Mary Poppins: The Original Super-Nanny or Insidious Tool of Plutocrats?

JoeCarl

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday December 13, 2015 · 10:03 PM PST

2015/12/13 · 22:03

TAGS

Edit Tags

Tag History

Done Editing Tags

Tonight, I saw a promo for the usual holiday-season broadcast of Mary Poppins. It’s a great movie with wonderful music, a talented cast, and a pro-family story. Wait – let’s think about that last part for a minute.

The story is set in Edwardian England, a time when “there were children dying of starvation on the streets of most big cities, where 80,000 prostitutes, most of them riddled with incurable syphilis, plied their trade on the streets of London, and where the average age of death for a working-class man was 35.” Society was wallowing in its own poverty and filth in England, Europe, and no small part of this country in the years before the First World War. Yet, note whom the marvelous, magical Mary comes to Earth to save: two children of a bank manager who do not get enough quality time.

O.K. Maybe the movie is not insidious, and maybe Mary is not a tool (well, you know). But I have to wonder how many children have learned to cheer when supernatural powers bend the rules for the betterment of a banker’s lonely kids while nothing what-so-ever is done for the walking skeletons living on the streets of that time and place and who probably could have made better use of a little magic.

Is there a hidden message here that the wealthy are more deserving? Is it just the usual blindness to poverty that serves the wealthy even without hidden messages? Or am I now official too jaded to be thinking about Disney movies?

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

Make YOUR voice heard!

Comments are closed on this story.