I always loved the Sound of Music. I loved Maria especially because she was not a normal nun; not that nuns are normal, either — at least not from a natural perspective. But, I was raised with a very unnatural perspective which drew me to her warmly compensatory character.
Maria wasn’t normal in any way — not even as a seamstress. How I admired her practical and inventive conservation of existing resources (though the family was quite wealthy, she anticipated the short-sighted greed and waste inherent in the modern marketing concepts of built-in obsolescence) when she sewed the children’s play-suits from the drapes that shielded the Captain’s projections of a regressive developmental phase onto them — thus bringing the harsh conditions of an effete patriarchy into the open light of scrutiny.
Her selfless dedication to the task of balancing an emotionally estranged single-father family unit with her much-needed feminine side allowed the children to differentiate themselves from the negative spirit-image of a dictatorial, militant pre-WWII Austrian commandant saddled with the then-current cultural charge of molding an untamed brood of human primates into a tightly disciplined corps of paranoid, misogynistic aggressors. She keenly foresaw that, without her help, their innocent, unknowing little natures would unconsciously seize upon the compensations and later make them sick like the Captain.
As a youth, I couldn’t identify with what I interpreted as the sissification of the boys and the rote collectivization of the children in general by the uniforms they donned gleefully amid her light-hearted song. But, what good are uniforms if they’re not all the same? Though, I later began to connect with the evolutionary implications of separating from an obsolete spirit-father-complex, it seemed to me then that she was robbing Beelzebub to pay the Devil.
But, those were extraordinary times; change was in the air. Maria sensed that the children would need a positive unisexual group-identity in the social crisis to come. What appeared to my young mind as the boys’ “sissification” was actually an intuitive attempt to fortify a developing male ego and prepare it, not only for resistance to an exaggerated masculine zeal which led to a terrifying new age of nuclear warfare, but also for a monumental cultural transition that would turn existing ideas of gender equality upside-down.
Little did I know then that she was gently but surely guiding the boys and girls alike through a temporary stage designed to liberate them from the historical warrior-ego’s regressive authoritarian structure and open them to the new vistas of an ego-consciousness released from its primitive heritage. She intuited the apparently peaceful but rigidly enforced group conditions as an unconscious complicity to the Nazi extreme of unquestioned patriarchal duty which, due to the laws of instinctual nature, was bound to spiral out of control in a desperate attempt to destroy itself for the sake of humankind.
She smashed apart a petrified world of tradition, not with the club of vengeance, but with the ardent, soulful weapons-which-are-no-weapons of song, poetry and emotion — plus the instrumental accompaniment of the finest and highest-paid musicians Hollywood greed and nepotism could muster under the auspices of an egalitarian, commercially-driven form of instilled propaganda which believes in its fantasies such that it would float an overdone show-biz extravaganza off as a romantic representation of a stupefyingly horrific period of human history to make money off it.
Still, the smarmy, loose and sentimental story was enough to make it one of the greatest musicals ever. For, underneath it, Maria’s sturdy and unflagging sense of individuality not only freed the children from the monster of unchecked patriarchy, it transformed the very character of the monster itself.
She shattered the deeply entrenched values of convention by innocently and benignly, yet knowingly, methodically destroying the Captain’s engagement to the rich, haughty, self-absorbed socialite and wicked step-mother figure with a mature facade who sank his moody anima-possession, along with the children, only further into an over-idealized romantic and regressive steep of hierarchical oppression which had stunted emotional growth in men and women of all sexes for generations.
Though her own dark night of the soul (her sexual affair with the Captain was a source of deep torment) was sanitized for purposes of mass appeal, we know that she suffered much beneath her courageous pose of gaiety. We suffered that gaiety with her. But, what people cannot comprehend of the suffering of life cannot be thrust upon them all at once in raw form. How they would grieve! What first appeared as an ostrich-like optimism, later revealed a steady resolve to confront the ineluctible demands of psychic evolution head-on.
She not only lovingly coaxed a brute animal out of the darkness of instinctuality and into the light of soul and relationship, she rescued a regressive single-parent family from the dark throes of the most stultifying and inhuman regimentation — and she enlivened the spirits of a generation in despair. Plus, she had a great voice and was pretty, too.
One of the things I used to ask myself in my youth was how she ever got to be a nun in the first place. Hers was an exemplary tale of individuation which few students of human nature acknowledge. How do you achieve such breadth of personality from such humble beginnings? How do you embody the healing psychic processes of a generation lost in transition in one unfathomable screen performance? How do you solve a problem like Maria ?