Walls and Borders, the Tribal Memory

Every time I hear about the path of the border wall, it sends a jolt of recognition through me. I grew up in Mission, Texas, right on the border with Mexico. The wall will cut through land south of my town, down by the Rio Grande. That includes a state park I have visited, the National Butterfly Center and La Lomita Chapel, the small Catholic church that actually gives Mission its name. My home town and the Rio Grande Valley are in the news every day, especially during President Trump’s visit to McAllen, the big city east of Mission. With the border wall now the point of contention in the government shutdown, the place is more notorious than ever.

The idea of moving among countries is familiar to me, as is the idea of staying in a place for generations. That all depends on what side of my family I talk about. On my father’s side, the rootlessness is very obvious. My grandfather, father and myself were all born in different countries: Ukraine for my grandfather, the United States for my father, and France for me, when my parents were living on a US Air Force base in the 1950s. My grandparents came as the typical Jewish families who got out of Eastern Europe, fleeing the pogroms and poverty. They came through, legally, and settled in St. Louis. My father was born there, but he had a wanderlust that took him back to Europe in the 1950s after he married my mother in Texas. In his case, he went to France to work in the auto racing industry. My brother and I were both born at the Air Force hospital there. But the marriage ended and my mother brought us back to her home town, Mission, and that’s where we stayed.

As that story of return suggests, my mother’s family shows a great attachment to place. I can’t think of anybody in the family who permanently left Texas, other than me, and I’m here in the Northeast for over 40 years. Family members came to New York from Germany in the 1840s and to Texas by the 1860s or before. One was the first ordained rabbi in Texas. He was my great-great-grandfather, Hayyim Schwarz. Zooming through time 150 years, my brother’s twin grandkids had their second birthday earlier this month. They are the seventh generation in Texas, living in a town outside Houston that’s just 35 miles south of Hempstead, where the esteemed rabbi Schwarz settled in 1873. Three or four generations can be found in the Jewish cemetery in the town of Gonzales, between San Antonio and Houston.

So when I see the wall, I think of people on one side, leaving what they have known for the unknown in search of something they can’t get where they live. I also people on the other side, where they’ve been for generations, feeling their sense of place and society threatened by disruption.

That’s been humanity’s pattern for hundreds of thousands of years. Move away or stay and fight, conquer or resist, adjust or repel, welcome or ignore, cooperate or clash, assimilate or stand apart. I can sense that story from both sides of the dynamic. The plans for the border wall may be new, but the emotions the wall evokes by are as old as our tribal memories and stories our ancestors told under the stars and by the rivers of Babylon.

As for me, maybe it’s time to look into applying for an EU passport. I was born in France, after all. I should keep my options open in case the wanderlust strikes me for some reason I cannot imagine.

Mary Poppins Returns in a Time of Social Convulsion

I came late to the Mary Poppins party. I must have seen the 1965 film as a kid since I recognize the songs although I don’t remember the film. In contrast, my Significant Other is a major fan and can sing all the songs. We watched the original last month in preparation for the release of Mary Poppins Returns. We saw the sequel on New Year’s Eve and I now I feel compelled to say something about it.

But what? As a musical, the sequel has some catchy songs that could become known, such as the touching "The Place Where the Lost Things Go," although not on the level of “Chim-Chim-Cheree” and “A Spoonful of Sugar” and, you know, that song with the long title. The hip-hop inflected songs with Lin-Manuel Miranda, set in a music hall, bring a dash of that Hamilton magic to the show. The dance sequences are OK, but don’t expect An American in Paris. The costumes are gorgeous with the over-the-top colors and styles now seen on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Emily Blunt brings a mesmerizing quality to the role with her style, wildly posh accent and bright lipstick. The rakish angle of her hat in the movie's posters suggests a femme fatale from 1940s film noir.

What intrigued me most was Blunt's depiction of Mary Poppins, along with the chaotic world she touches. The movie grabbed me on the level of social commentary, myth and psychology. If Julie Andrews played Mary Poppins as a kind, caring and firm nanny in the original set in the evolving post-Victorian London, Blunt remade the same character with a layer of chilly, cyborgian empathy in a London ravaged by the 1930s depression and the looming threat of all-out class warfare.

Both movies, but especially the sequel, have Mary Poppins flying in to a household of embattled and flailing men, economically adrift in a society convulsed by social pressures and marked by women raising their voices for change—women's suffrage in the original, support for the destitute working class in the sequel. The children prefer an energetic free-range lifestyle that alarms the parents. The men (father in the original, son in the sequel) work for a bank that embodies the rapacious values of soulless capitalism. Park attendants stand for those who enforce the rules with a ferocious intensity, while a sea captain and his loyal assistant make obsessive gestures in defense of the dying empire. From the depths of the social order, the grimy and jolly chimney sweeps and lamplighters wield their tools with the force of iron-willed Bolshevik revolutionary cadres in Ten Days that Shook the World, ready the sweep away the established order.

Into this chaos flies Mary Poppins with her talking umbrella and carpet bag, just as in the original, to set things right and have fun in the process. She’s a character in search of a comparison. Is she the silent stone Monolith from 2001? No, too faceless. A strict Freudian psychoanalyst, inscrutable and silent, upon which patients project their own emotions as they struggle for insight? That’s getting closer with the notion of projecting an identity on to Mary Poppins, but a psychoanalyst is passive and not directly involved in the patient’s daily life. Besides, Mary Poppins likes to talk.

She strikes me as a firm and creative parental influence, but one who insists on keeping an adult distance that preserves her private sphere. After mulling that thought, it struck me that Mary Poppins reminds me of Shane, the drifting gunslinger who helps a beleaguered homesteading family under attack from a cattleman. In the 1953 film Shane, the lead character forms a deep bond with the family’s son Joey while also having unexpressed feelings for his mother, Marion. Like Mary Poppins, Shane shows Joey values and defends the family through the climactic crisis. Shane and Mary Poppins are both snappy dressers with a talent for dancing. Shane ends, like both Mary Poppins movies, with the unreadable hero leaving the loving family, coming from nowhere, going somewhere else.

The last scene of Shane could apply to a revised conclusion of Mary Poppins Returns, with children calling after the nanny with pleas that unintentionally reveal the depth of emotion of a parent toward the departing stranger. This would require a gender reversal in Mary Poppins Returns, but I could see the widowed Michael Banks yearning for more with Mary Poppins, and the children begging her as Joey did to Shane:

Pa’s got things for you to do, and Mother wants you, I know she does! ShaneI Shane, come back!

But Shane rides on into the mountains, destination unknown, just as Mary Poppins ascends into the sky with her tight, knowing smile and faraway eyes. She never explains what she does, and denies involvement in any of the marvelous adventures she arranges for the children and her robust blue-collar companions (Dick Van Dyke in the original, Lin-Manuel Miranda in the sequel). A bit of eye moisture hints at her feelings, but to the end Mary Poppins remains a beautiful and tightly wrapped enigma, beyond the reach of those who care for her.

In all fairness, the Mary Poppins books evidently give far more details about her family and friends, and the personal vanity just hinted at in the movies. Mary Poppins Returns does have a song-and-dance number with her eccentric cousin, played by Meryl Streep speaking with an accent that blended Yiddish and Russian-princess tonalities. I found the scene more jarring than illuminating, since it brings in a family element that doesn’t fit with the austere blank-slate Mary Poppins otherwise envisioned.

Dick Van Dyke appears in both movies, 53 years apart, and reprises one of his two roles from the original to great effect. He shows off his 91-year old dancing chops, a great crowd pleaser. I can only hope Emily Blunt can do the same when she's 91. For the record, the Significant Other remarks, "I bet Julie Andrews could dance on the table, she still looks great."

Mary Poppins Returns closes on an effervescent hopeful note, thanks in part to the capitalistic wonders of compound interest. The final scenes shimmer with goodness and social solidarity confirmed against the “lovely London sky” and the evil capitalist banker humiliated one more time for good measure. Will Emily Blunt reprise the role and sail down with the East Wind for more adventures, perhaps Mary Poppins Battles the Blitzkrieg or Mary Poppins Parties with the Rolling Stones? Will she team up with Bruce Willis to make Die Hard With a Spoonful of Sugar?

Only the box office knows for sure.