Communication, The Neighborhood and White Elephants
by Bonnie Schultz
***SPOILERS WITHIN***
My husband and I recently saw A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). If you haven’t seen the movie, beware, this article contains spoilers!
Early in the film, Mr. Rogers introduces his friend Lloyd who is having a hard time forgiving someone who has hurt him. Rogers tells him, “It’s strange but sometimes it’s hardest to forgive someone we love.” The someone Lloyd has not forgiven, is his dad.
Lloyd is a journalist assigned to interview Mr. Rogers. Lloyd thinks this is a simple assignment, beneath his dignity. But as the interviews progress he makes observations of the show and while researching previous interviews of Fred Rogers, he begins to see the complexity and relevancy of what Rogers is trying to do in his children’s show.
We learn, along with Lloyd, the importance of emotions to relationships. Learning positive ways to express destructive emotions is important because they can block relationships. Isolate us. Hurt others and ourselves.
Rogers asks, “Have you ever felt like Lloyd does? So angry you want to hurt someone else or yourself? I know I have.”This is why in Mr. Roger’s neighborhood they’re “trying to give children positive ways to deal with their feelings.”
We learn that Mr. Rogers thinks “the most important thing we can do is let people know that each one of them is precious.”
After seeing the movie and attempting to analyze its teaching points, I awoke the next morning realizing what was so powerful about this movie, and about the Neighborhood.
At the end of A Beautiful Day, Lloyd is changed. His relationships are better. He was able to change because he found someone, he found a community of people if you will, who showed him how, who lived relationship out with him.
The transformation happens when he, in dreamlike fashion, enters into the neighborhood as the character of Daniel Tiger with his father, dressed as Mr. McFeely. Here he receives from others a safe place to acknowledge his own inner response to his relational experiences. Lloyd awakens from this surreal experience the next morning, by a phone call from Mr. Rogers, inviting Lloyd to join him on another show and to talk more with him. Mr. Rogers pursues a relationship with Lloyd. He let him know he is valued, loved.
Lloyd also meets Joanne, Mr. Roger’s wife. We learn from her that Fred Rogers is not a perfect person. But that he PRACTICES things that help him live well relationally. “He reads scripture, he swims laps. He prays for people by name. He writes letters - hundreds of them. He has been doing that since I met him,” she says.
Fred Rogers. Photo courtesy of CommonsWikimedia.com.
Mr. Rogers sees himself as human too. He is not surprised that people struggle, “No one lives this life without pain and problems.” No one is a broken person or less than, because they struggle with overwhelming feelings.
In the neighborhood, Daniel and Lady Aberlin explore what to do with the mad that you feel. They sing,
What do you do with the mad that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite.
They offer possibilities for how to constructively defuse the anger,
Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you load up friends for a game of tag or see how fast you go?
As Lloyd listens he is overwhelmed. He needed this before his recent physical fight with his dad, from which he is still sporting bruises on his face. Lloyd continues to struggle with his feelings as he encounters his father again, and in a medical crisis that brings things to a point of decision. To stay or to run? In his running, Lloyd runs to Mr. Rogers and the Neighborhood.
I studied relationships during much of my earlier years trying to fix mine and tell others how to fix theirs, without much success. But when I enter into relationships where I can practice positive relating, then I begin to change.
Fortunately, I married someone who has loved and accepted me over many years, where it became safe to acknowledge my emotions. I have been part of church groups where I received additional redemptive relational practice. I participated last year in a Journey Group through Deeper Walk International, intentionally practicing relational skills. Through these, I and my relationships are being transformed.
Relationships can be healed. Yet, relationships can only be healed as the individuals in them are healed. The individuals in them can only be healed through relationship.
Recent brain research substantiates our relational design and the process of our relational development. I have benefitted from the research and work of Dr. Jim Wilder who studied under Dr. Allan Schore, a medical professor at UCLA.
Life Model Works logo. Logo courtesy of Lifemodelworks/facebook.
Several separate organizations have grown out of Dr. Wilder’s work and in collaboration with him: Life Model Works, Thrive Today and Deeper Walk International. Each of these seeks to explain how we were made to function relationally, offering hope for emotional trauma and relationship restoration.
Michael Sullivant, CEO at Life Model Works, promoting a relational revolution, (see Twitter #Relationalrevolution) encourages his audience to see A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. He describes the movie succinctly this way, “God used him (Fred Rogers) and his style of relating to help transform an adversarial journalist into a bonded friend.”
We live in a world full of relational conflict. Religion itself defined as a system of right moral practice hasn’t always enhanced our relationships, processed only intellectually, in our left brain. We need our whole brain to experience the truth in relationship with God and others. God said the first two and most important of His instructions are to love; to first love God and then to love others. (Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27. What we need is to know someone who knows how (Jesus knew how) and people who know how (His followers) in order to be changed.
Transforming Fellowship cover. Photo courtesy of Amazon.com.
Chris Coursey’s book Transforming Fellowship…19 Brain Skills that Build Joyful Community, says we can’t become relational without love, but we also need skills. We need a retrained, rewired brain, and that will not happen in isolation.
Look, for comparison, at Ernest Hemingway’s story, “Hills Like White Elephants.” Reading it, I attempted to analyze the relationship dynamics between the man and the girl.
Cover of 2018 edition of “Hills Like White Elephants.” Photo courtesy of Goodreads.com.
I found a lot of relational errors; each denying and dismissing their own and the other’s feelings; fear that their relationship would change, fear that it wouldn’t. When defensive responses were triggered, in order to avoid more conflict, these were not pursued. There is blaming, minimizing the other’s concerns. There is denial that something will change, regardless of the decision they make. “We’ll be fine. Just like before.”
The truth is that things must change after a crisis. There are things that happen in our lives that draw the line between before and after. Choices we make lead us closer to each other or farther away, closer to life or closer to the death of a relationship. This is serious stuff, we now realize. Life and death.
The man and the girl love each other to some degree; he will stay with her, he says. He doesn’t want her to do something she doesn’t want to do- just for him. He wants her to know what she wants is important. He wants her to feel better. But again, sometimes love is not enough. Or sometimes, there is not enough love.
As my friend Mia once said, “The crux of the matter seems to be how to help others value their partners above themselves.” Philippians 2:3-4
Hemmingway’s Iceberg Theory. Photo courtesy of The Vienna Psychoanalyist.com.
There is much going on below the surface in this story. Hemingway’s style of writing, based on his iceberg theory, posits that not all of the details should be obvious in the writing: invite the reader to discover what is below the surface. Even without current brain science, Hemingway saw how effective storytelling this way could be. And it seems to me there is a lot below the surface in our emotional life that we can discover with a deeper look.
Had the girl been able to “see beneath the surface” to the man’s fear, she could have acknowledged his fear and allowed it. I can hear Mr. Roger’s comforting voice, “You must be feeling afraid of this and that’s okay.”
But the girl couldn’t say that. She has her own big feelings, also under the surface; desires for a deeper relationship, to keep the baby and still love each other, to be a mother, something she had wanted for a long time. The truth, she wants to be loved unconditionally.
The story ends with no resolution to the problem. The future of their relationship is unclear. How might things have turned out if they had the skills to relate better? If they had others who knew how to live more relationally who could show them how? A neighborhood, where others could join them in their scary feelings, and face them unafraid?
Will you join me in pursuing emotional health and the relational revolution?
Cover photo by Richard Jacobs on Unsplash.
Resources
We’ve created a free downloadable PDF to explore the article deeper. It contains discussion questions about the topic in general terms that will give you a jumping-off point for beginning a conversation.
The second page contains a way to see the topic from a biblical perspective.
And finally, to go deeper into the subject, we have chosen a few curated resources to explore from other authors’ and thinkers’ research or perspectives.
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