Thought we were going to see On Cheesil Beach, but we had the times wrong, and ended up on seeing a surprise showing of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? My hesitation with biographical documentaries is the tendency toward hero worship and blind adoration. WYBMN was not those things. Yes, you are overwhelmed with the goodness and charm of this “second coming of Jesus” (as his son sardonically puts it), but you’re also confronted with the frustrations and troubled psychology of a complex man.
First film of the Hawaii trip to see my famjam. We could convince no one to see Cheesil Beach with us, so we went alone, after a busy day swimming, lying on the sand, eating saimin and poké bowls at Foodland. So this was a solo mission to Kahala Mall on a Thursday night. A place I haven’t been since I had California Pizza Kitchen lunch there with my high school English teacher for a catch up in sophomore year of college.
The film’s structure falls into three acts: an explanation of the early vision for the Neighborhood in the late 1960s on the eve of the war in Vietnam and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, as well as an explanation for the driving force of the program, an abiding faith in the deep feelings of children and the lack of faith in children’s television to do the job; second, we take a dive into an analysis of the man, his childhood, his relationships on the set, his development of the characters, and his rise as a public figure; third, a reflection on the legacy of Mr Rogers, the mythology that was built around him, and the ways in which his philosophy has been misperceived.
It was nice to see François Clemmons from my alma mater Middlebury College. His inclusion in the movie made for some of the most revealing storytelling about Mr Rogers. Their relationship nicely sketched out a few different arcs about Fred Rogers’s politics of masculinity, sexuality, and race. Clemmons’s neighborhood policeman character comes on originally as a way of connecting with African-Americans in the 1960s, and Clemmons’s coming out at work strains their relationship and shows that Fred Rogers was not always ahead of the curb on social politics, but he got there eventually.
The inclusion of the story about the Westboro Baptist Church at Rogers’s funeral shows the critical eye with which the documentary views Rogers’s legacy. This much-beloved “radical” is dogged not just by critics who find him too “square” and nice, but also by people who think he’s not square enough, who try to flip his life-story on its head by inventing outlandish explanations for his persona. His struggles with imposter syndrome is dovetailed nicely with the story of Rogers’s Neighborhood as the story of the Triumph of the “will”: the reference to 143, I (1) L-O-V-E (4) Y-O-U (3) as both a self-confirming prophecy about self-love and a haunting (Wife’s reflection) reminder of childhood trauma and struggles with weight. The meditation on parodies of Mr Rogers and Rogers’s frayed sense of humor was another thoughtfully managed topic that showed the multivalent perspectives from which this outsized prsonality could be understood.
The footage for this documentary is rich. One of the great strengths of doing a movie about a guy in showbiz must be the miles and miles of B-roll. We see him practicing a song in the privacy of his own home and then the final version on screen. His discussions with close friends about his craft off the record and the edges of the show after the filming has ended or before it’s even begun. The footage of Rogers’s testifying before a Senate committee during the Nixon administration is the first time I fist-pumped in this film but not the last. The film does a great job of making his generous candor badass.
One of the most touching scenes is definitely Koko not snapping Mr Rogers in half or demanding to see his nipples. Thankfully, everyone acknowledges how weird and touching the interaction they had was, so that we don’t have to give each other in the audience some serious side-eye. The fact that Koko died within the last 24 hours should not deter us from exposing her for what she truly was, a serial-harasser who abused her fame in order to extract favors from impressionable researchers and tv personalities.
A lovely documentary that deserves your attention, if only to show that old creep Mr Dressup and his creepy Tickle Trunk a thing or too about what real human decency is.
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