There’s a question posed early on in Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the wonderfully sweet documentary about Fred Rogers, that sticks in your craw:
Was Rogers, who helmed Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood from 1968 to 2001, successful in his attempt to make a lasting influence on America?
After all, this was a man who preached love and fairness, who stood up to prejudice, who encouraged feelings and emotion and who helped generations of young boys and girls learn about life, death, divorce and other critical topics that many entertainers feared to address within the construct of a children’s television show.
To answer that question today requires a long look in the mirror, followed by a review of news headlines and a scroll through the social media accounts of friends and acquaintances.
The easy answer is no.
We are living in the antithesis of the world that Rogers envisioned and hoped to cultivate. America has become an angry, scary place where everyone feels entitled to say whatever mean or hateful thought pops in their head.
We elected a man who is the exact opposite of every virtue that Rogers exhibited. A liar, a philandering braggart and a buffoon. A man who, on the day of the screening for Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, was busy attacking the Prime Minister of Canada as weak and later praising North Korea’s brutal dictator Kim Jong Un as funny and "very smart."
Won’t You Be My Neighbor? returns to this theme several times, which is significant and telling. As much as it’s a documentary about a well-known pioneer in educational children's television, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is also a subversive attempt to shake and wake people up.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of backmasking, although instead of a deep voice urging listeners to worship Satan, viewers hear Rogers’ idealistic philosophy on repeat in the hope that his message of inclusiveness and civility might stick.
Rogers had a special way with children. He understood them. In archived footage, Rogers speaks while seated at a piano, musing about the similarities between piano modulations and educating young minds.
Rogers embraced television as a medium capable of building “a real community out of the entire country,” as he’s quoted saying in another archived clip.
And though he targeted a young audience, he did not water down his message. As the film shows, in just his first week of broadcast, as the Vietnam War raged, he conceived storylines that would appeal to children yet spoke of the larger conflict abroad.
Rogers would have been a one-man-band except for his need to have camera operators and assistants and other actors fill necessary roles. He voiced 10 different puppets, none more iconic than Daniel Tiger, whom surviving family members say most resembled Rogers’ true self.
On June 7, 1968, Rogers famously used Daniel Tiger to broach the murder of then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy just two days earlier. “What does assassination mean?” he asked in Daniel’s timid yet soothing voice.
In February 1969, Rogers famously waded into the national discourse over race relations by inviting the African-American François Scarborough Clemmons, who played Officer Clemmons on his show, to sit with him and cool his feet in a small kid’s pool. At the time, across the country, blacks were being persecuted for trying to share public swimming pools with white residents.
To drive home the significance of this televised moment, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? director Morgan Neville cuts back and forth between Rogers and Clemmons and news footage of a white man throwing cleaning chemicals in a public pool where a black family is swimming. The effect is chilling and surreal.
It’s most interesting to learn that Rogers was not a patron saint himself, immune from criticism. At one point in the film, Clemmons opens up about Rogers’ realization that Clemmons was gay. At the time, Rogers forbade Clemmons from going to a local gay nightclub for fear of public reprisal.
Rogers died in February 2003 in Pittsburgh, his hometown. His wife, Joanne, and his two sons both appear in the film.
What would Mr. Rogers think of the world today? The documentary ends with a meditation on our current times, as well as a moment of silence, which Rogers cherished, to allow everyone in the audience to think about someone who has positively impacted their lives.
It’s a complex, thorny marriage, those two themes.
On the one hand, there’s chaos raging 24/7 just outside our front doors. Uncertainty marks each morning and prayers sometimes fail to help us find sleep each night. As awful as the world was in 1968, it’s nothing compared to now. Peaceful protests have given way to hateful Twitter trolls. African Americans can now swim in public pools but live in daily fear of being killed by police just for being black. The political scandals of the Kennedy era now look tame compared to Trump.
But, on the other, there’s Fred Rogers, a man who tried to open every heart and fill every soul with love.
Even in death, even now, 15 years later, he’s still trying to teach us.
The question is whether we’ll listen.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at bloodviolenceandbabes.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.
This article appears in Jun 14-21, 2018.