“There is a profound cynicism at the root of his, as of all, sentimentality.” - P.L. Travers, reviewing Walt Disney’s Snow White in 1937 Iam watching the 79-year-old “speculative fiction” writer Harlan Ellison on YouTube talking about Walt Disney, the author Pamela “P.L.” Travers, her fictional creation Mary Poppins and the just-released film Saving Mr. Banks, which is Disney’s best hope for Oscar glory at the next Academy Awards ceremony. Ellison does not like the film at all, though he is careful to say that the people in whose home he watched the film-“famous people, in their own right”-and the Disney representatives in attendance were very kind to him. He allows that it is a very well-made movie, and that its stars Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks (who play Travers and Disney respectively and who Ellison seems to hint may have been in attendance when he watched the film) are excellent in their roles.Thompson, in particular, he says, “is breathtakingly brilliant … and blows everybody off the screen” though Hanks is “equally good.”
Still, Ellison dislikes the movie. He dislikes it in a very entertaining manner. I have put the video up on my blood, dirt & angels blog, but you should not watch it if you are offended by rude language.
We will get to the reasons Ellison dislikes the movie in a moment, but first let’s stipulate that Saving Mr.Banks is a Disney movie. It’s rated PG-13, not for the sort of language that Mr. Ellison is prone to using, but because of complicating “thematic elements” which remove it from the realm of children’s movies. It’s more a movie made for parents, or grandparents, nostalgic about a movie that was released nearly 50 years ago. Saving Mr. Banks is about how Walt Disney, after more than 20 years of pleading, was able to keep his promise to his own children by adapting Travers’ Mary Poppins books to the screen.
What Ellison objects to is that the movie is a lie, or at least a misrepresentation of the facts. He uses a colorful term to describe the movie, which he contends is “a refurbishing of Walt Disney’s godlike image which he spent his entire life creating.” Travers was very reluctant to allow Disney to make a Poppins movie, in large part because she feared the film would bowdlerize and dumb down her character and because of the historical tendency of the Disney company-which Ellison describes as “an octopoidal matrix”-to run roughshod over artists.
Though many of the film’s moments are based directly on audio tapes that Travers made to document her disagreements with the movie’s screenwriter Don DaGradi and Richard and Robert Sherman, the brothers who wrote the now familiar songs, the film leaves you with the impression that Travers finally succumbed to Disney’s charm offensive and not only allowed the movie to be made but even approved the final product. Ellison also takes issue with the film’s portrayal of Travers as a “hateful, spiteful, naysaying woman” when it turned out her concerns were legitimate: In real life, she despised the final film and (spoiler alert) the tears she cried during the movie’s premiere were of frustration, not-as the movie implies-of joy.
I don’t know exactly how I feel about this. I think that people who look to the movies for history get the kind of history they deserve. I think that while a much better film could have been made about Disney’s pursuit of the rights to Mary Poppins, such a film could not have been made by the Disney company, and that the Disney company would have made it impossible for anyone else to make it. I can accept Saving Mr. Banks as a legitimate entertainment product while maintaining my skepticism about Walt Disney the man. I don’t know that he was genuinely a fascist or more racist than most white men of his time or any of the worse things they say about him, but I don’t believe the avuncular Uncle Walt myth either. More than 30 years ago, T Bone Burnett wrote a song called “Hefner and Disney” that assayed the consonances between those two commodifiers who, whether they meant to or not, conspired “to rob the children of their dreams.”
I think it is stultifying to attend too much to Disney’s blandishments, but I don’t deny them their place in our culture. I grew up watching Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color on Sunday nights
like everybody else.
And I didn’t know very much about P.L.Travers until the publicity machine for Saving Mr. Banks ginned up, and I heard Emma Thompson describe her on National Public Radio as “defended and so blocked” and “deeply irrational from time to time.” Having done the slightest bit of research, I don’t doubt that this was true. Travers was a complicated woman and her life took a lot of unconventional turns. She wore trousers, never married, dated both men and women and at one point tried to adopt a 17-year-old girl who cleaned her house (when that didn’t work she adopted one of a set of a twins and never told him he had a brother). It seems likely the only reason she allowed Disney to have her fictional nanny was because she needed money. And she certainly regretted her acquiescence for the rest of her life.
But the truth is she contracted with Disney. She sold what she had and he bought it, and now when we hear the words “Mary Poppins” we think of Julie Andrews (and Dick Van Dyke and dancing animated penguins) and not Travers’ vain and homely supernatural nanny who smells of “toast and Sunlight soap” and bullies her young charges who love her anyway and beg her not to disappear. She promises to “stay till the wind changes”-and abandons them at the end of the first book.
That’s the sort of ending Walt Disney could not abide, the sort of complicated news many Americans simply will not hear. We want our heroes to wear white hats; we don’t want to picture Disney consorting with Leni Riefenstahl (he told her he liked her work but couldn’t hire her because of the damage it would do to his reputation) or John Wayne dithering about whether he should volunteer for military service during World War II. We want to be comforted, not reminded that the world is a complex and problematic place. We don’t need no Harlan Ellison. We want to be told what we want to hear. We want the echo chamber. We want the Disney version.
Chim chiminey chim chiminey chim chim cher-ee.
Perspective, Pages 80 on 12/22/2013