Whose kite-strings are a lute · 4:18pm Jan 13th, 2019
I loved Mary Poppins Returns but something struck me about the final song, “Nowhere to Go But Up.”
This takes place in in the 1930’s. By the end of the decade—that is, in just a few years--the “Lovely London Sky” will be full of Nazi bombers raining death and destruction on Cherry Tree Lane.
Really, Baldric--nowhere to go but up?
You might think it’s irony but this movie’s songs are deaf to irony. The only multiple meanings are the rather broad double-entendres in “A Cover is Not the Book,” which are clever but don’t take much to get.
All the songs in Mary Poppins Returns are pretty much about one thing and one thing only. “Nowhere to Go But Up” is a happy song about being happy. “A Cover is Not the Book” is a naughty song about being naughty. Even the very powerful “A Conversation” and “Where the Lost Things Go” are sad songs about being sad. They’re eloquent and affecting and they made me choke up, but there was no aesthetic tension in them, no attempt to make art out of opposites.
Then I thought about the songs from the original Mary Poppins. Had you noticed? They’re all made up of opposites.
The most obvious is “Stay Awake,” a song whose lyrics are about not going to sleep, but whose tune is a lullaby (and a rather fey and eerie one—elements that crop up in another song). The saddest is “Feed the Birds” which is not about feeding pigeons but about feeding the poor homeless woman who makes her living selling crumbs “tuppence a bag.” That “tuppence” of course sets the audience up for the true meaning of the later song “Tuppence,” a blimpish paean to capital and Empire, sung as a satire on miserliness and greed.
It’s most subtle in “Chim-chimeree.” The lyrics, at first glance, seem pure Pollyanna—the sort of words an Edwardian would put in the mouth of a good fellow who knew his place. But they’re sung in a minor key that moans like a gale in the chimney, and to a waltz tempo that twirls and swirls like the wind in empty alleys. The overall effect is, again, fey and eerie, like “Stay Awake.” And it makes you realize that Bert is singing about dark and often dangerous places—places where people like him work. Places and people his employers, the “better sort,” rarely see and even more rarely consider:
Now as the ladder of life has been sprung
Y’might think a sweep’s on the bottom-most rung:
Though I spends me time in the ashes and smoke
In this whole wide world, there’s no ‘appier bloke.
It’s even present in the middle of the animated sequence. “It’s a Jolly Holiday” takes the lightest of tones and the lyrics are all genteel fol-de-rol -- that is, until Mary sings:
It’s a jolly holiday with you, Bert
Gentlemen like you are few…
You’d never think of pressing your advantage
Forbearance is the hallmark of your breed:
A lady needn’t fear
When you are near
Your sweet gentility is crystal clear…
In other words, I know you won’t rape me. It seems a long way from dancing penguins and talking carousel horses.
And since you knew I’d get to it eventually, consider “Let’s Go Fly a Kite,” the closing number. People seem to think it’s the simplest and most completely joyous of all the movie’s songs. But listen – there’s something in the music that’s not in “Nowhere to Go But Up,” a yearning, even plaintive note. The refrain begins with what’s almost a moan: O!—O!—O! Think of all the ways that exclamation can be used: it can mean sorrow, it can mean joy, it can mean impatience (“Oh, just get on with it”) and it can mean surrender (“Oh, just do what you like”).
And it can mean an appeal sent up to something above us: O Muses! O God! O History!
Which brings us to the kite. Do I really need to tell you that the kite has been a metaphor all through the movie? It’s a symbol of childhood, for children make and fly it. It’s a symbol of art, because it’s made to delight the senses and the spirit. Above all it’s a symbol of hope—it soars above the smoke and fog, it gains a larger view, its tail is a ribbon that proclaims VOTES FOR WOMEN, do you need any more drubbing about the head and shoulders or are we good?
Now let’s put that all in context—specifically the context of the audiences who saw it in 1964.
They knew that while it might have been “grand to be an Englishman in Nineteen-Ten,” the next fifty years were pretty much gonna suck. In 1914—just four years after the events of the movie—World War One would start. Millions would die, London would be bombed by German zeppelins (no, that’s not steampunk alternate history, that really happened), and the hundred-year stretch of peace and order England had known since Waterloo would come to an end. Then there’d be about ten good years, after which the Depression. Then World War Two, and Dunkirk and the Blitz and buzzbombs and V-2’s. Then after that a horrible postwar recession and attendant political turmoil (ever wonder what “the scouring of the Shire” was about in Lord of the Rings?), Suez, and the breakup of the Empire. Things would only start getting good again around 1960.
They knew all this because they had lived it, or their parents and grandparents had. Jane and Michael Banks would have been in their early 60’s in 1964. Their children would have been in their 30’s and 40’s. Their grandchildren could have been anything from teenagers to four-year-olds like me. All that history was still within living memory.
So you couldn’t tell us that everything was going to be alright, that they all lived happily ever after, that there was “nowhere to go but up.” We would have been insulted.
So “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” doesn’t do that.
It offers hope, but not false hope. The hope it offers is that whatever happens in this world, we can send something up and out into a better one: wishes, children, art…
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
…O, O, O.
We send little pieces of ourselves Up thro’ the atmosphere/ Up where the air is clear, above the smoke and fog to better worlds though these might not be real, or real yet.
And between these things and ourselves there is a little thrumming thread, under tension between then and now, real and imaginary, us and them. Tiny, frail and passing, but in the moment alive and singing.
If we can hold to that, we have our happy ending. Or at least as much of one as true life allows.
I feel like I've waited my whole life to read this blog.
Ah those grand days before every Disney song became just emotional amplification.
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Sue's man's mind is like good jell--
All one color, and clear
Edna St. Vincent Millay meant that as an insult, and it's a pretty good one.
I don't think Mary Poppins Returns deserves anything close to insult, but considered against the original it does seem "all one color, and clear."
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To be fair, it's not just Disney. Deliberately formulaic and "all one color, and clear" entertainment is becoming de rigueur in this age of industrial products. People who want clever, subtle, and deep will grumble, but they are the fringe, and there's billions to be made by giving the vast majority what they want.
Still... "giving people what they want" is the first, best excuse for pornographers, drug dealers, pimps, and hit men, so there's that.
Here's to living on the fringe.
I'm willing to say it seems as if you've dug fairly deep in a shallow well, something which people do all the time with my own work. Both Poppins movies (which I loved) are simple escapism, attempts to make old and stodgy creatures, including two children who are getting old before their time, the ability to cast off reality and dream, like children should. Because after all, soon we will be adults, and have to put all that dreaming behind us. And true, they use deeper meaning in songs and stories, but for the purpose of making you let go of that terrible clinging to reality that old adults do so well.
It strikes me that there could easily be a "Twilight, the Early Years" Mary Poppins story in this, where a beleaguered Night Light is sitting in his den one evening, trying to write a Help Wanted advertisement...
Help Wanted: A nanny for a brilliant young unicorn filly who is about to start school. Must be...
Night Light considered the rest of the blank sheet of paper and tried to get his quill to move, but it had stuck quite fast and would not write another line. There had to be something he could put into the advertisement to encompass the situation and still keep under the thirty word limit. Then again, the situation was anything but the kind able to be squeezed into a few lines for a newspaper ad. The rhythmatic sounds of Shining Armor practicing his marching in the back yard barely tickled at the tips of his ears, as well as the sound of Princess... That is Cadence upstairs, reading his brilliant little filly a bedtime story involving quantum thaumic particles, something which baffled Night Light right down to his hooves. Give him a pulsar pattern or stellar conjunction and he could talk all day, but outside of that narrow field was very thin grazing.
If only Twilight's mother could continue to care for their precious little filly during the day. Twilight Velvet had sacrificed so much to raise her little Sparkle to this level, and yet the literary bug struggled nightly to escape. His wife wrote as well as his daughter read, and bottling up that creativity for eight years meant that the author Twilight Velvet was about to explode if she did not go back to work at the publishing company right now. She even dreamed of books when she was not stealing a minute or two out of the day to write, which left their brilliant daughter nothing to do but read, and read, and read. Little Twilight read when her father tried to play with her, read when she was in the back yard instead of running around like the other foals, and even read in the bathtub. A nanny for Twilight would find the job trivial if all she did was pass her charge a book when the last one was finished. That may have been what she wanted, but not what she needed.
What she needed was a nanny who... He did not know. Somepony as loving as Cadence, who could not possibly help watch Twilight with all of the Princess responsibilities she was gaining. Somepony as strict as Shining Armor, who could not be more of a Royal Guard Cadet when he entered the Academy in a few months. Somepony as loving as her parents, who could feel her slipping away every day. Somepony... magical.
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Have you ever heard of the movie "Saving Mr. Banks?"
I don't believe I'm over-thinking this. Aesthetic tension is an acknowledged virtue in art and I've shown that it is present in the songs of Mary Poppins, whereas it isn't in the sequel's songs.
My observations about the historical settings of both movies are valid, as is the way each movie acknowledges--or doesn't--what is to happen to London and the world in the coming years.
I note also that Mary Poppins was critically acclaimed on its release and was nominated for 13 Oscars, winning five including Best Original Music Score and Best Song. People nowadays complain about "cultural elites" but when we actually had any worthy of the name, they seemed to think there was something in Mary Poppins that was worth their attention. They wouldn't have thought so if it was pure escapism.
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It has always been the case. The old masters gave the people what they wanted so they could afford to create their greatest works.
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Yeah but I have to disagree with iisaw because Mary Poppins WAS what the people wanted. It was an enormous commercial success from the start, as well as being critically acclaimed.
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I love it when writers use pony-centric phrasing such as:
"field"... *snicker*
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But there's a very important difference: The "Old Masters" didn't give the people what they wanted; they gave their wealthy patrons what they wanted.[1] The industrialization of art has put the target audience broad and low. With that said...
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Most people can tell a superior product[2] when they see it. They may not know why it seems so much better, but they feel it. But most producers/marketers don't believe they can, and that's why we get so much dreck.
Fascinating post and discussion!
Excuse me if I don't reply to any further comments for a while. I'm off to LA for rotator cuff surgery, and I probably won't feel much like typing for a while!
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[1] And many what we now consider famous masterpieces were work-to-order jobs.
[2] Yikes! I'm even using corporate/industrial speak to talk about art now.
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Or an emotional crutch/manipulation. Is this necessarily a bad thing though? I have found that a lot of the recent Disney animated movies have better stories than their earlier predecessors.
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But the artists chased patronage because that's where the money was. And, yes, they produced some masterpieces, but you know what? They produced a lot of crap as well. A lot of it didn't survive but a lot did, only it doesn't get exhibited much because come on, do people go to the Louvre to see a retrospective of mediocre Renaissance portraits, or the Mona Lisa?
Once trade and industry began expanding, common folks started having money too. Then the Paul's Boys discovered they could earn better and more reliably performing at Newington Butts than they ever could at Blackfriars, and that was the start of live theater.
"Which people won't go to see nowadays on account of it's too arty." -- Dame Anna Russell
P.S.--
"...rather unusual name for a fong..."
P.P.S.--
Ouch. Good luck and get well soon!
It may have been too long since I've seen it to say so for all the songs--one has to hope that the visuals and the surrounding story have something to add--but I just recently re-listened to the soundtrack after my dad got his first record player in decades for Christmas and pulled out some of the albums that had been sitting in the crawlspace most of my life. I can definitely say that the tension you describe comes through in "Chim Chim Cheree" and "Tuppence" at the very least.
Haven't seen the new movie to compare, but given the right crowd might get around to it.
4996617 Actually, I had heard of Saving Mr. Banks, but never saw it. (and now I've got another for my rental list, darnit) One thing to recognize was that the book's author struggled mightily with Walt, and for the most part, Walt won. Bigtime. If they had followed the original author, there was absolutely no way they could have gotten 5 out of 13 Oscars, a record that has never been broken. For that alone, I have to admit the ultimate escapist is Walt, who can not only get swept up in his imagination, but sweep up an entire country with him. I miss him something fierce.
Nowhere to go but up... in smoke.
Beautiful post. I especially liked this sentence: "But they’re sung in a minor key that moans like a gale in the chimney, and to a waltz tempo that twirls and swirls like the wind in empty alleys." It's not just pretty--it's precise.