‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface

New York Times ^

[TigerClaws]

“Mary Poppins Returns,” which picked up four Oscar nominations last week, is an enjoyably derivative film that seeks to inspire our nostalgia for the innocent fantasies of childhood, as well as the jolly holidays that the first “Mary Poppins” film conjured for many adult viewers.

Part of the new film’s nostalgia, however, is bound up in a blackface performance tradition that persists throughout the Mary Poppins canon, from P. L. Travers’s books to Disney’s 1964 adaptation, with disturbing echoes in the studio’s newest take on the material, “Mary Poppins Returns.”

One of the more indelible images from the 1964 film is of Mary Poppins blacking up. When the magical nanny (played by Julie Andrews) accompanies her young charges, Michael and Jane Banks, up their chimney, her face gets covered in soot, but instead of wiping it off, she gamely powders her nose and cheeks even blacker. Then she leads the children on a dancing exploration of London rooftops with Dick Van Dyke’s sooty chimney sweep, Bert.

This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers’s novels didn’t associate chimney sweeps’ blackened faces with racial caricature. “Don’t touch me, you black heathen,” a housemaid screams in “Mary Poppins Opens the Door” (1943), as a sweep reaches out his darkened hand. When he tries to approach the cook, she threatens to quit: “If that Hottentot goes into the chimney, I shall go out the door,” she says, using an archaic slur for black South Africans that recurs on page and screen.

[lightman]

These folks have such a block on their shoulder that they don’t notice the monkey on their back.

[Kickass Conservative]

>>>You cannot talk to people like this. One has to try very hard to be this stupid<<<

Remember the good old days when Stupid People knew they were stupid? Now they run for Congress.

[Jeff Chandler]

Weird article.

[ronnie raygun]

So those companies who clean our chimneys are racist? Coal miners are racist, fire fighters are racist. Santa has to be carful coming down the chimney if he gets black face he to will be a racist, oh he already is he’s white and also has white privilege and peta will join the fun Santa’s is enslaving riendeer

[zot]

Hah! I never heard of black soldiers wearing white face, but I’m sure someone would take offense.