Barry A. Klinger, December 2013
It is shocking that The Sound of Music hit movie theaters in 1965, since its musical style seems to come from a different century than Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire at Monterey Pop (1967) or even the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan appearance (1964). Yet upon closer inspection one can see that The Sound of Music and Julie Andrews’ earlier movie, Mary Poppins, not only were in the decade of the 1960s but also helped usher in the epoch of “The Sixties”.
The Disney movie Mary Poppins came out in 1964 and was based on P.L. Travers 1934 book and its sequels. In the movie, Mary Poppins floats down from the sky to become the nanny for a brother and sister in Edwardian London. Others have remarked on the startlingly psychedelic adventures the children have with Poppins. A chalk picture scrawled on the sidewalk becomes a gateway to a more colorful London when the children literally jump into the picture where they ride through a park on liberated carousel horses and dine beside dancing animated penguin waiters.
This is not just druggy in a generic way, but staring at a picture and “falling into it” is a characteristic adventure on LSD trips. It is not so much that the tripper hallucinates, but that the barrier between what one is imagining and what one is actually seeing becomes thinner or at least less important. If there is a hill in the picture, it is easy to neglect the difference between *imagining* what lies behind it and actually *seeing* what lies behind it. Mary Poppins’ romp inside the picture takes place the year before Kesey’s San Francisco Acid Tests and two years after Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s psychedelic experiments at Harvard.
Next, Mary takes the children to a house where her friends — and then the kids — float up to the ceiling. This instance of getting high speaks for itself, but its worth pointing out that in the movie, the key to escaping gravity is a fit of uncontrollable laughter.
But forget about Mary bringing her young charges on drug trips; the whole point of the movie revolves around a theme of liberation that fits perfectly with Woodstock and the Summer of Love. Mary Poppins frees the children from the repressive environment of their emotionally neglectful parents. Even better, the children nearly bring down the entire financial establishment when the boy inadvertently starts a run on the bank where his father works. Father loses his job and has his middle class townhouse over-run by dancing chimney sweeps. At first his reaction is anger, but Mary Poppins’ example allows him to see the world not as a series of duties but as a supercalifragilisticexpialadocious adventure. He takes the kids kite-flying — yet another instance of getting high in the movie.
Once we notice that Mary Poppins is about tearing down the old, uptight Establishment and replacing it with a much groovier and colorful way to live, it’s not hard to make the connection to Julie Andrews’ other itinerant nanny movie. The Sound of Music movie is based on the 1959 play which is in turn based very loosely on the real-life Von Trapp family, so its theme of liberation predates the ’60s. The original book for the play was written by Howard Lindsay (70 years old in 1959) and Russel Crouse (66 in 1959). Forget that the movie seems to be about Maria, a singing nun-in-training who, in proper Old Movie fashion, falls in love with and marries a powerful, wealthy man when she warms his brooding heart. When described correctly, The Sound of Music could be a topical story from 1969. A stranger comes to town, rescues a group of young people from a life of dull uniformity, and teaches them to wander singing and dancing over the countryside in colorful clothes.
Once again, Father represents the Establishment, but he too is drawn into the tribe’s orbit. First he rejects his materialistic fiancee. Then, he actually joins the tribe and publicly proclaims his new identity by singing in public with them. Finally, threatened by being drafted into a military which we know is to be used for an immoral war, he and the rest of the tribe escapes over the border to a country where he can hide from the draft.
The last part of the movie, when the Von Trapps must deal with the Nazi annexation of Austria, seems somewhat unconnected to the rest of the story. In the first two acts, man and women meet, irritate each other, fall in love, overcome obstacles (previous attachments to another woman and to Jesus) and marry. Roll credits.
Also the conflict with the Nazis is somewhat vacuous. Sure, we already know that the Nazis are very, very bad, but we are never told why Captain Von Trapp dislikes them. Is it the assault on freedoms, the anti-semitism, or does he merely prefer Austrian fascists to German ones? When we look at the movie in its proper Age of Aquarius context, it becomes clear why the conflict with the Nazis is a more appropriate denouement than the wedding. Just as Father’s disapproval validates the children’s transformation from soldiers to hippies, so the conflict with the Nazis validates Father’s transformation. He was a wealthy military officer, but becomes a draft-dodging, itinerant singer.
Both movies end with the family, having broken on through to the other side, confronting the square world that has not. No one’s going to make a movie about Nazis giving it up and becoming hippies (though the children of Nazis is another story). But it is interesting that, while the militaristic life of Von Trapp is irredeemable and must be escaped, the capitalistic life shown in Mary Poppins does become softened and transformed, with a renewed Father returning to his job at a more humanized bank.
I first saw The Sound of Music when I was four or five, in the late ’60s. I immediately wanted to be one of the children, and to some extent still do. It and The Jungle Book were the first movies I saw. Mary Poppins didn’t make as big an impression on me until college, when the idea of jumping into a picture was more meaningful to me. I wonder what these movies mean for society though.
Was Julie Andrews–whether she knew it or not– actually preparing children to join the counterculture and remake the dominant culture in the 1960s and ’70s? The themes discussed here did not apply to the story of the real Von Trapp family; apparently Captain Von Trapp was already a nice guy who allowed his children to sing before Maria came along. Did the writers involved in crafting the book, play, and movies absorb something in the air that was already growing to a flowering of experimentation and casting away of inhibition? Or can similar themes be found in stories from previous centuries and other cultures? Perhaps some of the same aesthetic can be seen in some religious movements, which would be an interesting link to Maria’s abortive career as a nun.