Morgan Neville, 2018 #88, 2018 Skandies
Earlier this month I wrote about my TV viewing habits when I was four years old: Sesame Street at 4:00 p.m., Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood at 5:00, and The Electric Company at 5:30. The idea behind Sesame Street was to use the techniques of commercial television—quick cuts, slapstick comedy, cutting-edge music, etc.—to teach kids letters and numbers, some basic vocabulary, and a little bit about the world… particularly the urban world, from the misery of riding the subway to finding a way home after getting lost in a scary neighborhood, but with a few nods to the rural world as well. The Electric Company was more of the same, for kids ready to move beyond the Sesame Street concepts and expand their literacy. But Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, despite being sandwiched between the two, was from a different galaxy. Instead of trying to co-opt the techniques of commercial television, it rejected them entirely. The program was slow-paced, to the point that one episode demonstrated how long a minute is by training the camera on a sand timer and letting it run silently for sixty uninterrupted seconds. Puppets were a big part of the proceedings, but unlike Sesame Street’s hip Muppets, the ones on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were simple sock puppets and static figurines that looked like they belonged to the earlier half of the century—and the show was very careful about distinguishing fantasy from reality. Music was very important to the show, ranging from simple sing-alongs to sophisticated classical music, but the soundtrack was a far cry from the funk and disco of Sesame Street and The Electric Company. And instead of focusing on intellectual material like reading and math, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was concerned above all else with children’s emotional growth. The heart of the show was an extraordinarily gentle man earnestly looking into the camera and talking to the young viewer, seemingly one on one, about feelings. Fred Rogers said that one of his overriding goals with the show was to provide each child with a daily “expression of care”. For my generation, largely left to be raised by television, that might be the only such expression many of those children got that day.
This is a straightforward documentary that serves as a cinematic encyclopedia entry about the show, covering its origin and evolution and eventually touching on ancillary topics such as the many parodies it inspired and the myths that spread about Fred Rogers in the Internet age. It was well received, and many reported being moved to tears. But I was most struck by the dark lining of this silver cloud. Fred Rogers reached the end of his life wondering whether he’d accomplished much, and while the reflexive answer is to say “Of course you did!”, he had a point. He was a Presbyterian minister who’d made the unexpected choice to channel his efforts into secular television after seeing it for the first time in 1951, as he was about to graduate from college, and being horrified by the crassness of the nascent medium: a bunch of Krusty the Klowns entertaining kids by throwing pies in people’s faces and then trying to sell candy and toy rifles. He wanted to change the fundamental nature of children’s programming. Cut to my generation’s childhood and tune to PBS, and you might be inclined to argue that he had succeeded… and then tune to any other channel, look at the robots and super-commandos shooting each other in between toy and junk food commercials, and try to make the same argument. Perhaps more to the point: Fred Rogers hoped to fundamentally change the culture by helping my generation and the one after mine learn healthy ways to deal with our emotions, and by serving as a source of unconditional love. And for that he certainly earned the love and gratitude of millions, and established himself as the closest thing our era has produced to a saint. I just wrote about the Beatles, and John Lennon was similarly beloved and admired, especially after he was murdered, for his music but perhaps even more for his rhetoric about peace and love. But in the moptop era he’d been dubbed “the smart one” for his quick wit, and even in public that came to manifest as an acid tongue more often than not. In private, by most accounts, he was an asshole, a really negative personality who was difficult to be around (especially if you were one of the women he was beating). But Won’t You Be My Neighbor? makes it clear that those who knew Fred Rogers universally declare that he was the exact same person off the screen as on. He was the squarest of squares, with never a whiff of anything approaching a scandal; his idea of blowing off steam was to swim laps at the local public pool, his idea of an angry outburst playing a dissonant chord on the low keys of a piano. There was no “dropping character” to trade sarcastic quips with other adults when the cameras were off; in public and in private, he would respond to everyone—perhaps with an initial pause to gather himself—with empathy and kindness, in the same deliberate tones with their George H. W. Bush cadences he used on the show. Warm but not effusive, seemingly a milquetoast but strong-willed enough to always conduct conversations upon his own terms and never rise to anyone’s bait, he won over everyone from preschoolers acting out to, famously, an irascible senator. He was not particularly entertaining—I was absolutely more of a Sesame Street kid than a Mister Rogers kid, and thought of the latter show as sort of like the vegetables in the TV dinners I was fed back then—but as an adult I do find it hard to watch that video I just linked without tearing up. Fred Rogers did not seek to be thought of as a saint, though, nor to have a couple of generations think of him with love and gratitude. He wanted to improve the emotional health of those generations and thereby make the world a better place. And, I mean… now that those generations have come of age, look at the world. Does it seem like the product of an emotionally healthy population? It’s hard not to take the veneration of Mister Rogers as that paid to a beloved teacher whose class didn’t actually learn much.
Tom Junod, Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Noah Harpster, and Marielle Heller, 2019
no votes for Best Picture but rated #144, 2019 Skandies
I had assumed that this was going to be Won’t You Be My Neighbor? all over again, just with Tom Hanks playing Fred Rogers. It is not. It is about some embittered rando with uninteresting family problems who works for a magazine, is assigned to interview Fred Rogers, and is quickly broken down by his subject’s refusal to conduct a conversation on anyone else’s terms. Journalist: I’m here to interview this phony and see what’s behind the cloying façade; Mister Rogers: I’m here to offer an expression of care to someone who is obviously hurting. I guess it makes sense to have Mister Rogers as a supporting character, since he doesn’t really change or grow but rather inspires change and growth in others. But while Mister Rogers might care about everyone, I am not Mister Rogers and the movie did not succeed in making me care about the randos with whom he interacts.
Non-Fiction
Olivier Assayas, 2018
no votes for Best Picture but rated #143, 2019 Skandies
When it became clear that this was just going to be two hours of French people talking in cafés and at dinner parties about the state of the book publishing industry in the late 2010s, I wondered why my past self had put it on the list. My guess was that this movie, which like so many others these days had no opening credits, must have been by Olivier Assayas, still getting credit for the fact that I liked Summer Hours thirteen years ago. This turns out to have been the case. But this ain’t no Summer Hours, as the #143 placement suggests. It’s pretty dull. When it gradually shifts away from publishing talk and toward the characters’ various affairs, it does not get more interesting. I did appreciate one insight, though. One plot thread, to the extent it can be called one, involves a fortysomething editor working with a twentysomething who has been brought in to handle the publishing house’s foray into digital media. The digital media expert and her young colleagues press for an extremely aggressive approach to the transition, abandoning print entirely in favor of fully electronic publishing, for that, they are sure, is where the future lies. They can hardly contain their exasperation with these dinosaurs who can’t see the obvious inevitability of ebook dominance—that in the blink of an eye the idea of reading a novel on anything other than a Kindle will be preposterous, and that this is a utopian future where the younglings will be in their element and the oldsters will be bewildered and irrelevant. And then the latest figures come in, and it turns out that ebooks peaked in 2013 and print is actually experiencing a renaissance. They were certain, they were smug, and yes, in fact it was the children who were wrong. Answer choices that are certain about the future are always wrong on standardized tests, and that’s because in real life certainty about the future is always a mistake. (The plot point about ebooks in particular rings true to me: I initially published the second edition of Ready, Okay! solely as an ebook, only to be deluged by messages asking whether it would be coming out in paperback because, both old and young declared, “I don’t read ebooks.”)
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