1.23 Frasier Crane's Day Off

Good? The little rat is scintillating!

For the past week my beloved cat, Fauno, has been coming into the bedroom an hour or two before my alarm goes off. I think he takes after me, in that while he thrives on routine (for me, my morning coffee and crossword, for him, his daily bowl of wet food) he also moves through disruptive moods. For a couple of weeks, he’ll come into the bed as soon as the light turns off at bedtime. Then, for a few weeks, he’ll eschew the bedroom altogether at night, tucking himself up on the couch, or perhaps he’ll come in at 3am for a play, then leave. But for these weeks, he’s arrived at dawn not to curl up, but rather to walk all over me. I awake suddenly, feeling a weight on my chest (he’s a big boy). As a result, each day has started for me with disturbing dreams; planes crashing and ferries sinking (recurring themes for me), being trapped in country houses or sprawling student squats, difficult conversations with people I don’t like, and the ever-present weird erotic. In one, I attempted to meet a new therapist, a 25 year old Dark Enlightenment nerd-bully who was also Carl Jung, whose unpleasant personality turned me off so much I left the restaurant and walked out into the cold night of Edinburgh’s red light district. Then, suddenly awake, in those moments where both dream and reality are real, I see his adorable little face looking down at me, his eyes enormous in the darkness, his expression sweet and pleading, as if to say “Breakfast? Breakfast, Dad?”

I’m reminded of the wonderful 1781 painting by Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, an early Gothic masterpiece depicting a malevolent incubus squatting atop the torso of a sleeping woman while, from behind a curtain, a terrified horse looks on. The painting is replete with allusions, to the paranormal (a mare is, in the Germanic folk tradition, a creature who delivers bad dreams while his victims are sleeping), to the vivid, disorienting nature of dreams themselves (something Fuseli experienced frequently, and a subject to which he returned throughout his career) and, of course, to sex. The Nightmare is a Freudian’s dream, so to speak, with the incubus seen as an external fear that induces erotic dreams, while the horse, well, that’s a whole other thing. In his case study “Little Hans,” about a small boy who had a terrifying fear of horses, Freud postulated that, for a child nursing an Oedipal complex, the horse, with its strength and its large cock, represented the terrifying figure of the father threatening to withdraw his sexual access to, and affections of, his own mother. However, as Niles says in this episode: “I should warn you that while Frasier is a Freudian, I am a Jungian. So there'll be no blaming Mother today!”

That’s because Niles has taken over Frasier’s radio show. Frasier has fallen ill with flu; at first, the fragrant Gil Chesterton, KACL’s restaurant critic, has taken over his spot as a locum. Gil deserves his own essay, which no doubt he will get eventually, because he’s a mass of contradictions, depicted as a closeted gay who sometimes seems accepting of his sexuality, while at others bristles at the insinuation that his marriage to his wife, Deb, is a lavender one. He’s an American who speaks with an affected British public school accent, a snob and a bon viveur all in one, a friend and a traitor. This early in the show, he’s certainly a malignant presence, and Frasier is rightly suspicious that Gil is trying to steal his slot. To scupper his plan, Frasier asks Niles to host his show instead, suspecting that his lack of charisma will leave the station managers eager for his return. At first, the plan works perfectly; Niles resorts to dry analysis and tedious historiography. After a few days, however, he’s soon on form, delivering gripping, heart-breaking radio. From his gripped by flu, Frasier is delirious with both anxiety and illness, and is haunted by a dream in which, watched over my Gil and Niles, he quite literally detonates his own career in the radio booth.

It’s fitting that Niles is a Jungian. According to Carl Jung, and counter to Freud, the horse is a mother archetype, joining together with child as rider to make a dynamic whole. But a horse can also represent primitive, untameable passions, and this is what overtakes Frasier in the ecstatic, delirious dreams of sickness. Driven by instinct and propper up by a good batch of prescription medication he’s prescribed himself, he returns to KACL to reclaim his throne. Dreams are to feature in many future episodes of Frasier, fittingly for a show about a Freudian, but so too is this sort of delinquent Shakespearen madness that Frasier can fall into when an uncontrollable libidinal urge overwhelms him. While farce is one important antecedent of the show -- the inevitable unwinding of consequences that race ahead of the protagonist -- so too is a more lusty energy driven by a desire unleashed. If Frasier and Niles were merely buffoonish prigs or incompetent snobs, the show would be limited in its depths; it’s the fact that both are frequently overcome with amorous or sexual potency that derails their best intentions that makes the characters, to me, so damn compelling and human. They play both Romeo and Malvolio, Falstaff and Iago. In that way, the show is Freudian, balancing the competing mechanisms of the id, the ego and the superego within its major characters.

Raised from his bed by his terrors, Frasier appears as King Lear wandering on the heath, deposed, babbling and incomprehensible, when he returns to the station and locks Niles and Roz out of the studio. His usual balance is tipped, and his passions unloosed. Having hijacked the airwaves, high as a kite, he delivers a rambling show with his usual self-control removed. “Boring!” he declares one caller's problems, while with another he indulges with roleplaying for his own amusement, before security finally remove him from the building on his wheely chair, laughing and gurgling with excitement. Niles describes his childlike state as “inspired lunacy”; a better description of Lear’s madness would be hard to find. Once home, he again calls for care and nurturing from the long suffering Daphne, here in role as a wily Shakespearean servant. “Daphne! I had another dream!” Frasier calls, imagining his inspired lunacy as another figment of the Mare upon his chest. Daphne, sick of his constant precious man flu demands, decides to wait until morning, when he’s nice and lucid, to inform him of the terrible waking reality: that some nightmares are living. Perhaps this is Fuseli’s point, just as it was Shakespeare’s and Freud’s: the curtain between the sleeping and waking, between fiction and reality, between what could be and what is, is thin, and ready to be pulled open by that libidinal, unleashed horse, our own desire.

Check out more of my writing at Huw Lemmey’s Utopian Drivel