"Saving Mr. Banks" and the Invisible Backpack

Watching the bittersweet "Saving Mr. Banks" today,  I once again considered Faulkner's great truth: The past is never dead. It's not even past.

The film contrasts writer P. L. Travers' memories of life with her alcoholic father, whom she idolized, with scenes revealing her controlling inflexibility when dealing with Walt Disney. Her father's relentless self-destruction brought her mother to suicidal despair — until an aunt arrived, with umbrella and carpetbag, to help set things right for her impoverished family. The aunt, however, could not perform a miracle.  Travers' father died in his bed from a combination of alcoholism and illness, his memory an enduring scar on her psyche.

Back in Beverly Hills, a frustrated Disney, baffled at her insulting irrationality while negotiating the rights to Mary Poppins, gradually comes to understand that, in Mary Poppins, Travers preserves the wounded story of her childhood, re-envisioned with a happier ending. The prospect of her pain on display as a technicolor Disney parade set to music is intolerable.  Outwardly she is a grouchy, controlling, misanthrope. Inside, Travers is the powerless child of an alcoholic.          

At a funeral earlier this week, I observed as revelations from another long-past childhood suddenly illuminated an individual's difficult behavior. The new perspective demanded grace where before there had been judgment. Sometimes when logic fails, history makes all clear.

My written philosophy of education addresses the "invisible backpack" each child carries to school, and how, for some, it is filled with love and support — while for others it is packed at home with a dark and heavy load. We each carry our backpack with us as long as we live. It's a truth I have learned with my head, but I have to remind my heart again and again.

In the end, "Saving Mr. Banks" accomplishes what the very best storytelling does: it reminds us of something essential about being human. The past is never dead. It's not even past. Every interaction contains more of mystery than certainty; a fact that merits a gracious spirit of humility from each of us.