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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.