Mr. Rogers: A radical for our times

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/09/2018 (2962 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As a small kid, I didn’t watch the long-running children’s television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I saw Mr. Rogers only later, when I was a cynical teenager, and then mostly in parody form, when comedians made fun of his gentle, earnest, cardigan-wearing ways on Saturday Night Live or SCTV.

But I repented — and how! — for my youthful callowness as I watched the resonant, revelatory, absolutely lovely documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (now playing at the Towne Cinema and Cinematheque). A tender tribute to Fred Rogers’ lifelong commitment to decency, kindness and simple goodness, the film kept bringing me to tears, and not from nostalgia for some lost age of innocence. What is really moving about this doc, from Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (Twenty Feet from Stardom), is its hopeful belief that the best of Mr. Rogers has survived into an even more fraught and uncertain time.

As awful 1970s adolescents, we assumed Mr. Rogers was a square. He was a lifelong Republican and an ordained Presbyterian minister, and his TV show seemed old-fashioned even then, with its arts-and-crafts props — including his beloved, slightly mangy-looking tiger puppet — its lo-fi production values and its soft-spoken slowness. As his producer suggests, “Take all the elements that made good TV and do the opposite, and you’ll have Mr. Rogers.”

Viewing it now, though, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood feels absolutely radical, even avant-garde. Fred Rogers had a deep interest in the way small children experienced the world. In his show, the wacky and the mundane, the make-believe and the very real intersect and overlap with dreamlike weirdness.

There’s nothing noisy or quick or catchy, the program unfolding with the patient pacing and frequent silences now more associated with foreign-language art-house cinema. To demonstrate to kids what a minute was, for example, Mr. Rogers set an egg timer and just sat there until it ran down. It’s mesmerizingly slow.

Looking back, Mr. Rogers also seems forward-thinking in terms of gender. In contrast with the angry vigilantes, laconic loners and pipe-smoking authority figures who exemplified pop culture masculinity at the time, Fred Rogers was just… nice. Many commentators didn’t quite know what to do with his version of manhood — so gentle, so non-threatening and non-judging, so full of quiet feeling — and they inevitably projected their confusion onto him. There were rumours that Mr. Rogers was a retired Navy SEAL, that he was gay, that he was hiding some secret criminal past.

But Mr. Rogers was just offering “another way of being a man,” as one of his friends suggests.

This included his revolutionary belief that emotions are “mentionable and manageable.” One of Mr. Rogers’ songs about this topic, which he recited at a 1969 hearing into PBS funding, seems pretty darn topical in our rage-filled era. (What do you do with the mad you feel, when you feel like you could bite?)

Mr. Rogers believed that his show should be an “expression of care” for every single child in the audience. He saw this as an extension of his spiritual ministry, but he also drew on cutting-edge research into child development at the time.

He understood that the world loomed large for children, and often seemed chaotic and out of their control.

He did a whole week’s programming on death. In 1968, he responded, with calm directness, to assassination and war, trauma and racism. He always acknowledged that terrible things happened, but he told children that when they saw violence and disasters on TV, they should remember his own mother’s advice: “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

So how would Mr. Rogers respond to our current problems, to the distractions of our mass media, the divisiveness of our public discourse, the despair of continuing conflict? One commentator suggests that if Mr. Rogers were still here, he might “take his tiger and go home.”

I don’t think he would give up so easily. Before he died in 2003, Mr. Rogers himself identified the challenge going into the new millennium. “Let’s make goodness attractive,” he declared.

His idea might be working. When I told my 20-year-old daughter that I grew up thinking Mr. Rogers was kind of a cardigan-wearing dork, she stared at me, appalled, as if I had admitted to some cruel and ignorant historical practice that has since been made illegal.

My children and their friends have grown up in an environment that feels ten times coarser, faster and louder than the conditions Mr. Rogers was taking on. But I see a generation that is, on balance, kinder, gentler, more open and more accepting than the one I remember.

Unkindness hasn’t been eradicated, and it has actually expanded into the nastiness and anonymous aggression made possible by social media. But at least bullying is no longer seen as inevitable. It isn’t just assumed that junior high will be a Darwinian jungle or that summer camp will re-enact the group dynamics of Lord of the Flies.

Maybe some of the radical kindness that Mr. Rogers expressed, but even more importantly embodied, has taken hold. After quietly weeping my way through Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, I sure hope so.