"I've been thinking of a series of dreams" -
Bob Dylan.
Once upon a time, a young boy was taking his dog out for a walk, and something happened. The details at this point are sketchy. There may be truth to the lad's words, and, of course, he could have made this part up. The way he tells it, the boy was taking his pup for a simple afternoon stroll, out among the French countryside just outside of the village of Montignac, in the district of Dordogne. At first everything seemed normal, until the lad heard his companion begin to bark. He was well off into the countryside, now, and already it was possible to catch a view of the peaks and hill tops of the Vezere Valley which enveloped the region of his village. When the boy heard his dog barking, his first instinct was to look for where he last saw him. That's when he got his first real shock of the day, though there would be more. To start with, however, the dog was nowhere in sight. He could here the mutt's voice, yet it was like it was coming from nowhere. Everything about the dog had vanished into thin air. All except for the voice. The young traveler was sufficiently freaked out enough by this, so that when the dog began to bark in alarm, he may have felt a genuine moment of panic. The good news is that a continuous round of call and answer on the part of both pet and owner meant the dog's owner was soon able to locate where the barks were coming from. That was when the boy from Montignac received his second shock that day. It came when he discovered that his dog's voice was echoing from within a crevice in the rocky terrain of the region.
Not having much choice in the matter if he wanted to keep his companion, the boy followed the sound of his dog's voice into the crevice and discovered the third shock waiting for him inside. It wasn't just a simple niche carved into the side of the Earth, it was the entrance to an actual cave. It was just so well hidden that you had to be the size of, say, a regular Scottish terrier to be able to see it with the naked eye. The entrance to the cave was well hidden enough so that it didn't take long for the light to vanish, and the dark to begin. Luckily, the boy came prepared with either a box of matches or else it was a flashlight he had on him. This is one of the those plot points on which I'm not quite sure of. Like I say, this is a very old story. One of those tales where it's easy to lose track of the exact series of events, and even the stage props involved. Somehow the boy found a way to bring a little light into the cave as he searched about for his dog. Maybe it was matches, maybe what the British know colloquially as a "Torch". The point is the guy found some way of getting a light on the subject. It was enough to allow him to see his way inside the cave, and to follow the sound of his dog's voice. The good news is our intrepid day tripper and his best four-legged friend were soon united. The better news came when he looked around at the spot where he'd found his dog. That's where the final surprise lay waiting.
His little girl was nowhere to be found. The father called out her name, and to his relief she answered back. The curious part that set his teeth on edge was the hollow, echoing quality to her words. He kept calling her name and, like a good child, she would always answer back. Much like the young traveler from another tale, the father followed her voice to that same niche of entrance to the caves. In this version of the story, the second person to enter the caverns did, in fact, have a lantern with him, for some reason. He used it to light his way through the stone hallways until he came to the same expanse where the boy recovered his dog. There the man saw his daughter lying flat on her back, just staring up at the walls and ceiling. He ran to her and scooped her up in his arms, and then she pointed out something he'd missed in all his panic. That's when the father got his first real glimpse of the Lascaux Paintings for himself. According to the daughter, who is supposed to have told this story later as an old woman, what she saw that day acted as something of a revelation to her. When she caught her first glimpses of these first snapshots of daily life, no matter how primitve, she realized then and there that the townsfolk of her village were wrong, These "Monkey Men" weren't beasts, they were people.
Would you like me to tell you a story? I hope you enjoy it. This is the tale of a young, little tiger, and how he came to be, and what he means. It's also the story of the tiger's father, and what his life meant. The young tiger's name is Daniel. Can you say that name? You can call him just Danny, if you like. He doesn't mind. Though he likes being known Daniel, if that's alright. Can he just be that to you? He's four years old, which means he still has a lot of growing up left to do. Danny's father is named Fred. Fred never minded at all if you chose to call him by his first name. He's the kind of guy who encouraged people to do so. Though to most folks, Danny's dad is best often known by his last name, Mister Rogers. He's in a documentary called
Won't You Be My Neighbor. It's all about him. The name of Daniel's mother is a bit more complicated. In a sense, you might say that she was, and still is, a parent of many names. You might refer to her as Thalia, because that's one of her functions. She also answers to the name of Calliope, for that's how some knew her once, long ago. No matter how you slice it, it all comes down to the same thing. Daniel is the product of the interaction between the mind of the artist, and the strange yet necessary function or mental
thing known as the Imagination. That's a very important word, you know: Imagination. Can you say it to yourselves. Does anyone really
know it? Well, anyway, this is the story of Danny and his father, and what they created together.
Hidden Hints in the Early Years.
Daniel doesn't really remember how he was born. There's nothing wrong with that, however. No one ever truly remembers all that much about when they were a baby. This is true even of the big kids who like to call themselves adults. It's true of everyone, really. That's because our mind's were so young back then that they still had just as much growing up to do as our bodies. It's only when we've had a number of Summers gone by that we might, if we so choose, stop and try to figure just who we are and where we came from. The way Daniel the Striped Tiger came about, so far as I am able to figure out, anyway, was this. All the happened was that a mommy and a daddy had a child. As
an old Harry Chapin song goes, "it came about in the usual way". Frederick Rogers was born on the 20th of September, 1928, in a Pennsylvania suburb known as Latrobe, situated just southeast of a city that local residents still know as "The Burg". When it comes to discussing the origins of Mr. Rogers, there is always one element of Morgan Neville's documentary that always stood out like a sore thumb to me. It might be that this is the one aspect of the picture that's easiest to criticize. This is down to the fact that while Neville does touch on aspects of his subject's childhood, we're never given quite as much background information on "What Makes Freddy Run" as I think we might like, or that could have helped us to gain a better sense of who Rogers was as a person.
What I found galling was the hints of personal childhood, not issues, as such. It's more that there was the lingering sense that Fred went through some undisclosed kind of hassles as a kid just trying to grow up like normal. It's demonstrated in its clearest light when his wife, Joanne Byrd, talks about a shared element of their otherwise separate youth experiences. "He and I both had childhoods where you weren't allowed to be angry. You weren't allowed to show your anger", she tells us. "And we were never able to do it". She then makes a point blank confession which I still find fascinating, "It scared us". There's just so much unspoken history contained in that one bit of interview that it's like it had no choice except to jump out at me, and a lot of it stems from the fact that she's speaking about a man who, to most audiences, was nothing else except the picture of calm control, and contentment. This was the truth in many respects. It's just that a bit of deeper digging reveals that it was a point of rest that Fred might have had to do a bit of personal inner labor in order to get there. Here's the part where Maxwell King's written life of the artist, The Good Neighbor does a very helpful job of filling in a lot of the gaps that Neville chooses not to focus too much on, for some reason. It's King who gives us our first hint of the artist's conflict when he tells us some seemingly innocent sounding info about Fred's mother.
"Nancy Rogers was
immediately protective of her new baby, smothering him with maternal
love and guarding him against the outside world. In one of the
photographs from that time, she is seen hugging the young boy close to
her, one arm wrapped around his frame and the other protectively
holding his arm. She is slight, with an angular beauty; he is a bit chubby,
with a quizzical look on his face. Sixty-five years later, Fred Rogers would say in a television
interview: “Nothing can replace the influence of unconditional love in
the life of a child. . . . Children love to belong, they long to belong.” More than anyone else in Fred’s life, his mother gave him that
unconditional love. Certainly, her overprotective mothering contributed
to the little boy’s shy and withdrawn nature, but what is even more clear
is that her absolute devotion, along with her extraordinary generosity,
contributed essential ingredients to Fred Rogers’s developing character
and gave him the resilience to overcome an introverted, sometimes
sickly (with severe asthma), and sheltered childhood. His mother was
renowned throughout the family and the city of Latrobe for her giving
nature and her boundless kindness (17-18)". Now, I really do have to get up front the fact that there is no reason to doubt what either King or others say about Rogers.
That's what makes him such a fascinating historical figure to study. For all intents and purposes, what you saw of the man was not just what you got. It was also pretty much all there was to him. He seems to have been one of those rare examples of a denizen from modern life who has managed to forge a full and complete sense of character, and hence of personal integrity for himself. That's a very pathetic way of describing the effect this guy had on others. The real punchline is saying that he seems to have been one of the best examples of kindness and generosity leaves you with a perfect irony on your hands. Turns out it's possible to tell nothing but the honest truth and still come out sounding like a damned Hallmark card. How's that for a real kick in the teeth, huh? I bet Fred would have appreciated it. My point is that none of this is false. It's just that the Fred Rogers we eventually got didn't start out as someone with the exact same personality and winning social-communicative skills right then and there in the womb. With all due respect, that's not how any of us start out. Barring some kind of miracle, the very idea is laughable so far as humans are concerned. It's just not how the cards are dealt for some reason. Instead, the future creator of Daniel Tiger had to begin the same way we all do, with baby steps.
One of the things that Maxwell's biography helps drive home in a way that Neville's documentary sort of overlooks is the fact that there was a road that Fred had to travel along for a while on the way to becoming the titular Good Neighbor that we all know today. One of the gratifying things about King's input is that he lets us know that there was always a chance things could haven otherwise, yet it never seems to have come to pass. The was a brief window of opportunity when Mister Rogers could have been lost to the world before his time, and yet he survived a maze its all too easy for most of us to get lost in. In Fred's case, the obstacle course he had to navigate through proved to be a very delicate challenge, as it seems that a lot of what could have served to grind him under life's gears came from the very same source that also helped to nurture him into the role we know him as now. King makes clear that "Nancy Rogers spent her life giving to the people of Latrobe (18)". At the same time, however, "Given his family’s wealth and stature in the community, Fred
Rogers’s formative years were spent in an environment in which his
family had an extraordinary influence over his friends and neighbors,
and almost everyone in Latrobe (20)". While this did have its upsides, such as giving the young boy the chance to grow up in what turned out to be an ideal environment, it also came with challenges.
King describes Latrobe as a " very attractive cityscape of brick and stone
houses and commercial buildings that Fred captured in his Mister
Rogers’ Neighborhood trolley-track town. With its tidy homes and many
parks and playgrounds, it looks like quintessential small-town America (ibid)". " Ironically, the very generosity that made Fred Rogers’s parents so
popular with adults sometimes made Fred a target of other children.
Because he was so easily identified as the rich kid in town, and because
of his sensitive nature, he spent part of his earliest years as an outlier in
Latrobe. And he suffered from childhood asthma—increasingly common
in the badly polluted air of industrial western Pennsylvania. During some
of the summer months, Fred was cooped up in a bedroom with one of the
region’s first window air-conditioning units, purchased by his mother to
help alleviate his breathing problems (23)". "Still, for all the positive influence of his parents’ faith, hard work, and
philanthropy, over time their protectiveness of Fred seemed to have
contributed to an insecurity and insularity that made his earliest years
painful. Another childhood friend, Rudy Prohaska (whose mother, Anna
Prohaska, worked for years for the Rogers family and sometimes cared
for Fred when his mother was out on volunteer work), remembers other
children bullying Fred, calling him names, and chasing him. “There were
a lot of people in school who irritated me by the way they treated him. I
couldn’t take the name-calling and all that. My personal opinion is, Fred
was just too sheltered.”
"Prohaska and other friends all talked about how Nancy Rogers
contributed to Fred’s tentative and uncertain character. To a large extent,
the careful sheltering of the only Rogers son was a natural outgrowth of
the times for such a wealthy family. Although the Rogers estate survived
the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression largely
unscathed, millions of people around the nation were living in abject
poverty, sometimes lacking even food... dog.” Despite the deep appreciation most of the local people expressed for
the Rogerses’ philanthropy and for their unpretentiousness, Nancy and
Jim Rogers worried that Fred could be a target of resentment or even a
criminal act. When the twenty-month-old son of Charles Lindbergh and
Anne Morrow Lindbergh was kidnapped from their estate near
Hopewell, New Jersey, in 1932, it contributed to an atmosphere of near
panic among some wealthy American families with young children...For Jim and Nancy Rogers, whose small son was only a couple of
years older than the only child of the famous aviator and his writer wife, the Lindbergh story and the prospect of someone kidnapping Fred was
deeply affecting. Nancy had their chauffeur, Grant Ross, drive her little son to school
every day, pick him up for lunch and bring him home, and then take him
back to school. At the end of every school day, Ross would wait to take
Fred home, carefully guarding the young boy’s every moment out in the
community. Naturally this must have contributed to Fred’s feeling of
being apart from his schoolmates and his neighbors.
"Later in life, Fred Rogers reported that although he loved the small
town atmosphere of Latrobe, he struggled to fit in with his peers. He
turned to reading, listening to music, and playing by himself with his
toys and puppets. Fred took solace in his nascent artistry, evolving his
own puppet theater in the attic of the family home, sometimes
performing before family and friends, and beginning what would be a
lifelong love of the piano (26-27)". I'd argue that it's all these missing pieces of information that account for a segment in Neville's documentary where he tackles the way Rogers dealt with the topic of anger. It's a difficult subject to deal with even among adults, so this meant that any child educator trying to deal with it was always going to be involved in an uphill battle at the best of times. The way Fred handled it was by going back to the sometimes isolated boy that he used to be, and recall what it was like being left alone with that maddening sense of helplessness that a lot of children feel growing up. In Neville's film, proper, we can hear Fred say that "Music was my first language. I was scared to use words. I didn't want to be a bad boy. I didn't want to tell people that I was angry. But I could show it through the way I would play on the piano. I could literally laugh, or cry, or be very angry through the ends of my fingers". Neville and his team came up with a great conceit for the film, right here.
At some point in the editing process, someone hit upon the idea of using an animated, cartoon version of Daniel to create this kind of allegorical portrayal of what Fred's life was like as a child. Whoever had that idea deserves their own award, because that meager conceit turns out to be a stroke of genius. It allows the filmmakers to use Daniel as a window into Rogers' psyche, both when growing up, and even perhaps still, on some level, as an adult. It' all amounts to what Prof. Junlei Li says at one point in the documentary. "Daniel is articulating the fears and anxieties and feelings that Fred had as a child, but that many children have". Margaret Whitmer, Fred's producer on the
Neighborhood, explains that "He never forgot how vulnerable it was to be a kid. You know, you're this little thing. Everything else in the world is bigger than you are. And you have to learn everything that helps you get through life. I think that it just never left him. Whatever those scars of his life were, he wanted to help heal that wound, maybe". In his own words, Fred tells his audience that "Whenever I was quarantined, I would be in bed a lot. I would put up my knees and they would be mountains covered with the sheet. And I'd have all these little (toy and puppet, sic) figures moving around, and I'd make them talk". He sums it up in his own, simple way. "I had to make up a lot of my own fun". Here's where King provides more info.
He describes in his book how at one point Fred's parents hit upon the idea of letting him have a puppet theater to play and occupy himself with whenever he was either sick and had to be isolated for his health, which was often. Then, whenever he was well enough to have friends over (what few he may have had), they would "go up to the third-floor attic, where one of
the large rooms had been organized as a playroom, complete with a small
stage for Fred’s puppet theater, developed even before he’d started
school". One of his friends had a recollection later on about how "Fred entertained me with his puppets and
marionettes. I sometimes think I was watching the beginning of
Mister
Rogers’ Neighborhood.” In her account, Fred carefully studied her to see what she reacted to
with enthusiasm. Fred Rogers, who years later would seem almost
preternaturally young and childlike as an adult, was preternaturally
mature and sophisticated as a purveyor of puppet entertainment for his
young classmate (28)". I think that's the likeliest point of origin, not just for Daniel the Tiger, but also for the Kingdom of Make-Believe, its inhabitants, and perhaps even the entire Neighborhood itself. In the documentary, Fred tells us how this childhood of isolation while surrounded by a neighborhood that seems to have offered an equal amount of both the best and the worst of what growing up can sometimes turn into the most unlikeliest of creative wellsprings for a young boy like him.
"It's a lot easier, even as an adult, for me to have Daniel say, "I'm really scared. Do you think maybe you could give me a hug", you know? That would be hard for me to say...So the difference from here to "Here", that doesn't seem very far, but it was efficacious". What he means is that it was being left alone in his bedroom, or in the third story attic of the house that belonged to his wealthy parents where this shy, awkward, isolated nothing kid who grew up just outside of Pittsburgh turned to his Imagination as a solace from being, not robbed of a normal childhood, but definitely having what would otherwise be the typical experience of those formative years and having them curtailed every now and then. It's the sort of thing that doesn't have to be all that big a deal, yet it can also serve as an opportunity to either warp a child's young mind, or else provide him with an opportunity for a real growth towards sense of maturity. It seems that tapping into his Imagination by creating Danny the Tiger and his Make-Believe Neighborhood is what allowed Fat Freddy to become a better version of himself. It's what allowed him to become Mister Rogers.
Becoming a Good Neighbor.
The way Daniel and his father became everyone's favorite neighbor was more or less by accident. Fred never set out on any sort of career in television. It was more of a happy accident than most people realize. What happened is that as Rogers grew up, he began to lose a lot of the shy and awkward social stigma that he had during his Fat Freddy years. In an
NPR interview he cites his ability to befriend the head of his high school football team that made him realize what it was like to come out of his shell. It may have been the first time he discovered what a normal, healthy friendship was like. The way things were shaping up from there are best described as a combination of the unremarkable and the normal. One gets the sense that for the former Fat Freddy, this turn of events came as something of a relief. Like learning that you've just dodged some sort of invisible bullet with your name on it, or making your way through a dark wood where the Big Bad Wolf is somewhere lurking, lying in wait, ready to turn you into something just like him. And then to his own amazement the clearing path at the end of the Deep Dark Forest presented itself, and all he had to do was walk out unscathed. Still, it probably left Fred with at least a kind of knowledge of what it was like to be threatened with one's own negative emotions. It must have been a lesson he took to heart, because his behavior ever afterwards is a testament to some of the best possible meanings we can attach to a simple word like Humanism.
Anyway, once he'd escaped from the Big Bad Wolf in the Deep Dark Woods, all that was on Fred's mind as he entered college seems to have been nothing more than to graduate as a Seminarian, and maybe take up a job in a local pulpit somewhere in either Latrobe, or else the Burgh itself. So, all he did was to keep his head down, apply himself to his studies, and just have a normal and quiet life, in general. Entertain conjecture of a time when things could have just stayed that way forever. Imagine a world in which we never got what we have now. Fred Rogers could have remained a non-descript deacon of some local Church out in Pittsburgh, and there he might have remained to the end of his days, with nothing else to report or know about. The irony is that this is a pretty accurate description of the kind of career trajectory that Fred had his sights set on. The good fortune that knocked his entire life off course was something that must have happened during one of his breaks from college, either in the Summer or Holiday season. "I was all set to go to the Seminary, and become a minister", Fred tells us. "But I went home my Senior Year for a vacation, and I saw this new thing called Television. And I saw people throwing pies in each others faces. And I thought, "This could be a wonderful tool! Why is it being used this way" And so, I said to my parents, "You know, I don't think I'll go to Seminary right away".
"I think maybe I'll go into Television. And they said, "But you've never even seen it"! It's a moment worth a pause over when you stop and consider the nature of the media landscape today. To put it simply, it's like, I wonder if Fred would even be able to do half of what he accomplished back in the day if the kind of barriers, guardrails, glass ceilings, and red tape that defines showbusiness today were as deeply entrenched then as they are now. The good news might be that if he were, say, an up and coming Zoomer with still the same outlook, he might have been able to make a name for himself as an online Indie hit. One of the few Social Media influencers who can be spoken of as making a positive influence on what is otherwise a digital incarnation of T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. Just bear in mind that the odds being even that he'd have a fairer shot at bringing the Neighborhood to life as part of an independent, Patreon funded streaming production on YouTube, rather than on TV proper says a great deal about the sorry state of the analog medium that originally welcomed him with open arms. All of which is to say that it was another time, another life; maybe even a whole other world. Whatever the case, Fred decided to take the plunge. So, his wife Joanne reports that "His father told him about this new Station that was coming along here". The local TV station's name was WQED, "located in the heart of Pittsburgh" and as Jo reports, "It was called Educational Television". So that's where Fred went.
Somehow, perhaps to his own amazement, he found himself hired with a job in TV. Let this next statement stand as a good image of the kind of vanished world of Public Television that Rogers entered at that time. It must have had so much more freedom than it does today because it seems it didn't take long for Fred to find himself in charge of brainstorming ideas for some kind of educational programming to fill time slots in the Station's programming block. "Nobody wanted to do a children's program", he says, "and I said 'Well, we need a children's program'. I said, 'I'll produce it and play some music in the background. We'll get some free films, and Josie (Carey, sic), you can introduce them'. And then we discovered the awful fact when you got free film it was often brittle, and it would break. And if you were on the air, live, you had to do something. Somebody had given me this little Tiger puppet. I pushed it through the (very primitive mockup drawing of a clock, sic) and said, 'Hi, Josie, it's 5:02 and Columbus discovered America in 1492'. And then (I) just went right back in. And that's how the puppetry began. We never expected to use puppets". And so, in obedience to whatever surreal Laws of Irony there are that govern the universe, the minute you don't count on, or expect something to happen, there it is, right and your doorstep, forcing you to either deal with it or not. The punchline is that this seems to have been how all the greatest achievements in the field of the Arts have come about.
It was also Daniel's first prime time debut as a television personality. I maintain here the notion that Neville posits in the direction of his documentary that the origins of the Striped Tiger as a character began way back with Fred's experience of childhood isolation and loneliness. Danny was not, in that sense, a new creation made up then and there, on the spot, and in the heat of the moment. In fact, the bit of trivia that someone had gifted Rogers that now iconic Tiger puppet at some point before he placed it in front of the camera for the first time tells me that the artist might have already not just brought forth the idea of Daniel both as a personality and a hand marionette, he might also, in the back of his mind, have been brainstorming of ways in which he could introduce the Inaugural Citizen of the Kingdom of Make-Believe to the world for the first time. Apparently, that chance came about through no more than the expected results that happen when you try to save money on a production. Proof positive, if any were needed, that desperation, as much as necessity can be the mother of Inspiration.
Whatever the case, Daniel had made his small-screen debut, and this has remained the character's medium of choice up to the present moment, even going on to have his very own
animated TV series. All of right now was still in the future back then, however. In the moment, Fred was enjoying a modicum of success with his first venture into educational television,
The Children's Corner, yet there soon came a moment when it seemed as if the Neighborhood might still not happen. "Over time", according to biographer Max King, "Fred became unsatisfied with
The Children's Corner. He thought that it was simple and slapstick. And he said he really wanted to concentrate on the Seminary, so he wanted to stop for a while". For a minute there, it seemed as if Mister Rogers had come and gone without even leaving a clear trace of himself behind. What kept this from happening amounted to an example of help coming from an unexpected quarter. To summarize a complicated yet surprising turn of events, it really does seem to have been the desire of his Superiors in the Presbyterian Seminary that Rogers studied under to be a pastor who, in essence, told him, "No, hold on a minute. You've been doing pretty well for yourself with this TV gig of yours. So what we want you to do is this. In addition to your regular duties, get back out there in front of the camera this time, and just keep doing what you've already done". It was an astonishing command to be given, yet Fred was dutiful about such things. So, he did as he was bade, and so, for better or worse, here we are.
what
they are. At the end of the day, a painting remains nothing other than itself (whatever
that is).
The real issue is why
are they there? What are they for? What is their purpose?
No one's ever given a good answer for that one. In fact, I don't recall ever hearing anyone offer up a good explanation of who made them?
I know it makes sense to claim that we are looking at the work of more than just one artist. One of the main reasons for this is because there is evidence of one set of artwork being both painted and drawn over earlier examples of similar figures and animals. Beyond this however, no one has a clue who the artists where. We know that they're efforts date back to the Paleolithic Era, yet there's very little else beyond that to go on. Who were these people?
Did they make up part of any of the primitive cultures, or tribal societies that we still have information about (however scant) in our pre-historic records?The answer remains the same: we don't know. In terms of any simple answer to the question of what the Lascaux Caves are meant for, it's one of those cases where the best course of action is to pick a number and get in line, because there are all sorts of theories about that waiting their turn in the spotlight. Those systems of underground caverns and their artistic content have been posited as being anything from a site were a people once practiced their ancient or sacred rituals to something like a primitive form of nursery where the children could be kept safe and watched over. My own two cents on the matter isn't very scientific, I'm afraid. It's more like a knitting together of random passing thoughts inspired by nothing more than the mere visual data of all those near three-dimensional stags, elks, and bison, combined with nothing else except just the way my mind works. I kept flashing back to something I read a while back. It was a passage in a children's book written by some four-eyed geek by the name of Ray Bradbury. He was talking in general, yet what he said put me in mind of those cave drawings.
When you and your friends die
every day, there’s no time to think of Death, is there? Only time to run. But
when you stop running at long last...now you have time to think of where you came from, where you’re
going. And fire lights the way, boys. Fire and lightning. Morning stars to
gaze at. Fire in your own cave to protect you. Only by night fires was the
caveman, beastman, able at last to turn his thoughts on a spit and baste them
with wonder. The sun died in the sky. Winter came on like a great white
beast shaking its fur, burying him. Would spring ever come back to the
world? Would the sun be reborn next year or stay murdered? Egyptians
asked it. Cavemen asked it a million years before. Will the sun rise
tomorrow morning?”... “With such long thoughts at night, boys. And always at the center of it, fire.
The sun. The sun dying down the cold sky forever. How that must have
scared early man, eh? That was the Big Death. If the sun went away forever,
then what?
“So in the middle of autumn, everything dying, apemen turned in their
sleep, remembered their own dead of the last year. Ghosts called in their
heads. Memories, that’s what ghosts are, but apemen didn’t know that.
Behind their eyelids, late nights, the memory ghosts called, waved, danced, so apemen woke up, tossed twigs on the fire, shivered, wept. They could
drive away wolves but not memories, not ghosts. So they held tight to their
ribs, prayed for spring, watched the fire, thanked invisible gods for harvests
of fruit and nuts. “Halloween, indeed! A million years ago, in a cave in autumn, with ghosts
inside heads, and the sun lost (62-62)".
Being a Good Neighbor.
So now we come to like the main event. The moment you've all been waiting for.
Mister Roger's Neighborhood itself. In some ways, here's the part where I can't do the topic any justice, and longtime fans will know what I'm talking about. Whenever any artist leaves an entire lifetime's worth of legacy behind, then one of the pitfalls of such an achievement is that it becomes more or less impossible to sum up in just one article, much less the confines of a single Tweet. There's no way you can capture the whole of Rogers' accomplishment in just a handful of words in a space like this. It just can't be done. Instead, we're talking here about a legacy that needs its own Alexandrian style library just to list all of Fred's accomplishments as a child's entertainer. And one of the first things most fans will tell you is that he's not just a children's show host, and they're right. He's more akin to being the unofficial Uncle of households just about everywhere. All of which brings us back to the fact of there always being too much to talk about. So, rather than even try and be a complete encyclopedist about the
Neighborhood, I'm just going to limit myself with two kinds of observations here. I'll try and discuss what Neville outlines as some of the key facets of the show in his documentary, while also giving my own two cents on how these things impact me as a viewer. It's not the most professional approach to examining a work of art like this, yet I'm pretty sure it's the best I can do. Let's see if we can meet the neighbors.
To start with, thanks the actual professionalism of scholars like Max King, it's no exaggeration to claim that the main setting of the series is based upon two aspects of the artist's life. The Neighborhood itself, and the town of which it is a part, along with the Kingdom of Make-Believe are both drawn from the life, to a certain extent. The Town and the Street on which Rogers' lives is based off of the author's hometown of Latrobe, even down the ubiquitous presence of an old-fashioned trolly system. These are all elements of his daily world that Fred put into his work. The same holds true for the Make-Believe Realm. It's really nothing more (though certainly not less) than the results of all those sick days of loneliness where a young Freddy was left isolated and alone in his room with nothing but his puppet theater and the inner workings of his mind, and the artist's ability to tap into the Imagination, and make all of these otherwise meager elements come alive in a way that I'm sure most of us just aren't capable of. It was this nascent seed of natural talent that was nurtured, all unknowing for the most part, in those moments of isolation that allowed Rogers to first discover a gift for Fantasy making, and then later on acquire just the right knack needed to bring it all alive on-stage, in front of the camera. It's what he made of these initial ingredients that has kept his memory alive from one generation right to the next.
I believe it was the show's producer Margaret Whitmer who claims that "What he wanted to do was to take all of that (which, sic) he learned in television work. Add to that a sense of ministry, and the child development background. It became
Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood". The way it works as a fictional space is best described as one of those artistic feats that is both simplistic and somehow profound, by turns. In many ways, the entire show amounts to little more than Fred's old childhood puppet theater expanded into life-size terms. It's gone from a simple wood and cardboard mock-up that you have to sit down in front to even engage with the thing, to an entire secondary world that you can walk around in just like you would your own backyard. Rogers' must have had one of the few impressive cases of memory recall, because you get the sense that the Neighborhood and the Kingdom are meant to be seen as more or less accurate enough recollections of how Latrobe and the inner workings of the Kingdom must have looked to a the still developing mind of a child. The Neighborhood itself comes off as just this regular looking street somewhere in Anytown, USA. Yet even here, there's a certain quality about the place. You get the sense that what you're looking at is just as much a fairy tale realm as Make-Believe. That's because try as he might, Fred could never quite resist Romanticizing the world of his own past.
It's this Romantic streak (in the literary sense of the term) that ultimately forces him to design the Neighborhood in such a way as to make it seem like the kind of place where you might expect fantastic things to happen just out of sight of the adults. What I mean is that Fred's constructed the kind of town where things like goblins and wood sprites might climb their way out of the trees once bedtime rolls around, and all the adults have gone to sleep. Or else you the sense that another of the Town's possible functions is that it can extend to include the kind of Fantastic happenings that you'd see in either a Ray Bradbury story, or else a Dr. Seuss rhyme. I'm not sure how aware Fred was of this Fantastical factor when he designed the Neighborhood. Nor do I think it matters all that much. It's just as much of a storybook realm as Make-Believe, in spite of his best efforts to keep them both apart. I think this explains an unexplored part of the charm of why it was so easy for viewers to get drawn into the kind of Imaginative space that Fred crafted for his audience. It's also as Maxwell King explains. "A neighborhood was a place where if, at times, that you felt worried, scared, unsafe, would take care of you. Would provide understanding, safety. That's what the neighborhood was for Fred". The way Rogers put it was that "Television has the chance of building a real community out of an entire country". King also states that the Neighborhood was never entirely divorced from real life issues.
As a matter of fact, the very first week of Mister Rogers' was something of a masterclass in what you might call the dramatization of complexity within simplicity. On the face of things, the week-long issue that was chosen for the program to address in its opening week went under the unassuming title of: Change. What made that choice such a creative gamble was that Fred knew that sometimes a single word can be used to cover a whole myriad of topics. In this case, Change meant addressing the issues that the Country was going through at the time the Neighborhood made its big broadcast debut. The very first episode of the show aired on the 19th of February, 1968. By that point, a lot of the social upheavals that went on to redefine the Nation had already taken place. In one sense, it's possible to look back on those times with a certain amount of inevitability. Once a certain number of crucial flashpoints had continued to pile up, one after another, it's like it all acted as just the right series of Change Agents that worked to reshape the fabric of how America thought about itself. It's like from that point on, there was no going back. It's easy to see how this was the case in retrospect. However, at the time, there was still a lot of pushback to the way in which things were headed, and there was a concerted effort on the part of a lot of broadcasters, not just Fred Rogers, to tackle this sort of Generation Gap head on.
Perhaps the most famous example of this desire to examine how the shifting of social mores and customs was effecting the everyday citizens out in the streets and in front of the TV screen still has to be Norman Lear's groundbreaking efforts on
All in the Family. By introducing viewers to the residents of the Bunker household, Lear pretty much captured the most impressionable snapshot of those days by creating one of the perfect artistic documents of what it was like to be alive during those times. In a way, I suppose it's just possible to make the claim that Fred was up to more or less the same thing. The only real difference might be that he had a much more quieter approach to handling such themes. Which is sort of what makes the show's first week so remarkable. The initial four episodes of the
Neighborhood don't just show King Friday the 13th, the ruler of Make-Believe, railing about the good ol' days, like Archie Bunker from the relative safety of his immortal living room chair. Instead, he is more or less shown devolving into this particular strand of paranoia that would have been very familiar to a lot participants in the 1960s, from both sides of the Generation Gap. In this case, it's pretty clear that Friday is meant as a stand-in for the former Greatest turned Silent Generation. The kind of voters that politicians like Tricky Dick Nixon relied on to propel him to the White House down the line.
Unlike Archie, however, Friday is made to see the error of his thinking, and he more or less gives up the kind of late Sixties "Bunker Mentality". Neighborhood crew member Joe Negri (that's
Handyman Negri, to you!) seems to speak for the cast of the show when he recollects how "I couldn't believe what a broad area we covered. Fred didn't want you ad-libbing, putzing around with the words, because he was always trying to get a message across in every show". "That was the first week", as Li points out. "That's how it had gotten started". It was a heck of a way to get the attention of the viewing audience, and things just kept rolling from there. "From the early days of
Mister Roger's Neighborhood until the end of that program", the show's Child Development Advisor Hedda Sharapan says, "(Fred, sic) came in the door every day the same way. And he changed to the sweater, to give a sense that we're going to have this relaxing time together". With this basic setup of somehow simple profundity, Fred began to layout the nature of the Neighborhood, its denizens, and how it all went together to make the show function. The "real world" of Rogers' Neighborhood consisted of a vast array of neighbors. Some were longtime series stalwarts like the mailman, Mr. David McFeely.
There was also his wife, Betsy, Officer Frank Clemmons, and Chef Brockett. These performers would go on to become the core of the Neighborhood as generations of kids and adults knew it. There were, in addition, a number of cast members who would come and go throughout the years: Mr. Allmine, a pilot named Yoshi Ito, and Mr. Anybody. In the Kingdom of Make-Believe, meanwhile, you had a rich cast of fantasy characters to interact with. One of Rogers friends, Bill Isler, lays out the details well. "Anything can happen in Make-Believe. But Make-Believe was not real. I mean there was a distinction. Fred never appeared in Make-Believe. Actors did. The puppets did". A sort of centerpiece of this fantasy kingdom was a clock tower where Daniel Tiger lived, and knew as his home. Barely a stone's throw away was the castle, home to King Friday and his wife, Her Majesty Queen Sara Saturday. A newsreel shown in Neville's documentary describes Friday as "one of the few remaining benevolent despots", and I think that's sort of unfair. Friday was never meant to be portrayed in that light. He could serve as a useful satirical stand-in as someone who typifies whatever problematic issue the show chose to tackle. Yet even here, it's clear that Fred never meant the character to degenerate into the worst that humanity has to offer. Besides, I always recall Friday as one of those decent enough sorts, on the whole. So I'd take whatever that particular newsreel says with a healthy does of salt.
It's as John Rogers, Fred's son, describes it. "These characters were people in his life. Queen Sara would obviously be my mom. None of us like to think of Lady Elaine as my Aunt, but we wonder about that". That's Elaine Crozier he's talking about there. She was Fred's adopted sister, and there's hints that while she came to adopt the trademark Rogers warmth as her own, it was also clear that she could have this more tough and assertive side to her as well. "In the beginning, she was a witch", Crozier tells us about the Make-Believe grand dame who bears her own name. To which, all she has for comment is, "What can I say". Meanwhile, "In a beautiful tree", the aforementioned newsreel continues, "lives X the Owl, and Henrietta Pussycat". Out of all the Make-Believe citizens, it is probably X that stands out clearest in my memory, aside from a few vague recollections of Friday, here and there. The show must have gotten a better budget as the decades wore on and it grew in popularity. Because the clearest memory I have of Make-Believe is the sight of X challenging Lady Aberline, Handyman Negri, and (I think?) Daniel to a race, which they all participate in. X beats them all handily because, being a bird, he can fly, and I'll always recall the early to mid-80s digitized image of X soaring above the head of the rest of the cast as he makes a crow's path for the finish line. It's the kind of effect that probably looks janky as hell by today's standards, yet it's always somehow Epic in my mind's eye.
There are two particular crew members of the show who might be pretty familiar even to viewers of today. One of them was behind the camera, while the other mostly did some extra work, here and there. One of them is perhaps best known today as Dr. Facilier, the Shadow Man. The other went on to make a pair of films. One was called
Night of the Living Dead, and
Dawn of the Dead. In case you can't guess, or as difficult as it might be to believe, it's true. Keith David and George A. Romero were both crew members of the neighborhood staff. One of the unsung talents that Fred Rogers had was acting as a facilitator for future talents. It happened not just with David and Romero, but also a young actor named Michael Keaton as well. In fact, there's a funny as hell behind the scenes story which has probably become the stuff of legend for Neighborhood fans. At some point Fred's doctor told him he needs to have a tonsillectomy, and Rogers leaped at the chance. He saw it as the perfect opportunity to teach kids that there's no need to be afraid a simple, harmless operation, or of the doctors and nurses who are here to help you by performing the procedure. So he decided they would do an entire show around the operation itself, with the camera's rolling all the way, and Romero was tapped to be the cinematographer for that day's shoot. Now I have no idea what serendipity was at work that day.
Maybe George was dumb enough to share his enthusiasm for all things Horror genre related with Fred, and Mr. Rogers thought he was doing the poor, dumb sap a favor. I can't say one way or the other. All I know is that George was assigned to work the camera on the operation, and the story goes that just watching the whole thing unfold was enough to make the future Gore King so sick to his stomach that he had to hand over the camera to someone else just so he could rush to the restroom in order to be sick. The tale goes that even as this was happening, some part of Romero's mind was thinking, "You know what? If someone could make a Horror film with this particular kind of visceral reaction to it, I'll bet it would make a lot of money". I can't help thinking there's at least some truth to that account. What I do know is true is that when Dawn of the Dead had its big premier, Romero invited Fred to take a look at the final product. To say the inventor of the Zombie Apocalypse was nervous as hell is a bit like saying the Earth revolves around the Sun. He'd just taken America's Favorite Neighbor and given him a front row seat to watch one of the best remembered gore fests in the entire history of Horror cinema. Sweating bullets probably doesn't do justice to the reaction Romero was feeling as the action unfolded up the screen, in all its bloody glory. He must have felt like he was allowing himself to lose a friend.
However, when it was all over, and the credits rolled, Fred turned to George and said, "It's a lot of fun, George (
web)". Then again, perhaps there's a logic to Rogers' response. What is the original
Dead Trilogy, after all, if not something of a carry-over of the ultimate themes of the Neighborhood, except transmogrified into an appropriate and necessary (given the demands of the genre format) Gothic tone. It's one of those ideas that sounds too obtuse for its own good, yet there may be a swath of genuine logic to it. Consider the fact that Fred wasn't afraid to make a stand on issues that needed to be defended. Yes, it's true, he did it in his kind and gentle way. Yet I don't think he ever meant that to be used as a kind of drug which could help us escape from having to deal with these issues. Instead, Rogers continuous method throughout the entire run of his show was always the same. An ongoing, seemingly never-ending search for the right way in which to allow his youngest viewers not just the method, but also all of the best possible means with which to tackle a lot of the tough issues he knew they would all face one day as they became adults. In fact, I kind of have to wonder if even his most devoted fans might have sold their childhood idol a bit short in some respects. As this seems to be the true heart and soul of his achievement as an entertainer. While it's true he always tried he best to leave you a smile on your face, he never once, at any point, tried to pretend that a lot of life's harshness never existed.
Instead, he always found the right way to tackle a lot of these problems head on. There are even two moments in Neville's film where this ability of his is showcased to its fullest extent. One of them stemmed from the way that Rogers used the character of Daniel for "articulating the fears and anxieties and feelings" that all of us "had as a child". The best example of that is seen in a song that one of his young audience members helped him to develop, which is called "What do you do with the mad that you feel"? Part of the lyrics go as follows: "
Do you punch a bag? Do you pound some clay or some dough? Do you round up friends for a game of tag? Or see how fast you go?...I can stop when I want to. Can stop when I wish. I can stop, stop, stop any time. And what a good feeling to feel like this / And know that the feeling is really mine. Know that there's something deep inside / That helps us become what we can. For a girl can be someday a woman / And a boy can be someday a man (web)".Another example of how Fred was able to tackle complex subject matters is given when Neville shows us a clip in which Betty tries to comfort Daniel after he's learned the meaning of a new word. The grown-ups call it something like, assassination. That entire skit was made in the immediate aftermath of the death of RFK, just a few short years since one afternoon in Dallas. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like this discussed before in any of the pre-school media I consumed when I was just emerging from my toddler years. Most of what I saw during the mid to late 80s was a hell of a lot safer, by and large. Then again, maybe that's because of the overall positive enough conditions of the time period. With less turmoil on the national scene as a whole, there may have been this sense of lets put the past behind us and get back to living actual lives. There is logic in such a statement, just so long as someone agrees to be the watchman. Fred, as usual, never took the easy route in explaining what happens when the mind suffers a mental snap. Instead, he just kept on employing this downright uncanny knack for making a child feels safe in the midst of a time of crisis. I think part of what makes him such a fond memory for multiple generations has to do with that rare skill of his. He couldn't shield children, yet he could hold their hands enough in order to help us see the tough times through. This may be the heart of his achievement, yet is there more to it? Was there a positive aspect to his work that counteracted the bad?
I know very few things about the Lascaux Paintings. Very much in the same way that I know very little about life. All I know for certain is the impressions I get from looking at those ancient bits and pieces of artificial pigment and charcoal. I get the sense of a mind or a series of them in the process of discovering itself and the world around it. Like catching the first beginnings of human self-awareness. It's like you've caught a glimpse of someone who realized what it was like to remember something that has happened, or that they have seen either not too long ago, or else somewhere in the past. I've caught a passing glance at someone who's passed through here at some point in time, and has now moved on. I've found a collection of artists whose faces I'll never be able to see. All they've left behind are these trace elements of their own memories. Looking at it long enough puts me in mind of the basic gist of the opening prologue to an old, yet still famous play. It's from the chorus introduction from Shakespeare's Henry V. The basic idea the Bard was trying to get across was just this. There's no way I will ever be able to capture all of the history that I and others have seen. The best any of us can do is to try and leave a mark or message of some sort for others to find. Something to let the world know that I exist. That we existed, once upon a time. It's a meager offering to give at best, and still, at least we made it. Even a simple offering has got to amount to something over time, after all. Well doesn't it?
Conclusion: The Best Possible Chronicle of an American Essential.
The real punchline here is that I saw him perhaps just a handful of times when I was growing up. The same goes for
Sesame Street, if that's any consolation. I was a child of the 80s, born the year that George Orwell once made famous. Right about the same time that
Amadeus and the original
Terminator movie came out. My parents thought I was old enough for the former, yet I never saw the latter till way later on my own. Like a lot of 80s brats, my childhood counts as a peculiar and heady mixture of two dichotomous experiences. On the one hand, there was the kind of fodder that might be considered as more properly geared toward the Young Adult demographic that I was a part of back in the middle of that decade. This is where Fred, Big Bird, Kermit, and Oscar all came in. I don't think any childhood is complete without them, if I'm being honest. At the same time, and also like a lot of other kids growing up back then, these seemingly harmless bits of Saturday and Sunday morning fair were stationed together with such classic Trauma Fuel examples as
The Secret of Nimh,
Labyrinth, and
An American Tail. The last title on that list was among the first cartoons I can ever recall seeing, and it's remarkable how the initial impact left by the images of that film are still seared forever into my brain. Then I could turn right around in the same breath and watch Fred learn about a hip new video game called
Donkey Kong. The best part in retrospect is that
Keith David was right there with him. It was also my first exposure to the world of video games, and one its pioneer titles, for what it's worth
The clip enclosed above, along with that picture of X soaring above his competitors in a race to the finish line, still remains as perhaps the clearest memory I have of the Neighborhood. The only other clear recollection I have of him beyond that is when Mr. Rogers went on location to visit a petting zoo, and he sort of got nicked on the finger by the beak of an irascible penguin (and a pox on that bird, I say!). Beyond that, however...Sorry man. It's like there's almost next to nothing for me to go on. That's why one of the unexpected, yet very welcome benefits of Morgan Neville's documentary has been that's allowed me to retrace the steps into my past, in order to get re-acquainted with an aspect of my life that's been, not overlooked, or unrecalled. I can't even say that I ever lost track of him. It's more that I realized I had so little to remember him by. It means that Neville's efforts here have given me a second chance, of sorts. It's now possible to explore those parts of memory lain that have somehow fallen through the cracks in my mind. One of the things it's left me curious about is best summed up in the form of a question. How does someone like Fred Rogers come off looking in the eyes of 80s kids?
To be fair, I don't expect much in terms of any real difference from the way other generations have viewed him. It's just that growing up in an era dedicated to all things "gnarly", "radical", and even "tubular" does have a way of coloring the perceptions of both the entertainment we consumed as kids of that time, and of how that in turn shaped our outlook on the real world around us (whatever that's supposed to be). A lot of my peers can be found online lamenting how TV shows and films were a heck of a lot more impressive then they are now. I think part of the reason for that is down to an overlooked yet ubiquitous factor that characterized a lot of the entertainment we had back then. It really does seem to have been a time when there was a greater sense of Romanticism (in the literary-artistic sense of the term) in the artists who made the 80s their kind of shared golden age. It's where you get the heydays of Spielberg, Lucas, Henson, and Don Bluth. It's where you'll find
E.T.:
The Extra-Terrestrial, or you'll have a show like
Muppet Babies which goes out of its way to encourage the use of the Imagination. On the flip side, you have the Saturday morning debut of Garfield the Cat, who teaches kids an interesting subversive lesson about a lot of the phoniness of the adult world, and perhaps some inkling of how to try and avoid it.
Mister Rogers Neighborhood managed to make itself a part of all this shared artistry.
It's just such a strange dichotomy to think of, and yet the funny thing is the way in which Fred was able to hold his own in the midst of all this explosive, sometimes even epic and anarchic creativity. You want to known the funny thing I learned about how he did it? It all happened in response to a trend that was going on just before the 80s got its real start. There were a number of items in the newspapers (and yes, kids, they were a thing back then; I was there, I saw them, even held some of them in my own two hands on occasion) and these reports detailed a series of accounts that were happening to a number of local neighborhood kids. What was happening was you had these pre-teens, some of whom might have been no older than five, taking it upon themselves to be none other than Superman. They would run around their houses looking for anything that would serve as a cape. Which meant you had these little boys tying bathroom towels around their necks, climbing up to whatever they thought was a good height, taking an immediate leap, and then being introduced to a first-hand acquaintance with Newton's Law of Gravity the hard way. You had reports of kids doing this stuff in response to Christopher Reeves' big breakout role, and winding up in the hospital for it. Well Fred read up about this in the papers, and maybe he even caught it on the news, yet the result was still the same. It was one of the few times in his life when Mr. Rogers found himself having a genuine sense of anger and outrage.
He felt it was wrong and unethical for anyone, even those in his own chosen media of showbiz to do this to impressionable young minds, and he felt something had to be done. The real kicker here is that the Neighborhood had already been off the air for some time by the late 70s. Rogers felt he'd done enough by that point in terms of what he could do on television. So he'd hung up his sweaters, and gone back to the quiet life of a local community pastorship. Then Superman 78 is released in theaters, creating this ironic and sometimes literal fallout. It gets Mister Rogers mad enough that he decides then and there to go back to the Neighborhood and teach kids the values of learning the distinction between real and Make-Believe. The net result of his efforts was twofold. First, it resulted in the triumphant return of the Neighborhood to the small screen. It also created one of the few times in which Rogers' fans ever felt the need to create a kind of pushback against one of his messages. Superhero comics seemed to have already been enjoying the levels of fandom that has long since been recognized as the semi-official institution that it is now. Furthermore, Superman 78 was already enjoying the reputation it has managed to hold onto for all these years. It counts as one of the handful of late 1970s releases that served to help create and usher in the whole idea and ambience of 80s entertainment. It did so along with the likes of the original Star Wars, and Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
While it's clear he never meant to, it's still the fact that Fred's tirade was perceived as going a bit too far, at least in this one instance. The funny thing is how it all had a happy ending, with Rogers' and his show gaining a new level of publicity and popularity that he managed to ride with all the way up until the year 2001. I think the value of the
Superman incident is that it showed Fred that he could find ways of holding his own in the often off-the-wall nature of 80s entertainment. It meant that kids like me still knew we were dealing with a kindred spirit of sorts, no matter what his age. Apparently, this was just a gift that Rogers managed to cultivate into a genuine trait of his own, real-life character. Near the end of Neville's film, Fred's wife Joanne makes the claim that "He started out being Daniel, soft and quiet; shy. And he developed into King Friday". Now, it should be made clear that she knew the man better than any of us, perhaps. At the same time, it's like, I just never got the same vibe that she did from the show in its later years. If anything, the worst I can say about its development was that it kept to the same even and steady course while also rolling with the same level of changes that the Country was going to. As a result, it's left me with a very specific notion of the type of character Rogers became.
To me, the ultimate meaning of the host of
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is summed up by the kind of person its creator became, and what that personality symbolized. The funny thing is I didn't come into this article expecting to have to draw on the work of ancient philosopher's like Cicero, and yet one of that older guy's concepts just comes off as the best summation I can find for who Fred is, and what he embodies. The basic lesson, or meaning that Rogers embodied is best summed up by, of all people, a Classical scholar by the name of Michael G. Hawley, in his book on the legacy that Cicero has left to the modern era. There's a passage in that text where Hawley is able to neatly lay out which part of Cicero's thought coincides with what Fred was trying to accomplish with his little show that could. "Since
human beings are both body and mind", Hawley writes, "their goal must be the preservation
and development of both their bodily and mental faculties. For the former, this entails food, rest, shelter, health, and freedom from pain.
For the latter, this means the pursuit of virtue, which Cicero understands
as excellence of the mind (25)". It's what Hawley says next that creates a (to me) uncanny connection between the work of the famous Roman statesman and thinker, and the beloved children's show host.
"The germ of mental and moral excellence can be
seen in children’s innate love of knowledge and instinctive sense of gratitude, which show the naturalness of the virtues of wisdom and justice, respectively. Just as the mind is superior to the body, so, too,
is perfection of" what might be termed an outlook of ethical Humanism "more important than health or other elements of
bodily well- being". For human beings, such an outlook "all derived from these
first premises: that human beings ought to love and preserve themselves and
develop their capacities as far as their particular nature allows. Because they
exist under this law equally with all other rational creatures, there is a" to recycle an old cliche, a Common Welfare of Humanity. Human beings must respect the fact
that their fellows are co- citizens of the universal cosmopolis and also require
these goods. The consequence of this last realization provides us with extensive duties that" are ignored at our own peril (ibid). In The Good Neighbor, Max King details that Fred did have an interest in philosophy, in particular those coming from obscure thinkers like William Orr (117), or from celebrated experts in the field of child development, such as Erik Erickson (132). While it might not be a complete link between the work of the Neighborhood and the thought of Cicero, the fact that Rogers took an active interest in world philosophies means there is a certain level of ontological kinship between the statesman and the children's host on some level.
In particular, I'd argue that it was this devotion to an ethical Humanism that allowed Fred to become particular type of Ciceronian ideal. In his works, Cicero liked to speak of the Great Soul, or the Magnanimous Person as someone who is able to be a complete and healthy character. As another Classics scholar, Neal Wood, lays it out: "The individual of magnanimity (
magnanimitas), literally the
great-souled person, is the opposite of what we call the pusillanimous, and for the Romans, of one who is marked by
animus
timidus. The magnanimous individual is indifferent to external
circumstances, performing important and useful deeds that are
dangerous and arduous. To do so he must be free from passion
and consider moral worth to be the only good. He is fearless,
unmoved by desire for pleasure and riches, and displays both
moral and physical courage...Never vindictive toward enemies
or rivals, the magnanimous person refuses to succumb to anger,
always remaining calm and dispassionate. In times of prosperity
and good fortune, he avoids arrogance, haughtiness, and pride.
The higher he rises in society, the more humble he is. In retirement he manages his property honorably and honestly, increasing
it by wisdom, industry, and thrift, and he employs his possessions
generously and beneficently, eschewing all sensuality and excess.
Thereby he is able to live a life of magnificence, dignity, and
independence (101)". Now Fred may never have thought himself worthy of such titles.
Indeed, according to Joanne, one of the last conversations they ever had together as a couple boiled down to Fred wondering if he'd really been a good man this whole time. In answer to that question, I'm afraid all I can do is speak for myself. While self-doubt may have been Rogers' constant companion, for my own part, I fail to see how he didn't manage to leave at least some impact behind. There are a number of examples throughout his career that act as their own living and recorded testimonies to the kind of legacy he was able to leave behind. Four, in particular, stand out to me. Two of them came from the show itself, while the others demonstrate the kind of impact Fred left outside of the Neighborhood. Here, for instance, is a scene early in the show's broadcast history where
Mister Rogers and Officer Clemmons make a statement about the importance of Integration. Now, here they are at the series conclusion, in what what would be
Clemmons last ever appearance on the show. Within and without the confines of the program, Fred once had a quadriplegic boy named Jeff Erlanger on his show to teach children that there is no real difference, not just between races or orientations, but also that ableism is an incorrect way to treat people. A clip from
Erlanger's visit to the show can be seen in the documentary. And here we see
both men meeting up again several years down the road later. Just the look on Fred's face, and his entire reaction to meeting someone he considered an old friend says it all, really. The perfect irony might just come from the legacy he left on one of the show's crew members.
I've spoken before about how George A. Romero, the King of the Zompocalypse Pictures, was at one point in time, just a lowly camera operator and Indie filmmaker trying to jump start a career in movies for himself. Part of those years of apprenticeship included a stint working for the Neighborhood. Looking back on this point in time now, I can't help wondering if maybe it's possible that Mister Rogers was able to leave a positive impact on the guy who would go on to pioneer the future of Horror cinema. I set out with this article to write a review about Mister Rogers. So of course that means I somehow end up having to talk about an artist who works in the Horror genre. How obvious! Still, the more I think over the relation between Fred and George, I'm remined of something that a writer named Paul Gagne wrote in the pages of a book titled The Zombies that Ate Pittsburgh, which, again, is just the sort of thing "everyone expects" to hear of when talking about the Neighborhood. Aside from the fact this would make for a very interesting special episode of the series, there are these words that Gagne uses to describe the overall aesthetic outlook of Romero's cinema. What's amazing is that if you read it, you find yourself surprised over just how much it resonates with that whole Good Neighbor perspective that Rogers used as the template for just about everything he ever did. Gagne's description is as follows:
"First, in all of Romero’s films, there is a conflict
on some level between magic and reality. Romero’s “magic” encompasses myth, the mystical, and
the supernatural; on a deeper level, it
can be defined as romanticism, dealing with moral and ethical values and ideals. This is at its most obvious
in
Knightriders, with its troupe of idealists trying
to live by the moral and ethical code of King Arthur
in an age where commercialism and materialistic
values have run amok. “Reality” is seen as any
existing social order, lifestyle, or set of ideals (the
family, the American dream) from which “magic”
has been lost. “We’ve lost it in religion, we’ve
lost it in sex, we’ve lost it
even in our feelings
about a city like New York,” says Romero. “It’s
really gone and tarnished. We’re trying to operate
on a very realistic plane. I
find that to be a very
devastating thing as time goes on - you can't analyze it all. We’re not meant to operate that way.
You have to leave some room for emotion,
and you have to leave some room for love and
romance, or you’re not really complete, and you
find that you just want more (6)". Gagne then concludes, "Still,
there is a strong sense of hope in Romero’s films, and he always leaves the door to magic and romanticism open just a crack: “The underbelly in
my movies is the longing for a better world,
for a higher plane of existence, for people to get
together. I’m still singing these songs (ibid)".
It's a strange sentiment to find in a field that gets as much enjoyment from playing around with the darker aspects of life as the Horror genre. As Gagne's words clarify, this isn't just an idealistic stance, it's downright Romantic. If it weren't possible to trace a legitimate lineage for Gothic fiction, one that extends all the way back not just into the literature of poets like Coleridge, but also to the works of early modern Fantasy authors like Edmund Spenser, then the idea of Romero being a fan of Arthurian myths, of all things, might seem like a good case of cognitive dissonance. It probably still is so far as most of us are concerned today. The punchline is none of our reactions and reluctance changes the fact that the guy who made his name tearing the guts out of people also considered a film like
Knightriders to be his personal favorite out of all the films he's done. Now here's the real kicker. Go back and re-read what Gagne and Romero say about the meaning of his films, then see what happens when you pair it up with a moment in Neville's biography where Fred reflects that "In this Country, the child is appreciated for what he
will be. He
will be a great
consumer, someday. The quicker we can get them to go out and
buy, the better. There's so much of that in this Country". Again, as Romero says, there's just something about us, as a species, that can't seem to function well that way for very long. Sooner or later there's going to be any number of breakaways, all of them united in a continual search for something more.
I can't shake the idea that not only am I reading the words of two minds on more or less the same wavelength. It's also possible of being open to the idea that the Child's TV Educator might have a had a very definite shaping hand in guiding the way the future wunderkind of modern Horror approached and tackled the material of the genre. So, I guess this means that Mister Rogers is one of the unsung architects of the modern American Gothic? No offense, yet it would be real cool if was possible to prove this. That a lot of the morality of the genre as we now know it was given a certain amount of guidance from everyone's favorite Neighbor. All of which is to say that if you can't tell by now, I came away not just entertained, but also something in the way of an advocate for a film like this. Some pictures out there can surprise you with the realization that they need defending, and this is one of them. I came in to this review knowing it would also have to be something of a prose panegyric to the subject at the heart of this documentary. There may be some who will claim that this violates the rules of critical objectivity. To which I respond it can be the case, whenever the subject either acts in a less than exemplary fashion, or else proves that their public image is always less than how they appear.
The problem with applying this criteria to someone like Fred Rogers is that he's one of those thornsome individuals who just won't cooperate if it's skeletons in the closet that you're looking for. Like I said near the start. This could very well have been the kind of man he became. He had one of those childhoods where even if it can't be described as abusive or neglectful, there were still enough obstacles about it that it could have molded him into something other than what we got. The punchline there is that such a version of this less than stellar type of character would never have produced a
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Hell, he probably wouldn't have been either in showbusiness, or the clergy. There was just too much of this up-front personal style to everything he ever did, that even if he let his experiences turn him into a black sheep, he still would have kept to this kind straightforward, from Point A to Zero approach to how he handled it all. It means there's a very poor chance that a version of Rogers who never became the Good Neighbor would also have had very little interest in the welfare of children, and hence no desire whatsoever to go out there in front of the cameras and do his best to give kids a voice. It's difficult to imagine what that kind of a world would have been like. The one thing I can say is that it's most likely none of us would ever be aware that this Fred Rogers ever existed.
He would have been so anti-social that he wouldn't even register as a blip on the radar. That's how much of a difference a negative version of this guy would have been like. The good news is that none of the worst case scenarios ever came about. There was perhaps a short window of time which such an negative event could have made just the wrong sort of impact on the artist as a young child, so that all his creativity would be stifled in the crib, so to speak. I think it must say at least something that Fred got to receive some of the the best possible encouragement from his parents and others that he was able to either conquer or fight off whatever demons life might have tried to give him, considering just how well he turned out. In fact, it seems to have been some level of understanding born from the success of his struggle that seems to have left him with a lifelong understanding of what it's like to listen to your fears, and also how to best them, that allowed him to bring these skills to the table as an entertainer for kids. It really seems to have all gone together to mold him into the best possible character that any of us can probably ever have. Even so, as the documentary itself admits, it says a lot about where our collective head is at so that even today, you still get voices in the audience wondering if the guy really was as much of a class act as he presented himself? Hell, a real funny behind-the-scenes detail is that the director, Morgan Neville, himself thought the same way once upon a time.
His initial premise going in to the making of this documentary was to be as thorough as possible in digging up all the details that would, in fact, help to prove that Mister Rogers wasn't the best possible neighbor out there. The director meant to demonstrate that there were enough skeletons in the guy's closet to prove he could never live up to his own hype. So Neville went pouring through all the testimony and documentation of both the living and the dead in order to prove his thesis. The net result is what his project ultimately turned into, against his wishes, by his own admission. He discovered that there was a moment in time in which such a portrait of the artist could have come to pass, yet it never did. He discovered that Fred Rogers was a man with a clear understanding how the act of being bullied could turn one into a bully. However this was a realization the artists seems to have latched onto an ironic, yet very useful anchor, and he let that turn him into pretty much the exact opposite of the worst case scenario. It was this discovery that lead Neville to the conclusion that the only thing left to do was to turn his expose into a celebration of the life and achievements of one of the most famous names in the history of children's entertainment. Rogers turns out to have been one of the few genuine articles.
He really does seem to have been what I've described as a living exemplification of Cicero's Magnanimous Individual, the best possible result of dedicating oneself to Humanism in terms of both conduct and learning. My hope is that this doesn't make him as much of a rara avis as many seem to think. What I know can't, or shouldn't be disputed, is that this documentary will have to stand as perhaps the best cinematic tribute to America' best loved Neighbor. A friend from a while back once described his reactions to this flick with a gif of someone blubbering like there was no tomorrow. After having viewed this film for myself, I can at least understand what he was talking about. I don't recall blubbering at any point, though I do remember getting misty-eyed here and there. What I recall most from watching Neville's documentary is that it put me in mind of the nature of human achievement. It made me think of things like the Lascaux Cave Paintings, and the anonymous set of artists who have given the human species their earliest known examples of artistic self-expression. For me, Neville's film about Rogers efforts with television just created a link in my mind between those ancient painters, and of one man's lifelong efforts to encourage empathy, curiosity, and creativity in the youth of this Nation. Those cave paintings are one group's attempt at self-discovery. An effort to let the world know that they were here, and that their efforts mattered. That they knew what it was like to try and live.
That seems to be the best final summary of what Rogers was trying to do with his show. He wanted, not just children, but all of his viewers to discover the possible way any of us knew for how to live. Like Cicero, he seems to have realized that we all live in one grand, expansive cosmopolis. A Neighborhood which has to be shared by all. Like the Lascaux Artists, he also realized that being human meant the need to prove that our existence matters on some level, and so he encouraged us all to find out what that inner spark of life means on both an individual and collective basis. The best thing, in my mind, about Morgan Neville's documentary is that it suggests all of these things. It showcases not just Rogers' accomplishments as an artist, but it uses these demonstrations to hint at the larger themes and implications that his work carries even for generations that continue to find his work long since his passing. It's for all of these reasons that I'm, not just happy, but also somewhat relieved to be able to say that
Won't You Be My Neighbor is one of those essential film's that everyone should watch time and again. With any luck, it's sort of picture that shows what it means to be a decent human being.
No comments:
Post a Comment