I knew elves and such from Andrew Lang. So Middleearth was sort of old news, too long and heavy for me.

* Btw, re Galileo and Copernicus etc, "The Great Ptolemic Smackdown" (in LJ posts) gives a lot more detail Lewis would have loved. Says the Church was going by measured data and the 'Rennaisance' heliocentrists by "woo" -- the Sun was center because that is the noblest position and Fire is the noblest element. A recent biography of Lewis goes more into that, says Lewis came to Cambridge as a crusader for the Middle Ages, which name he says was invented by the Rennaisance people he was debunking.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I read LOTR at an early enough age that I had no such practical concerns. But Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien was published just before exams in my second year at university, and didn't that ever distract my attention.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Oooh, yes. Luckily past college, as Carpenter sent me off in several directions at once.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

That's such an interesting point about 'which you encountered first.' Would I have hated the movie as passionately as I did if I hadn't read the books first?

I dunno. It didn't help that I found the songs as boringly burbly as Muzak, and Dick Van Dyke's weird accent made me cringe. Mostly, though, that world was just so sugary that It felt like a very, very long commercial. Whereas the books were about a magical nanny who could keep kids safe from dark things--a thing I craved as a kid who often felt unsafe.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I quite liked Disney product in earlier childhood, and looked forward to regular visits to Disneyland. But there wasn't nearly the opportunity in those days to load oneself down with Disney Stuff. I suspect that budding interest in Tolkien, whom I didn't read until I was 11, was partly responsible for growing out of it, though I still admire some of their work a great deal.

Mary Poppins didn't speak to any inner need of my own. We had never had, nor needed, a nanny, though a year later we did get an au pair for a year. I liked her very much, but I was mostly not under her charge.

[swamp-adder.livejournal.com]

Can't say I've ever had this problem myself. There are plenty of books I've read second but ended up liking better than the adaptations.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Jane Austen, writing for her contemporaries, doesn't bother with a lot of sensory description, so I enjoy the books more after the films have given me the look and feel of that world.

Same with Christie's books -- and Phryne Fisher! Those films are making her a real person, with feelings between the lines of rather bare dialog.

Otoh, my own visuals of Narnia were much nicer than the movie's, so I haven't watched the rest of the films.

Often of course a movie has to leave out a lot, either because the book was very long, or because some things in the book were not really practical, or perhaps too melodramatic. So the plot of the movie seems thin, inadequate. (I missed Rearden insulting Dagny in the shadow of the venetian blinds, but I can see why the movie didn't put it in. For Dagny it was a minor emotional moment, she just laughed. But it would have stolen the show from the more important but less cinematic parts.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My complaint with Jackson has always been not what he left out, but what he put in.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Yes. If there's no room for what was in the book, don't pad the movie with other stuff that detracts from what you do keep.