Bobby Kennedy was killed on a Wednesday night. His funeral was nationally televised that Saturday. Fred Rogers, host of a children’s television program that was then less than a year old, wanted to air a special episode on Friday.
This was not exactly standard practice, talking to children about death and violence. Certainly not through television. But Rogers had a vision for what Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood could do and be. He was an ordained minister — an evangelist of television, literally — and his show was his unconventional pulpit, built for a congregation of the people he felt needed his care the most: Young children.
The special, Rogers said, was really “a plea not to leave the children isolated, and at the mercy of their own fantasies of loss and destruction. Children have very deep feelings, just the way parents do. Just the way everybody does. And our striving to understand those feelings, and to better respond to them, is what I feel is a most important task in our world.”
Morgan Neville, Oscar-winning filmmaker (20 Feet From Stardom), saw the episode for the first time when he visited the Fred Rogers Center in Pennsylvania in 2015. He was feeling out whether or not there was enough there there to make a movie about Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood — not a biopic of Rogers or a history of the show, but a film about the ideas that propelled the man and his work. Neville’s documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, made its debut at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was released in theaters on June 8.
Neville had read about the Kennedy special, he said by phone, but had never been able to watch it. “It had never been re-aired, and I wanted to see it. And when I watched it, any hesitancy I had about whether or not this was worthy of a film vanished.”
“All of the depth and the dramatic tension and insecurity, everything that I needed to know was there to make a dimensional story, was embodied in that episode,” Neville recalls. Crucially, Neville says that episode captured Rogers’ instinct “to help explain to the children of America what has happened, rather than telling them not to worry about something.”
“Nobody asked him to do it, he felt he had to do it,” says Neville. “And that was the first time he did something like that.” It wouldn’t be the last.
“I think that said a lot to me about what his priorities were, and how willing he was to take on the most difficult things in the culture, in the context of a show for 2-6 year olds,” Neville said. “Which is incredible.”
Though as an adult Neville realized “that Fred was always doing the show both for the child in the room and for the person sitting on the couch in the back of the room, watching — that the show works on both levels,” what made Rogers remarkable was his innate sense of how it felt to be a child, and what it was that children really needed from the adults in their lives.
“The interesting thing was, dad remembered being six, and seven, and eight, and nine years old,” Rogers’ son Jim says in the film. “That inner child never really went away.”
Each episode began with the same ritual. Taking off the jacket, putting on the sweater. Taking off the shoes, putting on the sneakers. All the while assuring the kids watching him from home: I’ve always wanted to have a neighbor just like you, I’ve always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you. He understood that the people who were watching him were real people, even though they were very young. Even though they were only tender-age children.
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood premiered in February 1968. In its first week on the air, a decree came down from King Friday XIII in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe: He was building a wall and establishing a border guard.
When the neighborhood trolley pulls up outside the castle, King Friday demands to know its name, rank, and serial number. A wall goes up, as ordered. A guard paces along the new fencing and sings to himself, “Oh, it’s very sharp, it’s very sharp, oh my, barbed wire is very sharp!” King Friday reminds the guard of their battle cry: “Down with the changers!” The guard sings back: “We don’t want anything to change.” King Friday ends the song by shouting, “Because we’re on top!”
Neville said that he did cut out some segments that felt “very on-the-nose…because it would be very easy to get very heavy-handed, and that’s not what I wanted. I wanted there to be just enough to recognize it, but not to hit anyone over the head with it.” So you can imagine what might be on the cutting room floor; apparently something even more prescient than “despot builds a border wall to keep out immigrants.”
Neville started making Neighbor near the end of 2015 and wrapped up before the election, so it’s not an explicit reaction to the current administration. Then again, “It’s not like the present era we’re in came out of nowhere. We’ve been living in it for years.”
“We have built a culture that has disincentivized a neighborly behavior and has incentivized disgraceful behavior,” he said. “And what I mean by that is, the core tenant of Mister Rogers’ philosophy is grace: that we do good to others not because it’s a virtue but because it’s a duty. And we live in a culture that plays against a sense of common bond.”
Rogers’ “struggle,” as Neville put it, was “with a world that wasn’t necessarily paying attention to these words and good deeds.” As Neighbor captures, Rogers got into television because he was dismayed by what the medium was being used for — pies thrown in faces, mean-spirited slapstick — but believed in its potential for good.
Neville wanted make a film capable of reaching all kinds of people by communicating along a wavelength of shared humanity, much like Rogers himself endeavored to do. Rogers was a lifelong registered Republican who went to church every Sunday and woke up at 5:00 in the morning each day to study the Bible. At the same time, Neville says, “He’s somebody who other people might consider liberal, in his views” — a man who pointedly cooled off his feet in the same little pool as his black neighbor, Officer Clemmons, while racist resistance to integrating swimming pools raged on in the real neighborhoods where his viewers lived.
“I felt that this was an opportunity to make a film that people of all different backgrounds could see, and maybe that we could maybe have a bit of a moral conversation right now,” Neville said. “I know that seems far-fetched.”
As Mister Rogers loved to tell children, there was, and is, no one out there quite like him.
“I think of his superpower as being this penetrating emotional honesty,” Neville said. “And I think what strikes us about it is, nobody else does that in our culture. The honesty and vulnerability of it. The willingness to be that vulnerable as an adult and on television is something that we just – we have never seen before, or since.”
“Sesame Street is about teaching you counting and letters, Schoolhouse Rock is about teaching you grammar and civics. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is about teaching you how to be a human, and ethics. It’s a deeper mission.”
The word “radical” pops up again and again in Won’t You Be My Neighbor? It’s nothing if not apt. It was radical to think of a relationship between a person on TV and a person watching at home as something real and powerful. It was radical to talk to kids the way Rogers did, about subjects like grief, divorce, and fear. As commercial children’s programming got noisier and zanier, it was radical to be as quiet and steady as Rogers was, to do things like ask, “Do you know how long a minute is?” — and answer that question by setting an egg timer for sixty seconds and sitting there in silence.
And, then as now, it is radical to make the case for kindness as Rogers did: Not as some finite resource or a sign of weakness, but as Neville puts it: “Fundamental to the health of our society.”
“A lot of us are asking these questions about what’s happened to our moral core and sense of responsibility to each other,” Neville said. “Which is essentially what a neighborhood is. In its most fundamental sense, he’s trying to explain how we live together in society. And it’s not radical to him. It’s both Christian and it’s human.”
The other central belief upon which Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was based — you’re special, just by being you — would one day come to be depicted in bastardized form by Fox News as a virus that infected an entitled generation of pathetic snowflakes enamored of their own specialness.
In reality, this core belief of Rogers is something so pure that it almost aches to look straight at it: That each child has inherent dignity and worth. That you didn’t have to do anything sensational in order to be loved. Through the screen, he looked right at you — yes, you — and said, “I like you as you are,” as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which, to him, it was.