"The real Mary Poppins got lost when Hollywood turned her into a cream puff"
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Diament’s jab lands because it treats adaptation as a kind of gentrification: the unruly, sharp-edged Mary Poppins gets priced out of her own story the moment Hollywood moves in with brighter lighting and softer contours. “The real” signals a loyalty test, a defense of the book’s original texture against the mass-market version that many people now mistake for the source. It’s not nostalgia so much as a warning about how cultural memory gets rewritten by the most widely distributed image.
“Got lost” is doing sly work. It doesn’t accuse Hollywood of outright theft; it suggests misplacement, as if the character wandered off while the studio was busy polishing her into something safer. That word choice implies inevitability: in the machinery of family entertainment, complexity doesn’t get murdered, it gets misfiled. Then comes the payoff: “cream puff.” It’s a small, cutting insult, domestically familiar, sweet, airy, and ultimately insubstantial. Diament is mourning substance - the tart discipline, ambiguity, and even menace that made P.L. Travers’s nanny compelling - while skewering the culture industry’s habit of sanding down women who don’t read as “likable.”
The context is the long shadow of Disney’s Mary Poppins, a beloved musical that effectively became the default Mary Poppins. Diament, writing as a novelist attentive to how stories preserve (or distort) female authority, is pointing to a broader pattern: Hollywood translates prickly competence into palatable charm, then sells the softened version back to us as the original. The line works because it’s funny, yes, but it’s also an indictment of how adaptation can become erasure with a smile.
“Got lost” is doing sly work. It doesn’t accuse Hollywood of outright theft; it suggests misplacement, as if the character wandered off while the studio was busy polishing her into something safer. That word choice implies inevitability: in the machinery of family entertainment, complexity doesn’t get murdered, it gets misfiled. Then comes the payoff: “cream puff.” It’s a small, cutting insult, domestically familiar, sweet, airy, and ultimately insubstantial. Diament is mourning substance - the tart discipline, ambiguity, and even menace that made P.L. Travers’s nanny compelling - while skewering the culture industry’s habit of sanding down women who don’t read as “likable.”
The context is the long shadow of Disney’s Mary Poppins, a beloved musical that effectively became the default Mary Poppins. Diament, writing as a novelist attentive to how stories preserve (or distort) female authority, is pointing to a broader pattern: Hollywood translates prickly competence into palatable charm, then sells the softened version back to us as the original. The line works because it’s funny, yes, but it’s also an indictment of how adaptation can become erasure with a smile.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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