Still from Frasier.
The old Frasier show is one of my all-time favorite sitcoms. Not only are the writing, casting, and acting superb, the show routinely addresses profound philosophical issues. Episode 2 of season 10, “Enemy at the Gate,” opens with Niles and Frasier on their way to a shopping mall where they hope to get a new cage for Nile’s lovebirds, “Niles” and “Daphne.” Frasier is in a bad mood because the phone company repairman was supposed to have shown up at his place between 9:00-12:00, but failed to show until 12:47, when Frasier had given up on him and was actually in the shower.
“When the phone company says they’ll be there between 9:00-12:00,” Frasier complains, “they’ve created a verbal contract that they’ve violated when they show up at 12:47!”
They’re pulling into the mall parking lot when they discover that the clock in Frasier’s car is an hour behind and that it they don’t turn around and leave immediately, Frasier will be late for his radio show. So instead of actually parking, they head straight for the exit. When they get there, though, the parking attendant insists they have to pay the minimum $2 parking fee. Frasier protests that his car was in constant motion until he was forced to stop at the exit by the wooden arm that prevents people from exiting without paying.
You’re parked now, the attendant points out, and then an argument ensues between them concerning whether standing stationary at the exit with, as Frasier points out, the car still running, should count as “parking.”
But the attendant is adamant. He explains that no one can exit the lot without paying at least the minimum charge of $2. It’s $2 he says for any length of time up to 20 minutes. So Frasier decides, since he explains that he refuses in principle to pay “good money for nothing,” that he is going to sit there at the exit until he has used up the full 20 minutes for which he is being forced to pay. Unfortunately, this creates a bottleneck of people behind him who are also trying to exit the lot and it isn’t long before people start honking their horns and hurling unpleasant epithets at them.
“If they weren’t so short-sighted,” protests Frasier to Niles, “they would see that I’m doing this for their own good!”
Niles appreciates the principle, but points out that they are also inconveniencing themselves in that Frasier is going to be late for his radio show. Realizing this, Frasier calls his producer, Roz, attempts to explain why he’s going to be late, and asks her to “just stall” until he gets there and that when he gets there, he’s going to give “a little speech for his listeners on the power of one.”
“Only rich people have time for this kind of crap,” complains one of the drivers stuck behind them. “Just pay the two bucks Mr. BMW!”
Fraser responds that his income and the kind of car he drives has nothing to do with his protest. Niles chimes in in agreement, “I drive a Mercedes,” he says, “and I’d have paid ten minutes ago.”
The attendant then hands Frasier a clipboard. “I told my boss,” he says in exasperation, “that I have a non-pay. Just sign the form saying you are unable to pay and that you’ll send us a check.”
“I’m certainly not going to send you a check,” declares Frasier as he hands the form back to the attendant without signing it.
“Most people don’t,” the attendant explains, “just sign the form so I can get the gate open.”
Niles observes that this is “an out” which Frasier should take, but Frasier refuses to take it because the statement that he is unable to pay is “untrue.”
So the attendant pays the $2 himself and opens the gate.
But still, Frasier refuses to budge.
“I can’t do this anymore!” exclaims Niles, who then accuses Frasier of being motivated more by his “bad mood” than by his desire for justice, and gets out of the car, birdcage in tow.
“I don’t blame you for bailing on that idiot,” the attendant says.
“He isn’t an idiot,” responds Niles, “he’s just passionate. That ‘idiot’ happens to be my brother.” Then Niles begins to have second thoughts. He peers through the window at Frasier’s forlorn face, and climbs back into the car.
“Don’t these people realize,” asks Frasier, as the increasingly unruly mob of bottlenecked motorists begins violently honking their horns at him, “that I’m on their side?”
“I don’t think they care,” explains Niles, “so long as you’re in their lane.”
Frasier then pulls himself up through his sunroof facing the crowd and begins to pontificate that he is not the enemy, that he is their champion.
“We don’t care,” responds one of the crowd. “We have places to be!”
“If you want to do something for me,” exclaims another motorist, “get out of the way!”
Frasier then explains that the reason he’s blocking the exit is that he’s being charged for parking even though he didn’t park.
“Even if it is a ripoff,” says the same motorist, “it’s better than causing a big stink.”
“Ah, but is it?” responds Frasier gesticulating. “I say no.! I say we’ve been trod upon long enough by people who are supposed to be providing us a service, by the postman who mixes up our deliveries, by the telephone repairman who swears to be there between 9:00 and noon, and yet arrives at 12:47 when you’re wearing nothing but a towel and a head full of shampoo. Well enough! I invoke my right to peaceful protest. Civil disobedience is a cornerstone of this country, for it is how the common man is heard.”
The parking attendant has, in the meantime, called a tow truck. But the driver explains that he can’t tow the car with people still in it. “You’ll have to call the police,” he explains.
“Good idea,” says one of the disgruntled motorists.
“Go ahead!” shouts Frasier. But when he ducks back down into the car, he looks nervously over at Niles and says, “I think I’ve made a mistake.”
“Maybe it’s time to back down,” suggests Niles, sagely.
“I’m not sure that I can,” responds Frasier nervously. “I am right, after all. My principles are holding me captive.”
“Your principles may have started this,” observes Niles, “but it’s your rigidity that’s kept it going.”
“My rigidity?” responds Frasier. “The rigid ones are those who operate the garage and impose such inflexible policies!”
“You’ve been given more than one opportunity,” observes Niles, “to leave without paying.”
“Yes, but that’s not the point,” explains Frasier. “They have to know why I won’t pay!” But then Niles points out that Frasier could explain this in a letter, but that he won’t be satisfied until everyone has agreed with him or has suffered for failing to.
“Do you really think that?” asks Frasier.
“I do,” responds Niles.
“That’s quite an indictment,” says Frasier dejectedly. “I never really thought of myself as uncompromising,” continues Frasier, “well, not in a bad way. I’m not sure I like this side of myself.”
“You could still change course,” observes Niles with well-modulated enthusiasm. “If you leave here without getting your full twenty-minutes worth, you’ll be the bigger person for it.”
“Yes,” responds Frasier, “but then these taunting motorists won’t know that I’m the bigger person. They’ll think they’ve gotten the better of me, or that I’m afraid to be arrested.”
“The bigger person doesn’t worry about what other people think,” observes Niles.
“Damn,” says Frasier, realizing he’s lost the argument. “I do want to be the bigger person. It’s just so hard!” and then complains that they wouldn’t be in their situation had it not been for Niles and his ridiculous bird cage. Niles then shoots Frasier and injured look, to which Frasier responds.
“Oh come on, I can only change one character flaw at a time.”
“You are not a prisoner of your character,” Niles continues. “You can decide right now that you are going to be the flexible one here. You can pay the money and go.”
“I can break my pattern,” asks Frasier excitedly. “I can just pay the money without proving to everyone that I’m right, without teaching them a lesson?”
“Exactly!,” responds Niles. “You can do it!”
But when Frasier hands the attendant what he refers to as his “ill-gotten $2,” the attendant informs him that he now owes $4 because he has just that moment exceeded the minimum twenty-minute limit.
The insult of the additional fee, is just too much on top of the injury of the original fee. Gone is the moment of enlightenment when Frasier realized he did not have to be held hostage to his principles.
“Hold on!” he yells to Niles, and then rams through the gate blocking the exit to the lot.
The closing credits show Niles apologizing to the attendant, paying the parking fee, and writing a check to cover the damage to the parking gate.
Not since Plato, I believe, have so many profound philosophical issues been packed into such brief dialogue. Many contemporary philosophers would likely concentrate on the entirely uninteresting issue of the meaning of “park,” and whether standing stationary with one’s motor running at the exit of a parking garage actually satisfies it.
The real philosophical meat, though, is in the questions such as to what extent one should inconvenience oneself, not to mention others, in the service of justice when the injustice in question is relatively innocuous. It’s in the difference between being principled and being inflexible. It’s in the difference between being principled and being domineering, and overbearing. It’s in the issue of how severely limited are the opportunities for civil disobedience allotted to the mass of humanity who must concentrate their efforts on putting food on the table. It’s in the issue of the nature of fraternal loyalty, or loyalty more generally. It’s in the problem of the apparent indifference of most people relative to issues of principle that they don’t see as immediately affecting them.
This, last issue, I believe, is actually the central issue of Plato’s Republic, which, when read closely emerges as plea to the politically disengaged to become engaged in order to avoid what Socrates calls “the greatest of penalties” of being ruled by those worse than oneself (Republic, 347a-d).
But even these issues don’t exhaust the philosophical profundity of this episode that, like most of the other episodes of the series, is so amusing one can easily miss the wisdom it contains. There is also the issue of the battle between individualism and the desire for social acceptance, a battle that rages almost constantly in the human psyche. Is Frasier wrong to inconvenience himself and a collection of innocent bystanders to make a point that, were they not inconvenienced, these bystanders would likely agree was important?
Would he be “the bigger person” if he simply paid the fee and exited the lot? Or would he simply be caving to avoid the growing anger and condemnation of the disgruntled motorists stuck behind him, not to mention the humiliation of being arrested?
Is Niles correct, that flexibility is what the situation calls for? Frasier could indeed have signed the form promising to pay, left the lot, and then written a scathing letter to the management concerning why he was not going to pay after all. But would that have had the same effect as actually creating a scene at the garage? When is creating chaos, or social disorder, important to effective civil disobedience and when not, and how does this issue relate to the nature of the injustice in question.
Is Niles’ advice motivated by a sense of fraternal loyalty, or by his own self interest? Should he stand by Frasier, even if he thinks Frasier is wrong, or would genuine loyalty consist in getting Frasier to see the error of his ways by either persuading him through argument or abandoning him there to the wrath of the drivers stuck behind him? Is loyalty even a virtue if it is interpreted to mean sticking by people even when they’re wrong? And if that isn’t what it means, what does it mean, and how is distinguished from the obligations we have to one another more generally?
Should we allow ourselves to be held hostage to what seem to us to be arbitrary and unfair rules? I remember my father getting into a heated argument once with first a waiter and then the manager of a restaurant when he attempted to use a coupon that entitled us to a free pizza of “equal value” to a pizza for which we paid. We’d actually gotten a second pizza of even lesser value to satisfy my little sister who was a pickier eater than the rest of us and so wanted her pizza with only cheese. The waiter refused to give us the second pizza for free, though, because he said it was not of “equal value,” that lesser value was not the same as “equal value.” Of course he was right, as far as the letter of the coupon went. But his refusal, and then the refusal of the manager, to give us the smaller pizza for free was ridiculous in that the wording of the coupon had clearly been intended to prevent people from trying to get more expensive, not less expensive pizzas for free. Anyone ought to have been able to see that and not been held hostage to the precise wording of the coupon.
But then perhaps both the waiter and the manager had had the same kind of wretched day as Frasier and their resultant bad moods had blinded them to what was reasonable, or even instilled in them a perverse desire to spread their misery to others.
My favorite part of the episode, though, is where Frasier says “Damn, I do want to be the bigger person. It’s just so hard!”
That’s our lot as human beings. The standards our consciences hold up to us are just a little higher than we are routinely able to meet. That’s actually, in a nutshell, Kant’s argument for the immortality of the soul. The moral law, he argues, makes an absolute demand on us, a demand we cannot help but feel obligated to try to live up to. We can see pretty clearly, though, that we are not going to succeed, at least not in the short span of this life, in consistently conforming our wills to the substance of the moral law. So we are compelled to postulate, that there must be more time available to us out there somewhere, an infinite amount of time, in fact.
The ending of the episode is just perfect. It puts me in mind of Kierkegaard’s observation that most people are like dogs that can be taught to walk on two legs. The posture doesn’t come naturally to them, though. They can sustain it only briefly, and inevitably revert to going around again on all fours. Frasier had that brief moment of enlightenment, that moment when he saw what the situation required and despite its difficulty, resolved to meet that requirement. But then, when confronted with the insult of the additional fee, that light went out. He was suddenly back down on all four wheels, raging his way through the gate that blocked the exit to the lot.
And then there was Niles, apologizing and trying to make things right again, like the better half of the human psyche.
That episode is not simply one of the most philosophically profound of the entire 11-year series. It’s one of the most hilarious. And its hilarity derives precisely from its profundity. There is human nature for you in all its glory and wretchedness. We are capable of truly profound insights, of rising above our fearful, self-preoccupied, selfish instincts, to understand the transcendent values of justice and truth — just not for very long. And it is the tenuousness of our hold on these insights that is the reason, not simply for petty squabbles in parking garages and restaurants, but for violence, and discrimination, for tyrannies, and wars, and nearly every other sort of horrific human suffering.
I don’t know how many times I have watched that episode. I watch it over and over again, just as I read Plato’s Republic over and over again. My hope is that other people do this as well, and that the sparkling wit of the dialogue serves to drive home to others, as it has to me, an insight none of us can afford to forget: that no matter how difficult, we must guard against our tendency to be less than we should be, that we must constantly struggle to be “the bigger person.”
