The surprising revelation in Won’t You Be My Neighbor? isn’t that Fred Rogers was a Presbyterian minister. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is the fundamental premise of Christianity even if most fundamentalists gloss over that passage. What will seem odd nowadays is that Rogers was a lifelong registered Republican. The party of free enterprise once had a tent large enough to contain a man like Rogers whose concerns encompassed all humanity. Lately, the GOP has been overrun by people Rogers contended against through his entire life—the bullies, the closed-minded, the bigots.
From 1968 through 2001, Rogers removed his blazer and penny loafers, donned a sweater and deck shoes and proceeded to talk to children—and listen to them in return. Although he was already anachronistic in appearance on the day he debuted, resembling a 1950s camp counselor visiting a 1950s sitcom living room, he was focused on the issues of the day. The movie’s heartbreaking scene occurred the day after Robert Kennedy’s killing when Daniel Striped Tiger asked Lady Aberlin, “What does assassination mean?” On another occasion, when the nightly news showed white supremacists dumping toxic chemicals into a swimming pool to prevent it from being desegregated, Mr. Rogers put his feet into the same little foot tub as Officer Clemmons, the African American who patrolled the neighborhood.
Other moments appear as if ripped from headlines 50 years in the future. Episode One of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” introduced King Friday the XIII, who established a border guard and sang a little tune about stringing barbed wire around his realm, adding, in a chorus, “Because we’re on top!”
“Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was subversive and contrary in form as well as content. At a time when children’s media was moving faster and growing noisier, as if spurred by “Speed Racer,” Rogers took it slow and quiet. Built into his show was the silence against which all events in the cosmos unfold. He despised kids’ shows that put children in an undignified light and fought a losing battle against superheroes.
As millions watched, Rogers opened himself to emotional vulnerability, albeit often expressed through his alter-ego sock puppet, Daniel. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? touches on his sickly childhood when many weeks were spent in bed with only his imagination for company; he was the chubby boy bullied by classmates. Rogers had an elusive goal—or was it illusive?—of building a community out of the vast country called the United States. He wanted America to be a neighborhood, which he defined as a place of safety and sharing, where differences can be respected and everyone more or less gets along.
Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) fills Won’t You Be My Neighbor? with archival footage and imaginative animation illustrating Rogers’ life plus interviews with his wife, children and associates. A member of the “Neighborhood” crew suggests that nice guys like Rogers were more common earlier in the last century than they were by the time his run ended. Another wondered what effect “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” really had on its millions of impressionable viewers. Did it mold a nation of whining narcissists who grew up thinking they were “special”? If so, it was an unintended consequence. Like a responsible Republican, Rogers didn’t believe in entitlements. But like a good Christian, he affirmed the fundamental worth of everyone. Did Rogers provoke a backlash against what many saw as his naïve empathy?
The dream had ended by the time he retired. Brought back for a special broadcast to speak to America’s children after 9/11, he looked shattered, as if he had been in the Twin Towers as they fell. And finally, a group of troglodytes picketed outside his funeral in 2003, waving placards reading “God Hates Fags.” The bullies followed him to his grave.
