Month: August 2024

Bert Is My Favorite Character in Mary Poppins

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & MoviesLeave a comment

Since I’m talking about the movie Mary Poppins, I’d like to mention that my favorite character in it is Bert. He shows up quite a bit, doing various things. He’s quite the jack-of-all-trades, and this competence is the basis of his character. This knowledge is not mere practical knowledge, though, he’s also wise. For example, he can read the signs of the times:

His wisdom comes up in other places; he helps Mr. Banks figure out what Mary Poppins taught him, for example.

But what I really like about Bert, more than anything else, is his humility. You can see this best when he’s a chimney sweep. Consider his song:

Chim chiminey chim chiminey chim chim chereee
A sweep is as lucky, as lucky can be.
Chim chiminey chim chiminey chim chim cheroo
Good luck will rubs off, when I shakes hands with you.
Or blow me a kiss.
And that’s lucky too.

Now as the ladder of life has been strung
you might think a sweep’s on the bottom-most rung
though I spends me time in the ashes and smoke
in this whole wide world there’s no ‘appier bloke.

Sweeping chimneys is an extremely dirty job. (It can be worse; ash is actually caustic when mixed with water.) Very few people would take it by choice and rich people always hire someone else to sweep their chimneys for them. But there is a freedom afforded in going where other men will not follow, and Bert takes the good that the life of the chimney sweep has to offer without resentment.

He also is without envy. Mr. Banks is a rich man, while Bert is a poor man, but Bert appreciates what he has and is happy. He even works to the good of Mr. Banks. When the children are afraid of their father, he reconciles them to him. He helps them to see things from their father’s perspective so that they are able to understand how he tries to love them.

In fact, Bert is the happiest character in the whole movie and his goodness is inseparable from his happiness. A character’s happiness being inseparable from their goodness is the mark of a well-done character. (Both in happy and miserable characters.)

Mary Poppins is an Unlikely Christ Figure

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized2 Comments

When it comes to Christ figures in movies, a British nanny with a talking umbrella in a musical for Children is not, perhaps, where one would first look. And yet, I think a strong case can be made that Mary Poppins is, in fact, a Christ figure. She’s not a complete representation of Christ, of course, but then most Christ figures aren’t. (Aslan in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is the only one I can think of who is. And he’s not so much a Christ figure as, well, Christ, just in a different universe.)

If you look at the basic structure of the movie, the Banks’ home is in chaos. They do not value things in the right order, with the things of highest important at the top, and so the relations between all the people are in disarray and they do not get along. In this dysfunction Mary Poppins enters, literally descending from the heavens. She does all things rightly (she is practically perfect in every way), and calls all of the people around to live their life well. That is, she calls sinners to repentance. She demonstrates, with wonders, that she is no mere sage, but someone having authority beyond that of human authority. After restoring a right ordering to the things that the people value, which reconciles them to each other, she then departs, because if she were to stay they could not do the work they’re supposed to do. She departs by ascending back to the heavens from which she came.

As I said, she’s obviously not a complete Christ figure. For one thing, she doesn’t heal anyone. The blind don’t see, the lame don’t walk, and the deaf don’t hear. Also, she atones for no one’s sins. That’s kind of a big one.

None the less, this is an interesting lens through which to view the film, and I think it can help one to get true things out of it.

The Intellectual Collapse of Antisemitism

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

In his masterpiece Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton discussed at some length madmen, and how they are rational but with a very narrow rationality. As he put it:

Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

He goes on to say:

Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

My experience of antisemitism is exactly this kind of madness. Antisemites are wrong that the Jews control the world, but the chief thing that strikes you, if you ever try to argue with such a lunatic, is how incredibly small the world he lives in is. They often play a kind of “where’s Waldo” game of spotting Jewish people in vicinity of important events, which they’re so caught up in that they never stop to ask what part the Jew they’ve identified played in the event. If they watched the movie Forest Gump (whose conceit was that a man named “Forest Gump” happened to be in the vicinity of every important public event in the lives of the baby boomers) and they applied the same logic, they would conclude it was a movie about the man who ruled the world.

There is a strange intellectual collapse that goes on when a man becomes an antisemite. I suspect that the causality runs from the mental collapse to antisematism; the man grows tired of living in a complex world and so retreats into the fantasy of the world being easily intelligible, and for various historical reasons the Jews make excellent fodder for this kind of fantasy.

I want to be clear, since this is the internet, that I do not explain the thing in order to excuse it. I’m interested in the explanation because understanding what has gone wrong is the first step in trying to help someone, if they can be helped.

Murder a Second Time

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized3 Comments

A thing which comes up in murder mysteries about clever murders (that is, murders which were cleverly planned and executed, as opposed to those merely covered up well) is the murderer using the same technique again and being sloppier the second time (or the third or fourth). There is an interesting psychological insight in this.

The first time a person tries something, they’re new to it and everything is scary. When it succeeds, they then evaluate how it went. Most people do this primarily to figure out how to improve, but one naturally also takes stock of where one spent unnecessary work in order to streamline the process. The same thing applies to murderers. They pay attention to what people noticed but couldn’t figure out and take extra care to not leave those clues. But they also can’t help but be aware of what no one noticed. Human nature being what it is, it will be very hard for them to put the same level of effort into covering up things that weren’t a problem last time, and they will likely leave these same clues again, possibly even stronger. Maybe no one noticed the cigarette butt that they forgot to pick up; they will be all the more likely to not remember to pick up the cigarette butt next time.

But what the murderer can’t know is why no one noticed. Perhaps they didn’t notice by accident. Perhaps they did notice but thought it didn’t mean anything because it could too easily be a coincidence. Perhaps they noticed and there was some circumstance the murderer didn’t know about that explained the clue away.

To continue with the example of the cigarette butt, in the first case, maybe the cigarette butt was dropped in a place where it blended in or it was disguised by a leaf falling over it or by rain distorting the paper and making it look older than it was. In the second murder, the cigarette butt might be dropped in a place where it stood out more and got noticed. In the second case, suppose it was a relatively common brand of cigarette, though not super common. Showing up in one place barely registers because it might have been anyone. But showing up in both places seems far less likely and attracts attention. In the third case, suppose that, unknown to the murderer, the first victim smoked the same brand of cigarettes as the murderer. He would have thought that the butt was not noticed, when in fact it was noticed and it was only a coincidence that it was not thought important.

The first and third of these may or may not apply to any given repeat of a murder technique, but the second of them necessarily does. Or at least it necessarily does if someone believes that they two murders are connected. When the detective believes that the two murders are connected, he will begin to look for similarities between them, which makes a different set of facts stand out than when investigating just one.

A very good example of this which comes to mind is in Three Act Tragedy. (spoilers follow) The murderer actually tried out his method of murder once in a condition in which he was very protected, which did show a kind of good sense in that, if there were flaws in the method, it would have been revealed to him when it was virtually impossible to bring home the crime to him. But what he didn’t count on was that the act of testing out the method of murder produced two instances of the method being used which could be compared; this produced clues which would not have existed otherwise. And, unfortunately for the murderer, one of the main connections between the two events was him. It’s true that he took pains to conspicuously not be at the scene of the second murder, but the second victim was so connected to him that the connection could not be avoided.

There is also, of course, the problem that murderers never count on the fact that the more times you try something, the more likely you are to eventually be unlucky. In Three Act Tragedy it is a pure accident that a doctor who recognizes the symptoms of nicotine poisoning happens to be present when the victim dies.

An interesting corollary to this is that a good way to use a “perfect” murder technique in a detective story that still allows the detective to catch the murderer is to have the murderer use it more than once. That lets you enjoy the cleverness of the technique without ruining it by making it done poorly or not actually that good. It allows the murderer to be brilliant—in devising the murder—and his flaw to be his bad judgement and/or laziness. Either goes well with the flaws intrinsic to a murderer.