Can You Say "Feminist?"

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

                           -William Wordsworth

One of the most enjoyable parts of this gap year is the fact that I have more time to go to the movies than ever before. Even when we were in Italy, Matt and I went to see O.V. (Original Version) movies with Italian subtitles, like Joker and The Irishman. So one of the first things we did when we came back to Detroit was to go to the movies and see Won’t You Be My Neighbor? the fictionalized account, based on a true story, of Mr. Rogers’ encounter with the cynical journalist from Esquire magazine who wrote a story about him.

The film may be “based” on a true story, but the plot is actually more fiction than fact. The cynical journalist, named Lloyd Vogel in the movie and played by Matthew Rhys, is based on real-life journalist Tom Junod, who wrote the 1998 piece titled “Can You Say…Hero?” for Esquire. The reality ends pretty much there. In the film, Lloyd Vogel is a “broken” person, unable to handle his feelings of anger, unable to bond with his newborn son, losing himself more and more in workaholism. When the movie begins, we see Mr. Rogers showing a picture of Lloyd to his viewers – Lloyd has an injured face that wears a dazed expression, because he has just gotten into a fight with his father at his sister’s (third) wedding. Lloyd and his father are estranged; Lloyd is unable to forgive his father for abandoning his children and his dying wife, Lloyd’s mother.  Lloyd has unresolved feelings of fear, shame, hurt, and anger, which Mr. Rogers, over the course of the film, helps him start to resolve.

“What do you do with the mad that you feel?” asks Mr. Rogers in a song. Lloyd has never known what to do with the “mad,” or the “scared” that is at the root of the anger. Most men (and women, frankly) in our capitalist patriarchy have never known what to do with this, or any, emotion. “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence towards women,” writes bell hooks in her book,  The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. “Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”  After a few encounters with Mr. Rogers, including some bizarre and hilarious dream sequences in which Lloyd inhabits the Neighborhood of Make-Believe as his childhood toy, Old Rabbit, Lloyd is able to admit to his wife that his anger is a mask for fear, the fear of losing the people he loves most, especially his wife and son.  This “mask” of masculinity, the creation of a false macho persona that boys learn from early childhood, is something that Mr. Rogers utterly rejects. At one point in the film, Lloyd says something like, “Well, there’s Mr. Rogers…and then there’s you, the real you, right?” Mr. Rogers just looks blankly at him; he is the embodiment of wholeness, of integrity; the on-screen, public Mr. Rogers is the genuine man, the “real” Mr. Rogers, which is one of the reasons Mr. Rogers can be called a hero. In the words of bell hooks, “The quest for integrity is the heroic journey that can heal the masculinity crisis and prepare the hearts of men to give and receive love.”

Dr. William Pollack, a psychologist in The Mask You Live In, a documentary about the devastating harm created by American masculinity and patriarchy, explains: “The way boys are brought up makes them hide all their natural, vulnerable, empathetic feelings behind a mask of masculinity. When they’re most in pain, they can’t reach out and ask for help because they’re not allowed to.” From Mr. Rogers, Lloyd learns to lean into his vulnerable feelings and ask for help. bell hooks believes that “Men cannot speak their pain in patriarchal culture.”  In choosing to become emotionally aware and speak to his wife about his pain, Lloyd rediscovers the path to love and starts to dismantle the internalized patriarchy that has prevented him from healing.

According to hooks, feminist men can engage in parenting in a way in which their own fathers could not. “Parenting remains a setting where men can practice love as they let go of a dominator model and engage mutually with women who parent with them the children they share.” In one of the most poignant and most powerfully anti-patriarchal scenes in the film, Lloyd gets up in the middle of the night with his infant son, allowing his wife to stay asleep. As he looks into his baby’s face, he sings him a Mr. Rogers song: “I like you as you are/exactly and precisely/I think you turned out nicely/I like you as you are.” Lloyd is learning to teach his son, in the words of bell hooks, “To know from birth that simply being gives [him] value, the right to be cherished and loved.” Mr. Rogers teaches this profound spiritual truth in just about every one of his shows.

Lloyd’s ailing father, sleeping in the next room, hears the singing and calls Lloyd to him. “You know,” he says to Lloyd as he tenderly touches his grandson’s foot, “I never did that kind of thing when you were little. That mom thing.”  Lloyd immediately replies, “It’s not a mom thing.” Indeed, by the end of the film, Lloyd has decided to take a few months off work to stay home with  his child. “Feminist masculinity offers men a way to reconnect with selfhood, uncovering the essential goodness of maleness and allowing everyone, male and female, to find glory in loving manhood.” Thanks to Fred Rogers’ example of feminist masculinity, Lloyd forgives his father, learns to love his son, and most importantly, reconnects with himself.

“Enlightened men,” concludes hooks, “must claim mass media as the space of their public voice and create a progressive popular culture that will teach men how to connect with others, how to communicate, how to love.” As we drove home in the car, Matt and I racked our brains to try to think of any male role models in popular culture who do this. The only one we could think of (aside from Mr. Rogers) was Tom Hanks himself. His films are often about the best forms of masculinity. Even his war movie, Saving Private Ryan, is not about blowing away the bad guys – it’s about strength that comes from the capacity to be responsible for self and others: loyalty, honor, and friendship. “This strength,” according to hooks, “is a trait males and females need to possess.”

For, hooks reminds us, “The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. In patriarchal culture women are as violent as men toward the groups that they have power over and can dominate freely.” Mr. Rogers, in serving as a feminist role model for both men and women, has something to teach all of us. His song, “What Do You Do With The Mad That You Feel?” ends this way: “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.”