When I was five years old, I broke our videotape of Mary Poppins.
Not through childhood carelessness, but because I watched it so often that the VCR finally ate the tape.
Why did I love the film so? I thought the answer was obvious: great music, comedy, whimsy — all things I loved as a boy. But there’s more to Mary Poppins than meets the eye, and I didn’t realize it until I grew up and saw it again after many years.
As the lead actor in The Wonderful World of Benjamin Cello, a Christian children’s show deeply inspired by the Julie Andrews classic, I found my early love of the story a bit strange — perhaps I had some of Burt the chimneysweep in my DNA. The character I play owes a great deal to Dick Van Dyke’s whimsical artist: a country gentleman named Benjamin Cello who, like Burt, breaks into song and dance, plays an instrument, and jumps through magical doors. In creating Benjamin Cello, our aim was to recapture that whimsical and artistic spirit, complete with puppetry and live music, but with a “‘ealthy ‘elping,” as Burt might say, of Scripture and faith.
But when I watched the old classic again with my children, I realized I had missed how deep a story Mary Poppins really is.
Perhaps you remember the plot: two neglected children, a checked-out mother, a legalistic father, and a “practically perfect” nanny who makes everyone realize that life is more than bank accounts and ledgers.
Seen this way, one might agree with David Tomlinson, who played Mr. Banks, when he called it “the most sentimental rubbish.” Indeed, what is one to make of a story that celebrates throwing away money on bird seed? Despite her severe demeanor, Mary Poppins seems to be a kind of subversive proto-hippie.
But I saw something different when I revisited the film as an adult. You have a family coming apart at the seams, a family in desperate need of heavenly intervention. And then the wind changes — a sign of grace. The wind blows away all the “normal nannies,” symbolizing a purifying truth that supplants mere imitation. And then the true virginal mother descends: Mary, a woman who is clearly more angel than sorceress.
Once she has secured the nannying position, she begins a series of lessons. The children learn that a “spoonful of sugar” helps them overcome suffering. At first, just what this “spoonful of sugar” is remains unclear. Then she teaches the children a new word: “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
What does it mean? At first, it seems to be an undefined superlative, as mysterious as the “spoonful of sugar.” But then the lyrics of the song disclose a humorous anecdote:
One night I said it to me girl
And now me girl’s me wife
Now we see more clearly: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is a superlative, a superlative for the ultimate reality: Love. Love is the “spoonful of sugar” that can make any job, any difficulty easy to bear.
And this illuminates the breathtaking climax of the film. Mr. Banks stands before a comedic panel of bankers, stripped of his dignity and worldly titles. When asked if he has “anything to say,” he responds with… supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Up until this point, Mr. Banks has been unable to even speak the word. But now, as it bursts from his lips, its very indecipherability points to the mystery of existence, the mystery of love. And when told that such a word does not exist, Mr. Banks makes his grand declaration: “It is a word! A perfectly good word. And with all due respect, when all is said and done, there’s no such thing as you!”
I can’t forget seeing that scene for the first time as an adult, feeling the impact of those words. Here was the theme so beloved by G. K. Chesterton: that the weightiest and most substantial things are also the lightest and most joyful. In the figure of Mary Poppins, the severity of the moral law and the call of adventure are reconciled in a higher reality: the reality of Love, a power that can literally lift you into the air as you laugh and laugh and laugh.
At last, the theme became clear. It was not duty versus “having fun,” or some such malarkey, but a manifesto against The World, the World that would squeeze out Love and deny its ultimate authority. This is why the Bank “did not exist.” Compared to the reality of Love, it was all mere shadow.
That this lesson is taught by a Marian figure who is “practically perfect” and assisted by her platonic beau, a humble working man like St. Joseph who teaches Mr. Banks how to be a good father — well, the symbolism can’t escape the observant Christian. Nor the lesson that we ought to give our money to the poor, like an old woman selling useless bird seed.
The message of Mary Poppins is as powerful as it was a half-century ago. In filming our own series, The Wonderful World of Benjamin Cello, we hoped to carry forward that deeply Christian message, depicting through music and art the eternal truth that the saints and angels are watching over us; that God’s wind blows wherever it will; that the deepest reality, what truly exists, is Love Himself.