Mary Poppins [DVD]

"I was born in 1960 and possibly my first and most enduring cultural artifact on marriage was going to see Mary Poppins . The Disney movie, of course. I saw it maybe five times when I was four. And Mary Poppins is really about a dysfunctional marriage. At least dysfunctional from the kids’ point of view – because the parents don’t pay any attention to each other or, especially, to the kids. And it’s all fixed when an outsider, Mary Poppins, the nanny, comes along and shows them the error of their ways. And since my own parents didn’t get along that was the ultimate fantasy for me. And then, as I got a bit older and started reading things that were more literary, two things stuck in my mind. One was A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, which I helped dramatize in high school when I was about 15. And the other was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which I discovered at about the same age. And what those two plays have in common is their very dark view of marriage. Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf is all about a deeply dysfunctional, co-dependent marriage. The marriage of both couples that feature in the play is obsessive, destructive: they can’t escape except by liquor or by playing these insane games. A Doll’s House is not quite as dark. The notion is that a marriage is anti-feminist. That this woman, Nora, becomes free when she leaves her marriage, that leaving it is a statement of liberation. And in the 1970s that made an immense amount of sense to me. So that’s where I began, with an oppressive, dark view of marriage. And by the way, these are all very powerful works of art: very, very influential on anyone who sees them – including Mary Poppins, which also has great, great music."