A spy across a city, across the cavernous gulfs that make the city streets, modern canyons carved from concrete and air, each hiding a thousand glass caves. Stacked atop each other, our hermits’ chambers face out to each other, and yet up here in the sky, we maintain a fiction of invisibility. I watch from the window as I type these words, across to the apartments a block away. A neighbour, whom we call Good Pete Buttigeig, walks in his boxer shorts around the house, airing out his linen on his balcony as he does, obsessively, every morning. He is short with dark hair, his face from a distance resembling the erstwhile presidential candidate, and he lives with his boyfriend, whose own gay nueroses manifest not in aired linen but in sparkling windows. No doubt they can see into our flat too, devoid of lavender-scented bedsheets through spotless glass, and watch us lounging in our underwear too, battling in futility against the summer’s merciless heat.
City-dwellers make a pact of not-seeing. I know Good Pete can see us, and he knows we can see him. Yet we turn our head when our glances meet, a pantomime gesture at 200 yards. Yet it would be a strange person indeed in a modern world who ignores the stories the city lays on through the open windows of neighbours. Traditionally the Dutch were said to eschew curtains, a Calvinist statement that nothing that happens in their home necessitates hiding in shame. But the Dutch living rooms open to the street were part of small homes; in larger cities, a new rule of not caring applies. The anonymity of scale protects us from shame just as it isolates us in loneliness. When Frasier buys Martin a telescope to look from the balcony window into the rooms of apartments surrounding Elliot Bay Towers, the condo building in which they live, he is relying upon the same prurient urge we all share to break that pact. “There are a million stories in the Naked City,” says Frasier, paraphrasing the opening of the mid-century cop show of the same name, “now if we could just find a naked one…”
Naked City only ran for a few seasons in the late 50s and early 60s. Its noir aesthetic and semi-documentary style, nonetheless fitted within a model of tv norms from the time, gives the show an unmistakable, uncanny atmosphere of painful, loaded silences, hard-nosed detectives talking from the sides of their mouths, and deep and melancholic stares. Shot on location — a novelty at the time — and featuring a lot of young actors deeply enamored with the method acting technique, which was reaching prominence at the time thanks to the efforts of director and practitioner Lee Strasberg, it helped break the careers of a new generation of young actors, giving early roles to everyone from Dustin Hoffman to Christopher Walken, Gene Hackman to Sandy Dennis. It provided an early TV role for Robert Redford, whose smouldering portrayal of a young neo-nazi in this 1961 episode gives a taste of the show’s intensity and drama.
The show began each episode with a shaky aerial shot over mid-century New York, whose towering buildings seem to emit the same aura of anomie, social dislocation and disorder, that the show portrays. As Frasier and Martin monitor their neighbour’s lives, they seem to pick up the same isolation. Frasier is a strange companion piece to Cheers, the show from which it span off. Cheers takes as its subjects a series of individuals who are perhaps alone or lonely in a big city, and brought them together around a bar. It’s about a group of people who choose to look inwards towards each other, to create a new family. Frasier, on the other hand, locates itself firmly within a family unit already, with its characters looking out to the city, normally in a futile attempt to find the love that a family can’t offer. In Here’s Looking at You, that manifests literally; Martin spots a woman who is doing the same thing, and via their telescopes and a pad of paper, they begin a medium-distance communication between tower blocks. They spark up a fast friendship, sharing life stories and interests, yet when Frasier attempts to initiate in-person contact via a phone call, Martin rebuffs the opportunity to meet the woman, Irene. Despite their correspondence, the physical gap allows them to maintain an emotional distance, a chance for Martin to hide his own insecurities — in this case, his need to use a walking stick.
Cities, ironically, allow for isolation, for protective distance. In her book The Lonely City, Olivia Laing recounts her own experience of the gap that Martin is experiencing, writing:
The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can’t reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in almost any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure… One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation.
Despite the proximity of his immediate family, it becomes clear even early in the show that Martin’s injury and his widowhood have combined to make an elderly man who is uncertain with his future, and hence his sense of self. Has he started his inexorable decline towards death, or is there the possibility of a rebirth in his later years? Perhaps in such circumstances, the family, a legacy of his past life which has come together to offer him physical support, is not enough. He wants independence, and independence requires emotional liberty, a freedom that requires, quite ironically, a little privacy. He decides to go on the date, after all.
Check out my non-Frasier writing at utopian drivel.