Michael Procopio
Elementary School

Movies are filled with scary creatures: Dracula, werewolves, Frankenstein’s monster, Carol Channing — most of us can name one or two that frightened us when we were young. When I was growing up, the things created by the film industry to frighten our pants off swelled to include the likes of Freddy Krueger, aliens, giant, man-eating sharks, and the devil himself. Of course, these are characters designed to frighten us.They owe much of their success to the fact that they prey on our deepest fears:  the dark,  death, the supernatural, the unknown, Jazz Baby heiresses. Name your phobia and it’s more than likely been exploited by the film industry. For me, there was one film in particular that stand out as the scariest film of my childhood:

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

When I tell people that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang scared the hell out of me as a boy, the response tends to be, “Well, um, sure. I can see how that Child Catcher guy could scare any kid.” I suppose that’s true for some people, but that disturbing, putty-nosed man who sniffed out children never bothered me. Quite the opposite, in fact. I was rooting for him — he seemed was my greatest hope for ridding that film of the two creatures that scared me the most: Jeremy and Jemima Potts.

As the two cute-as-can-be children of Dick Van Dyke’s character, Caractacus Potts, Jeremy and Jemima were the manifestation of my two greatest childhood fears — abandonment and replacement. Where did these children come from? I squirmed in discomfort every time they screeched, “Daddy! Daddy!” I simply could not accept that these were Mr. Van Dyke’s children, because as far as I was concerned, Dick Van Dyke was named Bert and already had two children.

I refused to accept that Dick Van Dyke was playing a role in a different movie. To me, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the sequel to another film. I understood that he was acting, of course, but I found it difficult to grasp why he was also acting as though he had never even heard of Mary Poppins, Jane and Michael Banks,  or his old life in London. That the parents of Jane and Michael Banks were a banker and a suffragette made little impression on me — I considered Bert and Mary Poppins Jane’s and Michael’s true parents. And in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Bert had left his family to start a new life with a new woman and a fresh batch of cuter, blonder children. He just changed his name from Bert to Caractacus and figured that no one would catch on.

Granted, my logic was shaky and the suspension of my disbelief was scattered and selective. But try telling that to a boy whose parents were divorced, and whose father had married a woman who was as pretty and young and blonde as Truly Scrumptious. My biggest fear in the world was that my father, like Bert,  would start a new family and forget all about the children he already had, that he would make a fresh start of everything. I would have absolutely none of it — neither my father’s new wife nor Chitty Chitty Bang Bang — for years. They scared me.

What made Bert leave? Whose fault was it? Was it Mary’s icy virginity or her addiction to cough syrup? Was it because the children were extremely stubborn and suspicious and rather inclined to giggle? I searched for Bert’s reasons for leaving in much the same way I struggled to understand my father’s.

It took me a long time to realize how unreasonable my fears were — and how unfair I had been to my own father for thinking he would ever abandon or replace me and my siblings. The amount of time he spent with me as a child should have made it clear that abandonment was not forthcoming. And my new stepmother was more eager to share my father with us than take him away, though I found that a difficult concept to grasp for years. There were to be no Jeremies and Jemimas nesting in the higher branches of my family tree.

The horror of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang faded as my fears remained unrealized. Jeremy and Jemima no longer scared me — instead, I found them irritating and saccharine. I eventually gave a silent apology to Dick Van Dyke. I should more than likely give an audible one to my father.

I made a very important discovery during a recent viewing of Mary Poppins, based solely on the sometimes literal, selective logic I had used upon Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In the last scene of the film, Jane and Michael Banks decide to spend some quality face time with the two people who pay for their upkeep, their biological parents. Out in the park, as Jane and Michael are flying their Votes-for-Women-tailed kite, Dick Van Dyke is right there singing with them — not at their sides, but he’s there on the ground, still looking out for them. He never, in fact, left.

It was Mary Poppins who left. While it’s true that the director was careful enough to add a bit of dialogue in which Mary fights back some tears at the thought of leaving by explaining to her talking umbrella that “practically perfect people never allow sentiment to muddle their thinking,” it is obvious that she is lying. Clearly, she feels that she will no longer receive the same level of adoring attention from Jane and Michael as she feels is her due. So she takes off.

After letting the winds carry her to the Continent, she tried to find  new way of life — one that might help her forget the traumatic emotional distancing she felt from Jane and Michael. She bleached and cut her hair, Germanicized her name, and hid away from the world in a nunnery for twenty-seven years. But, as is the tragic way of some Catholics who join the church to escape their true natures, the need for a child’s love was too strong. Only this time, as though making up for 27 years of drought, she connived to win the affections of seven attention-starved Austrian children, destroying expensive drapery, thwarting the marriage plans of a beautiful Baroness, and turning her new charges into illegal aliens by sneaking across international borders — all for the sake of her unquenchable emotional neediness and hunger for juvenile attention.

Now she, my friends, is one scary character.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 1:31 am and is filed under book reading.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.