Although not a cornerstone of the Australian childhood – that honour belongs to either Harold from the LifeEd van or Cheez TV – the late Fred Rogers played a part in the development of en entire generation of American children. From 1968 to 2001 Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood filled the airwaves with life lessons about kindness, self-respect and being kind to one another, always accompanied by an endearing smile and one of those famous knitted jumpers. Won’t You Be My Neighbour by documentary maker Morgan Neville brings this extraordinary man to the screen, looking at his life, career, and legacy with a film as respectful as you’re likely to find in the current climate.
The closest comparison would be to 2015’s I am Big Bird, a documentary about a beloved children’s television presenter focusing on a perfectly nice gentleman whose life’s mission is to entertain and teach important lessons to rascally children the world over. It’s not going to offend or test the resolve of anyone. It’s a documentary made for those who grew up with Mr. Rogers and the lessons about empathy are now more relevant than ever.
Fred Rogers had the patience of a saint and an outlook on life that should give us all pause for thought. A lesser known part of him is that he was an ordained minister, and through his work he embodied everything he held dear about his faith. The greatest aspiration of religion is community, and Mr Rogers’ Neighbourhood is all about the kind of humanist worth that the best of Christianity has to offer. He was the kind of God-botherer that it’s worth getting bothered by.
Yet as the many interviews with colleagues and family reveal, Fred Rogers was not just a kind man who worked with puppets. He was a deeply serious person and, importantly, someone who grasped very early that television is one of the greatest propaganda tools ever created. As children learn about the world from it, the example set and the lessons taught do nothing less than change societies. For pre-school aged children who tuned in everyday, Rogers’ teachings about the necessity of compassion, love and kindness were the greatest teachings they could have heard.
And yet while watching it’s hard not to wonder where it all went wrong. We live in an age characterised by disunity and cynicism, where the anonymity of the internet has bred a particularly noxious culture where people who would otherwise be pleasant dive into comment sections and spew their bile the world across. It sums up the strange mood of our time that in online discourse the middle ground has been eradicated: everything is either the greatest or the worst thing ever made, people are caricatured as Far Left Libcucks or Alt-Right Nazis and anything slightly complicated is tossed aside into meaningless boxes of ‘ologies’ or ‘isms.
As the world changes faster than we can keep up with, our differences are one of the few things we agree on. This may be why Neville’s documentary is a breath of fresh air, Fred Rogers’ message may seem simplistic at first but it’s one always worth hearing. He was ahead of his time on many things; “Feelings are mentionable and manageable” he says early on, which is exactly the talking point that the current dialogue about mental health and development has arrived at. Won’t You Be My Neighbour is like a shot in the arm, reminding us all that there is good in this world, and ideals should always be strived for.
Although for Australian audiences Fred Rogers might be someone occasionally glimpsed through pop culture references, this is a wonderful film celebrating the life of a unique man and his stellar legacy. Millions of people can claim him as a mentor, but it’s a nice reminder that even in the current world we still could all learn a lot from Mr. Rogers.
Won’t You Be My Neighbour screens exclusively at Cinema Nova from 13th September through Universal Pictures.
