Saving Mr. Banks – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns About Psychotherapy from a Master Story Teller.

Walt Disney provided a third of the soundtrack of my middle childhood.  Mary Poppins was one of the regular albums that we played as kids, along with The Sound of Music and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Actually, my parents had a credenza filled with classical music and Broadway musical soundtracks and we listened to those some of the time (Bernstein’s recording of Peter and the Wolf and Peer Gynt were favorites), but Mary Poppins was one of the big three.  That said, it has always been a weird movie.  My Mom pointed out that the sweetness of Julie Andrews did not square with her experience of Mary in the book (a book I have never read).  Mary Poppins, as envisioned by P.L. Travers, was apparently a very proper British nanny with a touch of magic who brooked no nonsense.  

P.L. Travers, as played by Emma Thompson, brooked no nonsense from Walt Disney played by Tom Hanks in the (of course) Disney Studio’s dramatization of the interaction between them about his wresting the rights to the story from her so that he could tell the story in a musical that, despite being part of the soundtrack of my childhood, never quite held together in my mind.  So when the reluctant wife and I were looking for a movie to watch, her recent time spent travelling led me to recommend a movie with Tom Hanks trying to join the million mile flyer club, but we could not find it on Netflix or Amazon, and so decided to watch Saving Mr. Banks as a fall back, and thought it would be a nice first feature on what would be a two movie date night – vaguely thinking it would be a light fluffy appetizer.

This movie, though flawed, turns out to be a meaty and satisfying main course.  Emma Thompson introduces us to a version of the Uptight, British lady, but she is not just uptight, she is mean and remote, dictatorial and difficult.  She has what Disney wants and, though she needs his money, which she is horrified to admit, she also wants to tell her story on the big screen (maybe), but if it is to be told, it will be on her terms – and therein lies the crux of the movie - what is her story?  And how will it be told?  On the surface, it is the story of Mary Poppins, the nanny who brings order and perhaps a bit of proper British love to a proper British household that seems terribly devoid of it.  But Travers, who appears to be a most proper British matron, is, we know from her flashbacks, an Aussie from way out in the outback.  Her Dad was a delightful dreamer and an awful and incurable drunk who was employed, when he could stagger to work, as a banker, and her mother was a flimsy and somewhat distracted woman who was caring for Helen (Ginty) Goff (the girl who would take the pen name Pamela L. Travers as a woman) and her two younger siblings.  Into this picture swoops her Aunt, who brings order to the chaos of the household (and has an umbrella with a parrot handle).  We discover this story through Travers, who experiences it as a kind of nauseating dream while she is in Hollywood, where she has been whisked by Walt Disney who is trying to impress her into signing over the rights to the movie.  We experience her father as a playful, imaginative ne’er do well who intensely and deeply connects with his daughter, but also bruises her (though not as brutally on film as I’m betting happened in life – this is a Disney film after all)  by his drunken insensitivity.

This movie, on one level, is a good mystery, and there were plenty of clues as I was watching to who Travers was and what Mary Poppins is really all about, as there should be in any mystery (Btw, I was quite familiar with Mary Poppins, but the reluctant wife had never seen it – the movie tells the story enough that you don’t need to have seen Mary Poppins to appreciate, understand and enjoy it).  This movie makes lots of sense in retrospect, but at least I did not see all that was coming, and pieced it together as the movie played out.  That said, I don’t know how to put it together in this post without laying the pieces out, so if you plan to see the film, this would be a good place to stop reading this post and to come back later. 

Travers travels to Hollywood and goes to the Disney Studios where we hear the Disney songwriters writing the songs that we (or those of us who can play it in our heads) know will be in the movie – and yet her iron will – her downright meanness – convinces us that she will never sign over the rights.  She insists on absurd conditions – there can be no red in the film - and she is opposed to animation.  We know that the whole gang jumps into a picture and that Burt dances in a red striped suit, no less, with the animated penguins - but she insists this won’t happen.  We are trapped in believing that history will play itself out in ways that we know it hasn’t.  This is very good story telling.

 

We believe, because both Disney and Travers say it, that Mary Poppins is something that Travers does not want to part with – Mary is all Travers has.  And Disney remembers when Mickey was all that he had and someone wanted to buy Mickey from him and he wouldn’t sell.  He used Mickey to build his own studio and then his own empire.  Travers doesn’t have the wherewithal to do that, but she does have the gumption to refuse him, no matter how seductive he might be.  He deeply identifies with her and recognizes the level of power that he is up against, and he is convinced that she won’t sell.  His identification with Travers, however, also leads him to respect her and ultimately to get her – to understand what she is fighting for on a deeper level.  This helps him put up with her even when she is indescribably maddening (though he attributes his patience to the fact that he has promised his daughters that he will produce the film Mary Poppins for them and a father never goes back on his word – of course, because I think that the unconscious mind is a complicated place where multiple intersecting and sometimes contradictory pieces exist, I believe both are true – he connects with her and with his children to manage his exasperation with her).

As in all good mysteries the obvious answer, that Mary is what she is hanging onto, is not the answer.  And, as is also the case in all good mysteries, the answer is hiding in plain sight.  It is not Mary that Travers is hanging onto, but Mr. Banks – the banker father in Mary Poppins.  We get the clue we need (though I wasn’t smart enough to get it) when Travers begins tapping her foot – and then dancing (!) to the tune “Let’s Go Fly a Kite”.  When Travers gets wind of those dancing animated penguins, she leaves Hollywood, fleeing to England.  Disney chases her there and confronts her.  They, it turns out, have the same secret – they both need to preserve the goodness in a father who was also abusive to them.  Perhaps because it was not depicted, but only told, Disney can describe the horror of his own childhood straightforwardly and can clarify something that we have had access to all along – Travers' father (whose first name she took as her pen name – an important clue for Disney) is deeply loved – but also hated.  I think not just because he, in a drunken state, rejected her poetry, but because she is ashamed of the very thing she loved him for (and loves in herself) – the ability to be playfully, whimsically engaged in the world.  Mary Poppins is her effort to stamp out the wish and desire to play – something that she hates because it causes him to be unstable and to fail to care for the family – but desperately and deeply loves.  So she sides with the aunt – the order imposer – against, though it just about kills her, her father and, even more so, against herself – with the play coming out only in the books whose nanny, stern as she may be, is irreverently engaged with reality – so much so that she can do nonsensical things like slide up the banister and fly.

This actually helps me better understand the structure of Mary Poppins – a movie that has always felt jumbled up and confusing.  Bert, Mary’s friend from the world of magic, is not some random guy.  He is the alter ego of Mr. Banks, the children’s stern father who works at the bank (this is enacted in the film when Dick Van Dyke plays a bank director in addition to playing Burt).  Travers wanted her father to be stable and steady like Mr. Banks.  Travers was critical of the Bert figure as Disney portrayed him – critical that Dick Van Dyke was going to play him – Dick Van Dyke was an insubstantial actor in Travers’ eyes – not an actor with gravitas - like Olivier.

In the scene in London, where Disney confronts Travers with the truth about her past, and reassures her that he will (OK, this clue was right out in the open – the title to the movie) Save Mr. Banks, he is functioning as her therapist.  It becomes apparent, as he talks about the role of storytelling, which, of course, he is very good at, that storytelling is, in his eyes, therapeutic.  He preserves the goodness of his father in Mickey, the diminutive mouse up against the world, but with a twinkle in his eye.  It is his belief that we need, through the medium of the story, to save the goodness in those who have traumatized us – to know that the world can be the kind of place in which we can be both productive AND happy – and happy with them – connected to the ones we love but who have terribly disappointed us.  And he was clearly quite successful at selling this brand of therapy to the American public.  Despite my not having graced either of his theme parks the little bit of Disney stock that a generous uncle bought for the reluctant son when he was born to be a nest egg for him and to allay my feelings of spending so much on Disney products across the course of his life, has appreciated at a tremendous rate – outpacing the market by a bunch.

What do we make of this therapy?  And what does Travers make of it?  She sells him the rights.  But is that because of his speech or because she needs the money and she realizes that the movie will never be the one she would produce?  In the film, despite not being invited by Disney to the opening (who could blame him, really), she travels back to Hollywood and watches the film.  She cries as she watches it.  I experienced her tears as reluctant tears of joy.  My reluctant brother experienced them as tears of sorrow.  Wikipedia just notes that she cried at the opening.  I think it quite possible (again, I am invoking the complexity of the unconscious and its ability to harbor competing feelings) that both interpretations are accurate.  I think she may have been highly ambivalent about this thing that Disney created, this thing that included Dick Van Dyke, with the red stripe suit, dancing with animated penguins – with just the kind of whimsy that her father would have greatly appreciated.

Disney tells Travers, “George Banks and all he stands for will be saved.  Maybe not in life, but in imagination.  Because that’s what we storytellers do.  We restore order with imagination.  We instill hope again and again.”  And that is all that we can do.  And it is painful.  Travers has walled off parts of her father.  She has separated the good from the bad, as best she can, and stuck the whimsy onto her aunt who brought order to her life – giving her the power to fly and to have a talking umbrella.  But she kept it under tight control.  And Disney set it free – and clarified that it was not the children who were being saved, but the father – the one thing that her aunt could not do.  So Travers, as storyteller, saved him, and Disney promised to do that as well. 

Was Disney a good therapist?  Travers certainly profited financially from their arrangement.  She also continued to write.  What about the people who see his films?  Have we had our order restored?  This film helped me put together what had gone wrong for me in Mary Poppins – and while I could make a case that Mr. Banks and my father are a lot alike – in fact just thinking about that allows me to see lots of parallels – I think that, in my experience of the movie, it was the hard working Mr. Banks who came out to play – not the ne’er do well Burt who was able to lead a creative life – that led to a sense of relief – I never connected Burt as a father figure, though on reflection it actually works.  This second story – the saving Mr. Banks version, then – leads to a different kind of restoration of order for me.  It involves actually a kind of tragic vision of my father, of myself – as enslaved by the mundane world – not actually achieving the joyful life we might have had we engaged the world in a more carefree manner.  Perhaps that was the message Disney meant to be sending to Mrs. Travers, though I don’t think she received it.

In one of the helpful after notes that Amazon provides, one of the song writers suggests that it was not “Let’s Go Fly A Kite” that got the real Travers toe tapping, but “Feed the Birds,” a song sung to the children by an old woman who sold bread crumbs to feed the pigeons around St. Paul’s Cathedral.  If this is the case, it may be that what allowed Pamela to sell the script was that there was room in it to save Travers – her father’s first name that she had taken as her own.  The song has a wistful quality and it would be the kind of thing her father, in his generous moments, would have encouraged her to do – saving not he as the banker who could play, but she as the daughter who could be beloved while doing what she wanted to do – feed the birds. 

I think Disney, both as portrayed in the movie and the corporation that he spawned, is interested in saving Mr. Banks – creating a make believe world where it is OK to play all day and money will come raining down.  But neither of the Travers portrayed in the film believed that would happen.  They were both sad but very much aware that they lived in a world where you need to work for a living.  Therapy with Mr. Disney, as with all therapists, becomes a co-creation - it has a little (or a lot) of the therapist in it.  I think that Walt Disney's Mary Poppins saved a version of Mr. Banks that suited Mr. Disney quite well.        

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