It’s more than a post-viewing icebreaker—it’s perhaps the central question one might ask of Morgan Neville’s smart, engaging, and inevitably touching doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? : at what point did you cry while watching it?
Or, if you haven’t seen it yet, at what point are you pretty
certain you’ll start bawling? I ask that on the chance that, like me, you watched and re-watched
the trailer rather obsessively, becoming familiar with the ground covered by
the film while perhaps also trying to build up a tolerance to the tear-jerking moments.
I have news for you if the latter is the case: it won’t
work. Your face will be wet.
Or maybe not. Maybe you’re the
inured-to-raw-emotion-and-sentimentality type; in which case, congrats, and by the way, the
doc might still be of enormous value to you for reasons cultural and historical.
And if you’re at all interested in children, childhood itself, media, and the
place where all these intersect, Won’t
You Be My Neighbor? casually offers up some riches. Yet it doesn’t often try to answer questions in these areas
explicitly so much as raise them in passing. So despite its touching upon a range
of socio-political points, the film is more like an old-style Hollywood biopic than
an issue-oriented doc. It’s the story of a great man, pure and simple, with
just enough cultural relevance to show why he was great, no more, no less. (You
may have heard that Tom Hanks is playing Fred Rogers in an upcoming flick—frankly, I
think I’d prefer Paul Muni.)
On second thought, asking when you cried, at what moment,
is too easy. It just answers the question in the title of the film with another
question. A better, more productive line of inquiry might be: What kind of crying
did you engage in? An almost-suppressed roll of a single tear? Fluid, open
weeping, perhaps with a smile on your face? Or full-on, noisy “ugly crying”?
Each betrays a relationship to the trigger, and so
underneath all of them is a still more fundamental, if obvious, question: why did you cry? And, yeah, here’s the part where I’m going to
answer for all of us, sorry: we’re letting the tears flow because of Everything
We’ve Lost. And Fred Rogers is the patron saint of precisely that.
The downside of being the patron saint of anything, however,
is that one must be dead. One gets reduced to symbol and song, to chant and
relic, to idealization and reification. The living message of the saint—and it
can be argued that saints have no message other than the lives they lead—becomes
lost in the construction of, to use the phrase in its original meaning, an icon
to which we bow our heads. And when more than one generation surrounds and bathes the saint with the sacred aura of Childhood, as we have here, then we run the risk of suffering from acute nostalgia. Maybe even toxic nostalgia. The death of the saint, or (less literally) the death of his or
her work, can thus seal the past off from the present in ways that are
dramatically and psychologically satisfying but which deny the very gift of
spirit that the saint was only too happy to share.
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with admiring the America that produced
a Fred Rogers and which he in turn shaped in profound ways. And there’s nothing
wrong with recalling our own innocence and that of other children, elements
that happen to launch the waterworks quite frequently in Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
The danger of such cathartic moments, though, is that they
can be too powerful, almost unbearable. We go back to watching the moving
instead of experiencing it, which is understandable. After all, you still have to pull
yourself together and converse coherently with your date in the lobby afterwards. The
result is that you end up touched but not moved, to coin a distinction. You get the tears out of your system, and then return to feeling alienated accompanied by all the sound reasons for feeling that way. If the world were just a bit different—that is, more like it used to be—than we ourselves could be differently. We forget that the world has always been in turmoil,
although to Mr. Neville’s credit, he does do a good job of capturing the anguish
and upheaval of the 1960’s.
But along with turmoil, today we still have neighbors and
neighborhoods. Nowadays we are more apt to use the word “community” instead,
but the idea is just as powerful. It pulls us out of ourselves and, if we’re
lucky, we become as unself-conscious as Fred Rogers was.
Indeed, this film probably would have embarrassed
him. And what if he were aware of the extent to which we’ve made him the universal
surrogate for a good neighbor—or, more precisely, someone we aspire to be a
good neighbor to? He might feel his mission was not accomplished. That's because all of us still
have neighbors, living, breathing ones. In fact, everyone around us who inhales
the same air we do—professionally, geographically, culturally, socially—are our
neighbors, or could be if we just treated them as such. All it takes is our
popping Fred Rogers’s question, and meaning it when we do. Because if we’re not
doing that then we’re mourning the loss of the messenger without honoring the
message itself.
So please permit me to rephrase the earlier point: we weep during the film not because of
everything we’ve lost but because of everything we think we’ve lost; they’re still there, still present, still
extant, all those lost things. Your tears are proof of it, as are the tears of
thousands of other moviegoers; together, they provide overwhelming confirmation of the presence
of, as Rogers would put it, the ability to be loved and to feel capable of loving
in turn.
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Won't You Be My Neighbor? opens on June 8, 2018. You can find playdates here.
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