"The Life I Lead” is George’s theme song, his leitmotif, and whenever we hear the tune, it is in the context of order, structure, schedule, and routine. Think of the planetary archetype Saturn as George’s patron archetype. George, as he sings, is unrelated to anyone, he does not move around but mostly stands in one place. "The Life I Lead" is a patter song, not really sung for the most part, but spoken. This same tune will accompany George’s upcoming advertisement for the new nanny, and these Saturnian qualities are the kinds of characteristics that he admires. George will sing or patter two more songs later on with this same theme, and I will point them out as we go along. “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” the chorus of which we have already heard during the opening credits, is another song that does multiple duty and acts as a theme song. It is a leitmotif for liminality. It is Bert’s signature song and can be associated with the planetary archetype Pluto.

When he finally comes to realize that the children are missing, George reactively calls the police without listening to his wife when she attempts to tell him the facts. Cutting her off mid-sentence, he curtly remarks: “Madam, kindly do not cloud the issue with facts.” Only when he is on the phone, does it dawn on him that Katie Nanna has left. This scene shows the danger of routine and of being caught in one way of seeing things.

The children then arrive home with a broken kite, accompanied by Constable Jones, who tells Mr. Banks that while on his duties he noticed “that some valuables had gone missing.” George has no idea what the constable is talking about, because he does not associate the word valuable with his children. George is very brusque with his wife, the children and the constable. When the children begin to tell about the kite, George shuts them down, and they are sent off to the nursery with Ellen.

George is aloof, he does not pay attention to other people or listen to his wife. During “The Life I Lead” song, as he adheres almost blindly to his routine, Winifred is understandibly is exasperated and disappointed. George implores her not to get too emotional when she goes to embrace the children upon their return. George is emotionally cut off and unwilling even to engage in a socially appropriate way with the constable—repeatedly cutting him off when the constable attempts to bring a bit of compassion to the situation; George also resists the children’s attempt to involve him in their lives when they suggest that he might help them make a better kite.

Dysfunctional Dynamics

Both George Banks and Winifred Banks enter their homes singing about their self-involved lives. They are at different ends of the spectrum, and their songs reflect this, not only in content, but also in style and choreography. George sings a patter song that glorifies the patriarchy, unrelated to anyone. Patting his invisible children on the head as he sings about his orderly schedule, he is very constrained, not moving much, and not engaging in a relational way with others. Winifred, on the other hand, energetically sings and dances, including the domestics in her revolutionary cause and song. The dynamic between Mr. and Mrs. Banks reflects the notion of gerontomorphy and pedomorphy, respectively [See Gerontomorphy-Pedomorphy Table] The dynamic between them also mirrors the cultural milieu of the 1960s, between the establishment and the counterculture. Mary Poppins appeared at this time, and her character metaphorically offers another position, a third choice, holding the tension between the two opposites, similar to and what Jung (1958/1973) called the “transcendent function.” While beyond the scope of this dissertation, I see a more in-depth exploration between play and the transcendent function as an area of future research.

These two songs set up the need for Mary Poppins to be there, as Richard Sherman relates: “The parents were so busy doing their own thing, they weren’t paying attention to their children and that would be the key to the story.” (Stevenson, 2004. DVD). As Marshall McLuhan (2003) synchronistically noted in 1964: artists are “the antenna of the race.” Sherman notes the film-makers originally thought of having the father be physically absent, but then realized that he could be absent emotionally, while still being physically present in the home. The dynamics of the Banks family, the problem of absent parents who are physically present yet emotionally absent from their children’s lives, is a very real problem in today’s world, much more so than when the movie premiered in the mid-1960s.

Cuomo (1995) sees George Banks as a “failed patriarch,” his wife is an inattentive, subversive suffragette, and his children are errant and out of control. In Cuomo’s feminist reading of the story, Mary Poppins is a “spinster in sensible shoes,” a witch, whose “magic opens up worlds of possibility,” and a “rebel nanny without a feminist cause.” Cuomo faults the movie for “merely agitating but never truly upsetting gender roles and social configurations” (p. 214). She notes that Mary never interacts with Winifred, and takes Mary’s lack of onscreen interaction or overt support of Winifred’s cause to mean that Winifred is insignificant; the message, Cuomo argues being that men can save the family. Cuomo asserts that the movie Mary Poppins is all about men being the bastion of the home, and that “men can have it all.”

I see it differently. I believe that Mary focuses on George Banks because he and his routine are the problem. Winifred is most likely overly concerned outside the home as a compensation for and rebellion against her stern, strict, patriarchal husband. Cuomo notes that Winifred gives up her suffragette sash at the end of the movie for the kite’s tale—implying that she has given up the cause. But as we have seen, Winifred had several such sashes and giving up one of them is a healthy way of indicating her becoming more balanced, but lets us not get ahead of ourselves.

New Nanny Needed

“A British Nanny” –to the Tune of “The Life I Lead”

George then decides to take matters into his own hands in hiring the next nanny. He dictates the advertisement to Winifred, whose behavioral flexibility allows her to easily go from suffragette to secretary, as the need arises. George, however is a “one-trick pony” as they say, and in his advertisement for the nanny, we see that his ideas about the requirements run along very Saturnian lines: “A British nanny must be a general . . . the person that we need to mold the breed is a nanny who can give commands.” George has only one way of being in the world, which the coincidence of his name and occupation suggest. His advertisement for the new nanny also reflects this gerontomorphic, Saturnian pattern: “Tradition, discipline and rules, must be the tools, without them disorder, catastrophe, anarchy, in short you have a ghastly mess.” The children have their own view about nannies, one that is diametrically different from their father’s.

“The Perfect Nanny”

The children come downstairs to apologize, and George says “I’d like to have your help in the matter,” by which he means that they should be well- behaved. When the children offer their own advertisement as a way to help, George dismisses them out of hand. While their mother Winifred is loving, relational, and inclusive, and listens attentively as the children read aloud/sing, George is ridiculing and excluding the entire time: rolling his eyes, interrupting them, and making rude comments. The children desire a nanny who they can relate with, not be ruled by. If their new nanny is not domineering and cruel, the children promise that they will not rebel by playing tricks: “we won’t hide your spectacles so you can’t see, put toads in your bed or pepper in your tea.”

After the children finish their advertisment/song, George sends them off to bed and they leave, crestfallen. He proceeds to tear up their ad, which he sees as nothing but rubbish. He throws the torn paper in the chimney, and then phones in his ad to the newspaper. Winifred attempts to engage her husband, and she tries to put a good face on the situation, but he is just very abrupt. While George is speaking with the Times, the torn pieces of paper magically rise up the chimney and are carried away by the wind.

It is appropriate that the papers rise up the chimney because chimneys are symbols of “the mysterious channels of communication with beings in the Heavens. It is the channel used by witches when they go to their Sabbaths” (Chevalier & Gheerbrant, 1996, p. 191). Chimneys relate to the world axis where celestial influxes come down and earthly souls rise, linking the two realms, and in this way they are also liminal. Chimneys also symbolize of the bonds of society, because they were places of gathering, where relating bygone customs and storytelling occurred. The family is torn, just as the pieces of paper and the kite have been torn. Julie Andrews relates “the magical quality of Mary Poppins lies in the main thrust and her reason for being in our lives is that she fixes things; she goes in and makes families better.” (Stevenson, 2004, DVD) In a moment, we will see that Mary has done just this with the children’s ad.

A few days later, in answer to George’s ad, a “ghastly looking crew” of nannies have lined up outside along Cherry Tree Lane. They are all stern and somber looking. Jane and Michael remark: “they’re not what we advertised for at all.” As he prepares the morning time gun, Admiral Boom’s assistant, Mr. Binnacle reports that the wind has changed and it is coming out of a new quarter.

Ellen tells Mr. Banks about the cue of nannies, but she is twelve seconds early and George is so rigid and controlling that he refuses to see them until precisely 8:00, because George has previously told Ellen “ I dislike being hurried into things.”

Meeting Mary Poppins

Mary Poppins Arrives

Meanwhile, the wind has picked up and the Nannies begin to blow away down the street, toward the park entrance. As they are tossed about on the wind, their umbrellas are all turned inside out. Mary Poppins arrives on the same wind that has blown the other nannies away. Unlike the others, she gracefully sails down, with her umbrella. This different way of being in the wind might allude to the advantages of flexibility over rigidity. The children watch Mary's arrival and Michael wonders aloud whether she is a witch. ∆RC[mp21]

Symbolically, wind can indicate turbulence and instability, as well as unseen forces. Wind is an elemental force associated with the Titans and can be blindly violent. Wind is also “synonymous with breath and consequently the Spirit, a heaven-sent spiritual influx.” For Hindus, Vayu is the wind god, the cosmic breath and the World, who rules the subtle world between heaven and earth. “Vayu imbues, shatters and cleanses, and is related to the points of the compass” (Chevalier & Gheerbrant, 1996, pp. 1110-1111). In the Bible, winds are seen as the breath of God, and “instruments of God’s power, bringing life, punishing and teaching. They were signs and carried messages like the angels” (p. 1112). In the Greek tradition, Eureus, the East Wind, was associated with morning and the Zephyr, the West Wind, was associated with evening. Mary Poppins has come on the East Wind, possibly alluding to the dawning of consciousness. Like Mary Poppins, the wind is unpredictable, and is able to “produce dramatic effects despite its own invisibility” According to Zoroastrianism, “wind played the part of world foundation and keeper of cosmic and moral balance” (p. 1111), and “in ancient Iran as in ancient Islam, the wind was thought of as a great organizing principle for the cosmos” (Biedermann, 1994, p. 382). This is precisely the function that Mary serves in this family.

Mary can thus be seen as a symbol of the Self, Jung’s term for the balancing, corrective structure in people, in this case in the guise of the archetype of spirit—Mercurius. Shulman (1997) notes that the Self, like Mercurius (and I would add Mary) is duplex, both are linked to transformation and healing. Mary and Mercurius are both associated with the wind and the term “the winds of change” aptly embodies this transformational thought. Mercurius is also associated with the unconscious and the nonrational, and Mary has much affinity with these as well. According to Paulsen (1966), Mercurius is a symbol of the “wholeness which can be achieved only through a development of consciousness that results in transformation,” and Paulsen sees Mercurius’s role in transformation as his most essential function:

As the archetype of spirit, Mercurius moves to restore the balance of wholeness whenever it is threatened. He aims at reconciliation between consciousness and the unconscious, operating as a compensatory factor, now in one sphere and now in the other, depending upon where his help is needed and what stage of conscious development has been reached . . . . I believe that Dr. Jung thought of Mercurius as the god of revelation, the archetype of psychic evolution, of growing consciousness itself. (p. 109)

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