There have been any number of ways that we have faced the terrible condition of modernity. The mechanisation and reproduction of life came as blunt trauma to the workers expected to live it. In response, slowly, an entertainment and culture that matched the nature of automation emerged. First the moving film, a production line of images, then Chaplin, a ruthless humanist critique, the rogue tramp as the last abject subject adrift in the alienating city. The speed of machines embracing Futurism, powering full horse-power across Europe, dragging the dead of war into their slipstream. The Freudian unconscious pulled manifest from the couch, the reaction of Surrealism to the terrifying soft undercarriage of modern humans that threatened to break through. The nightmare of communication, every increasing, the gap between synapse click and intercontinental auditory recognition reduced to an instant. The city an endless churning mass of human bodies, eating, screwing and excreting amongst each other, and the recurrent sight of the dead body sprawled across the bed, from Walter Sickert to Patricia Highsmith — naked lust and madness as the city’s own orphans. And the rage of it all, the furious, blind, anonymous rage, the miasma of offense and paranoia, all coming to a head in typeset words splashed across a syndicated edition, a manic and unprovoked attack on your good name, the newspaper itself taunting you, the words: I hate Frasier Crane.
Frasier doesn’t even know the man, the columnist, Derek Mann, whose living is criticism, the wilful attack on those who do by those who can’t. But such is modern life — a constant friction of the anonymous, a paranoia that everything could come down around you. In I Hate Frasier Crane, the early budding of a social anxiety around reputation rears its head, an anxiety that would flourish as opinion in all its ugly forms became the beating heart of the internet. Here, in ink, it’s all analogue, as is Frasier’s response across the radio. There’s only one way to solve a war of words — fists. They arrange a fight outside Cafe Nervosa, the Crane’s favourite coffee place. Put ‘em up, these two men made famous by words, and lay down blood on the pavement to prove right from wrong.
Back to the Surrealists. The only good ones are the ones they threw out, and Antonin Artaud was no different. A provocative avant-garde theatremaker, he was influenced by the pioneer of absurdism, Alfred Jarry, and founded a theatre company in his name. He went on the develop his own distinctive take on the potential of theatrical productions, and on the nature of performance itself. Like Brecht, he attacked the bourgeois vision of theatre as a passive experience for the viewer, who was separated from the action by the conceit of a “fourth wall”. The proscenium arch of the theatre was a frame of the theatre makers craft, but also a conceptual barrier which divided life from art. No more, said Artaud. It’s time to put up fists with your audience.
While Brecht sought to remove that barrier by means of radical didacticism, highlighting the constructed nature of the performance and the material base of society, Artaud instead removed it by the destruction of a traditional armistice between the actors and their audience. Theatre had become tied up in psychology, in language — so many plays about so many heartaches in so many drawing rooms. Instead, he argued, we must return it to the gesture, to a more basic form of ritual around images and bodies. Like many interwar European artists, his work involved a crude but productive appropriation of non-Western artforms: in Artaud’s case, the theatre of Bali, in which he chose to see a theatre which held deeper, more esoteric truths in its gestures. In his vision of a new theatre, words become phonics, movements regain meaning. He called his ideology a “Theatre of Cruelty” — a cruelty not necessarily oy physical violence but of metaphysical terror, stripping away the cosy untruths of language. Like the bloody entertainments of Ancient Rome, he felt that performance of horror played an important social role in channelling the violence subconscious urges of humans, and that "the theatre has been created to drain abscesses collectively."
Frasier and Derek Mann intend to play out their intellectual disagreement — an utterly meaningless one, a provocation without content, a barb for barb’s sake — in the theatre of violence. Bring out the mariachi band. Words are insufficient — the true nature of their relationship must play out in broken bones. For Frasier, the fight is nothing less than a rerun of his childhood trauma, a chance of redemption through violence. He enters the crowd, hounding for blood, ready to strike his blow.
Frasier’s chance at an Artaudian reckoning with society’s desire to see people rip each other apart, in words or deed, is broken by the manipulation of Martin. Having put Frasier up to the fight in order to placate his own gendered insecurities about his sons (and their clarinet lessons), he then calls his buddies down at the police station to break it up before Frasier is hurt — light-hearted police corruption is a running theme of the sitcom. Here we see the deeper ritual of violence in which Artaud lives on — in the ideology of the cop, who has mythologised themself into the thin blue line between order and chaos, the citizen extraordinaire who acts as the needle that drains the social abscess, who ritualistically metes out violence and cruelty in order, he claims, to prevent society indulging in violence and cruelty. Frasier as pure copaganda. After the fight, Martin no doubt returns to his hobby: poring over his private collection of lurid crime scene photographs, ever fascinated by the dark violence he believes he shields the world from.
Check out more of my writing at utopian drivel.