The curse of us fickle beasts: we are social animals, bent towards the touch and voice of our fellows but struck forever in horror at their abject ways. They look too much like us, sound too much like us. Like a domestic animal, we recoil in horror at ourselves mirrored. We suffer a fundamental alienation, seeing ourselves in the mirror as something, something that is other to us. Worse: we exist.
As the first series begins, the cataclysm of care has returned to Frasier’s life, perhaps absent since childhood. He is used to living a solitary life, complete with little morning rituals that he needs to adjust himself to the day. He is, in common parlance, “not a morning person”. Suddenly, that routine is changed; Martin has cooked him a breakfast, Daphne added eggshells to his expensive coffee, and his newspaper has been opened and read.
I know how he feels. I too am “not a morning person”. We have, as a culture, developed a shared language for what someone means when they say this. The implication is they’re simply more suited to the night, yet the constraints of capitalist society force us into the disciplined hours of a shared productive life. The standardisation of working hours, necessary for an industry of mass-production, has created “the morning person”. In Frasier’s mind, however, this is less “work” than a crypto-spiritual vocation: he must have his morning routine, or the equilibrium of the emotional universe will be tipped on in its axis. He tells Martin and Daphne, his father’s personal care assistant, that:
“I have to ease into my day slowly. First I have my coffee… then I have a low-fat, high-fibre breakfast. Finally I sit down and read a crisp, new newspaper. If I am robbed of the richness of my morning routine, I cannot function, my radio show suffers, and, like ripples in a pond, so do the many listeners that rely upon my advice to help them through their troubled lives. I’m sorry if this may sound priggish, but I have grown comfortable with this part of myself. It is the magic that is me.”
Of course, he can wrap it up in metaphysics, but the problem is not that someone has prepared his breakfast or fetched his newspaper. You cannot placate a man who craves solitude. Frasier’s problem is he has come face-to-face with the horror of a social existence. From the happy sleep of the conscious, he has woken to be presented with the mirror of himself in other humans. When I tell my partner that I “need space” and am “not a morning person”, I too pretend that it just takes me a little time to slough the sleep from my eyes — but in reality, it takes me a little time to come to terms with the terrible truth of existence. Alone, such a task is easier; observed, it is a cruel transition for the sensitive. Martin’s right: we are both a “hothouse little orchid”.
It is Eddie, the dog, who breaks him — removed of the need to maintain the sense of being a considerate person, Eddie allows Frasier to reveal his true nature. When Eddie stares, Frasier cannot help but stare at himself. It’s not the presence of others Frasier hates: it’s the awareness of himself that they create. And so, the show Frasier begins its heady ascendence towards the purpose of its first season: a catalogue of modern neuroses, the avoidance of which will land our hero in an endless, almost Sisyphean series of entanglements. Confrontation will always be Crane’s weak point, because to confront the other, one must simultaneously confront the self.
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