When we revisit a movie that gave us a lot of joy in our childhoods, it ends up being more of a crapshoot than a lot of us expected.
Sometimes, we watch a beloved classic that deserves its reputation and sometimes we realize how flat Michael Jordan’s acting was in Space Jam .
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But even in movies that hold up, we can find a scene or two that make us a little uncomfortable. It’s not uncommon for issues that people used to laugh at to become much more seriously explored as years pass. When a reminder of the old attitude shows up without warning, it can make things awkward.
But in this case, it’s difficult for people to agree on whether that’s even happening.
There are many different ways to feel about the success of “Mary Poppins Returns,” but one professor took it as an opportunity to speak out about the original.
In a piece for the New York Times , Daniel Pollack-Pelzner of Linfield College said the new movie “seeks to inspire our nostalgia for the innocent memories of childhood”, but also said that nostalgia is “bound up in blackface performance tradition.”
Sure, you may be wondering how on Earth Marry Poppins could be accused of blackface.
You wouldn’t be alone either. Let’s take a look at Pollack-Pelzner’s claims in a little more detail.
In particular, he’s referring to a scene in which Mary Poppins notices her face is covered in soot after she and the kids fly up a chimney.
Rather than wipe it off, he said, she powders her cheeks and nose even blacker, which Pollack-Pelzner compares to the “blacking up” that white performers did in order to perform in blackface.
When Twitter caught wind of the professor’s claim, their implied facepalms were pretty obvious.
It appears as if Pollack-Pelzner was going to need some more backup evidence that the “blackface” in Mary Poppins was racially-motivated.
In the tradition of Sigmund Freud’s assertion that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” Saul here clearly believes that Pollack-Pelzner is reading too much into a dirty face.
Of course, the most simple explanation for the darkened faces is that, hey, soot flew up onto their faces unintentionally.
Other critics thought Pollack-Pelzner’s reading was so ridiculous that they called his education into question.
For them, the more likely alternative would be that Mary decided to spread the soot around her face because of her friendly relationship with the chimney sweeps, particularly Bert.
Since she didn’t see them as lesser people for being covered in dirt, one could then say she didn’t see much point in removing the dirt from her face either.
For others, the idea of Mary Poppins being racist was so absurd that the only response was to mock it.
But it’s important to note that Pollack-Pelzner’s interpretation doesn’t begin and end with one five-second clip.
A lot of his basis for reading Mary Poppins the way he does comes from P.L. Travers’ original books.
In Travers’ books, the soot on the chimney sweeps’ faces does actually lead other characters to mistake them for black people.
And among housekeeping staff, the response to seeing the sweeps ranges from “don’t touch me, you black heathen,” to “if that Hottentot goes into the chimney, I shall go out the door.”
“Hottentot,” by the way, is an antiquated racial slur for certain indigenous peoples in southwest Africa.
Mary herself tells young Michael that he’s “behaving like a Hottentot” in the 1952 novel “Mary Poppins in the Park.”
The term does appear in the movie as well, but in a specific context that it’s also important to note.
Both utterances of the word are said by Admiral Boom, who also mistakes the chimney sweeps for actual black people.
This shows that Disney acknowledged that Travers’ novels associated the chimney sweep soot with actual black faces, if not an intentional blackface performance.
However, it’s also worth mentioning that the only character to actually use the word “hottentot” and make this mistaken identification is supposed to be considered a foolish character.
So the question we’re left to ask is whether Disney was making an implied comment at Travers’ own racial implications or passing them along as a gag without any real examination.
Answering that question goes a long way to determine whether Mary Poppins “blacked up” or not.
What are you opinions on the assertion that Mary Poppins is a film with blackface?
It’s pretty clear that most people are skeptical, but considering the author’s history, the answer may be a bit more nuanced.
h/t: The New York Times
