This blog post is based on remarks Henry Jenkins presented as a keynote speaker at The Older, The Better! Aging Celebrity in Contemporary Media and Sport Contexts, PRIN 2022 PNRR “Celebr-Age” Final Conference at Universita di Bologna in September. He discusses legendary performer Dick Van Dyke's joyful aging vibrant characters in conjunction with Jenkins' own work as Van Dyke's 100th birthday approaches this December.
The following blog post is based on remarks I presented as a keynote speaker at The Older, The Better! Aging Celebrity in Contemporary Media and Sport Contexts, PRIN 2022 PNRR “Celebr-Age” Final Conference organized by Ylenia Caputo, Simona Castellano, Antonella Mascio, Roy Menarini, Maurizio Merico, Sara Pesce, Mario Tirino at Universita di Bologna in September.
Dick Van Dyke will turn 100 this December and this past year has seemed like one big victory lap, starting with the extraordinary moment when a production number of “Step In Time” on Dancing with The Stars (ABC) concluded as this particular star stepped out onto the stage and (with an assist from two chorus boys) danced a few steps. The crowd went wild and so did the internet, as the scene brought a rush of nostalgia for anyone who grew up with Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins and Van Dyke’s performance of Bert the Chimney Sweep. I count myself among them. Mary Poppins was the first film I remember seeing in the theater and what a theater it was – Atlanta’s fabulous Fox Theater, an arabesque themed movie palace from the 1920s.
Mary Poppins plays a central role in my recent book, Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America. I want to begin this blog post where that book’s discussion of the film left off or perhaps more accurately where the book began, since I used the film to ground the book’s introduction of the concept of permissiveness, which turns out to be useful to think about the current moment in Van Dyke’s life (and mine) also. I am an aging Boy in a Striped Shirt, admiring Van Dyke’s dexterity all the more at a point where my own mobility has been limited by symptoms associated with diabetes and neuropathy.
In the book, I use this scene where the Banks household discusses how to hire a new nanny, with both the father (embodying prewar patriarchal norms focused on disciplining the child) and the children (embracing a more pleasure-centered and permissive style then coming into popularity through the widespread success of Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care). We might map the contrast between the two approaches through this chart from another popular child-rearing guide of the era by Rudolf Dreikurs in 1964, the same year Mary Poppins was released.
Autocratic Parenting (Mr. Banks)
Authority Figure
Power
Pressure
Demanding
Punishment
Reward
Imposition
Domination
Seen and Not Heard
YOU do because I said so
Here, and throughout the rest of the song, the key words and concepts—“precision,” “firmness,” “discipline,” “rules,” on the one hand and disorder and moral disintegration on the other—come directly from the discipline-centered child-rearing advice of the early 20th century. Ada Hart Arlitt’s The Child From One to Six (1930) warned that the child “will not know that there are laws that govern the universe unless he knows that there are laws that govern the home.” The home was to be regulated not by “mother love” but by the “kitchen time-piece.” Here, we speak to a core concern of the behaviorist model: the idea that children should be fed and put to bed on a fixed schedule rather than giving over to their demands or desires.
As in the pre-war models, the best methods for achieving these goals required the father to be the head of the household and for those under his “command” to maintain authority over the young. Going hand in hand with this emphasis on patriarchal power within the home is a distrust of maternal sentimentality or what Banks refers to as “the slipshod, sugary, female thinking they get around here all day long.” Banks is portrayed as seeking a polite distance from his children: “I'll pat them on the head and send them off to bed.”
Democratic Society (The Children)
Knowledgeable Leader
Influence
Stimulation
Winning Cooperation
Logical Consequences
Encouragement
Self-determination
Guidance
Listen! Respect the child
WE do it because it is necessary
The conversation between parents and children models something closer to the family council Dreikurs (1964) describes: “Each member has the right to bring up a problem. Each has the right to be heard. Together, all seek for a solution to the problem and the majority opinion is upheld” (p. 301). The children assume that they have the right to contribute to solving the problem and that their insights will be helpful to the adults. The children’s attempt to assert their voice in the process is only heard because their mother insists that the parents should listen to what they have to say.
The children’s criteria emphasize an affectionate relationship, the opposite of the anti-sentimentalist approach advocated by Watson and Mr. Banks. If Banks wants a nanny who can give commands, they want one with a “cheery disposition.” She is defined by the ways that she engages with them through jokes, songs, outings, and games, and not through the expectations she places upon them. She is to win their cooperation through what she permits and the guidance she offers. And as if to dramatize this process of winning cooperation, the next verse functions as a negotiation in which the children agree not to misbehave if the nanny agrees to better respond to their needs.
As defined in my book, permissiveness:
Uses empathetic reflection to “take stock” and attempt to understand children’s motivations and drivers
Values children’s sensuality, curiosity, push for independence, passion, playfulness as part of how they process the world
Seeks to protect the rights of children to find their own voices, to pursue just solutions, to engage democratically with others in their own community
Offers opportunities for children to achieve catharsis by working through emotional conflicts via expressive means, such as drawing pictures, writing stories, acting them out using dolls or other household materials.
Seeks to minimize conflict by decreasing the use of authoritative statements in favor of discussions and explanations
Seeks indirect rather than direct means to shape children’s characters
Is known for what it permits and accommodates rather than what it disciplines, constraints, limits and thwarts
Gives children security and freedom to work through their own problems, watches from distance, provides resources when needed
Embraces play as a mode of learning and as a means of communication, especially between parents and children
My book discusses the ways permissiveness permeated the representations of children—especially boys—in the children’s fictions of the era. Consider, for example, this sequence from one of my favorite films, 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, written by Doctor Seuss, as a young boy in a striped shirt proclaims his rights to be treated with the same respect owed to adults.
Alongside Spock, the other major advocate on the permissive family ideal was the grandmotherly Margaret Mead who was preoccupied with the idea that changing the dynamics of the American family was the best way to foster a more democratic culture. American family life, Mead argued, had been shaped by several decades of disruption. First, there had been the immigrants who came to America in the late 19th and early 20th century; their children had rejected old world traditions in order to try to become more American. There were also the dislocations felt by families, like my own, that had moved to the city from the country, shifting from agriculture-based to industrialized lifestyles. Then, there was the generation which had postponed starting a family during the Depression and the war. Consequently, baby boom parents had little to no memories of what the typical American family had looked like before. Mead wrote in November 1945, “this leaves two courses open to them, either to fashion a pattern out of partial remembrance of the war years or to make a new pattern for themselves altogether” (p. 91). What will happen, Mead (Unpublished, 1945) asks, “if the young people of this generation realize that the world is theirs for the making, that because of the break between peace and war, they can -- if they wish -- reject the whole model which their brothers and sisters -- living in another world -- have given them in the past five years?” Developing this new model will require intentionality: Otherwise, she fears:
It is this younger group who will be most lost, most groping, most likely to take short cuts and easy solutions, most likely to become a ‘lost generation.’ The only way in which this can be prevented is to help these young people think it through, give them a chance to discuss the whole problem, to realize why they are at sea, to talk over the kind of life their elder brothers and sisters have been living, to label those aspects of it which don’t belong in their lives now….There is no older generation who can give these models to them. The most we can do is to help them find them themselves. (Mead, 1945, Unpublished)
Writing for Harpers, also in 1945, Mead calls upon “the symbol-makers, the writers, the artists, the radio broadcasters and the filmmakers” to be “enlisted” into producing new narratives, the shared designs out of which the post-war family would be constructed.
And the “symbol makers” responded by producing works, such as Mary Poppins, which consciously modeled what a permissive household might look like. In “Just a Spoonful of Sugar,” Mary describes her use of “reverse-psychology,” through which work becomes less painful if embraced as a form of play and medicine tastes better if disguised by sucrose.
In both Mary Poppins and Sound of Music, Julie Andrews embodied the ideals of the period, freeing children from the constraints imposed upon them from conservative fathers, allowing them to sing and play and go on outings, and gradually bringing the father to embrace the new values of the postwar family.
A recent Disney film stressed the way the story was about “Saving Mr. Banks” as much as it was about setting the family right. And in practice, permissive culture sought to place greater demands on adults to listen to, empathize with, and achieve understanding of their children. Often, the parenting guidebooks of the era stressed the importance of the father becoming a playmate for his children, a practice which not only brought a strong male presence into their lives, but also gave the father a way to rejuvenate himself at the end of a hard day at work. Similarly, in 5000 Fingers, we see the adult male’s potential to be an ideal father for the orphaned boy by observing how they played together.
Advertisements of the period warned fathers that if they did not take time to play with their children now, then it would be soon too late. We can see examples of this discourse in a Kodak advertisement. Or, again, in a popular song about fatherhood performed by folk singer Harry Chapin.
If the plot of Mary Poppins works to get the workaholic Mr. Banks, who is named for the institution where he has dedicated his life, to go out and fly a kite with his children, the Van Dyke character, Bert, models what it might mean for an adult to enjoy a more playful and imaginative life. It is Bert who draws chalk pictures on the sidewalk that are so immersive that the children and their Nanny can jump into them and have wild adventures together. It is Bert and his Uncle Albert who lets loose with wild laughter which sends them floating up to the ceiling. And it is Bert who teaches the father that he needs to be more attentive to the emotional needs of his children.
And much as Mary Poppins teaches the children that “just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down,” Bert and his Chimney Sweep friends model what a more playful relationship to work might look like. And, ironically, it was Dick Van Dyke who also portrayed the most fossilized version of adult work, the ancient old man who is the elder leader of the board of the Bank of England. Here, we see a still relatively young Van Dyke imagining what it would be like to be elderly, having, like Charles Dickens’ Ebanezar Scrooge, spent his life dedicated to little more than the pursuit of gold or in this case, tuppence.
In hindsight, it is clear that Mary Poppins had as much to teach us about being an adult as it had to say to us as Baby Boom era children, if we only knew where to look.
I want to argue that a new phase in Van Dyke’s life can be seen in Mary Poppins Returns when he steps on screen, now himself an older man, singing and dancing, having grown into the bank president who looks more like the original than we could have anticipated. And this becomes the persona which Van Dyke adopts more and more in his public appearances. As the character explains, “I may be circling the drain but I have a few steps left in me.”
dick van dyke in Mary poppins returns (2018)
Each new birthday requires that Van Dyke, now widely seen as a national treasure, flash another broad smile and looking like he will burst out laughing at any moment. We already know how much he loves to laugh. While Van Dyke played many roles across his career, it is the part of Bert to which he returns again and again. Photographs show him in T-Shirts which evoke catch phrases from Mary Poppins, now repurposed to reflect ironically on the process of aging. He and Bert have fused with the star sign becoming a living, breathing intertextual reference back to his most beloved role.
For his 90th Birthday, he stood on a balcony in Disneyland being serenaded by throngs of the public below and presided over the opening of a new cafe dedicated to memories of the film.
Dick Van Dyke celebrates his 90th birthday at disneyland
For his 96 birthday, Van Dyke released a music video where he dances with his considerably younger wife and gives a ribald version of “Everyone loves a lover.” Again, he demonstrates his physical control of his body as well as the fact that he still is a clown who does not take himself too seriously. A news segment commemorating his 98th birthday includes references to his roles in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Dick Van Dyke show but it starts with “Jolly Holliday” and references Mary Poppins multiple times.
Much as Bert in Mary Poppins models what a permissive father might be, Van Dyke’s later appearances showcase to an aging Baby Boom audience what playful aging might look like. He’s still got it, baby, and so do you, he seems to say, as we watch from our arm chairs and imagine what it might be like to “step in time” with a chorus of always cheerful chimney sweeps. In Entertainment and Utopia Richard Dyer (1977) tells us that musicals model what utopia feels like through their appeals to spontaneity, plentitude, energy, and the other virtues they associate with entertainment. As my own 68th birthday approaches, I would just love to move through the world with less numbness in my feet, less stiffness in my knees, and less discomfort in my chest.
Van Dyke’s 100th birthday approaches in just a month and a half and he seems to be joining George Burns and Betty White as an example of a star who comes to perform what it is like to break the century boundary. Happy Birthday, Dick, and may everyday continue to be a “Jolly Holiday.”
Biography
Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era. He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.
