interview #4: rowan on niles
lesbians and wife guys and gender, oh my!
On Tuesday 26th January, I received the following email from friend of the newsletter and noted dyke and dyke-enthusiast Rowan:
This was, it transpired, a threat. Over the following few months, Rowan repeatedly tormented me with nightmare screeds about a man named Niles and how he was actually a lesbian; I am forced to imagine that this represented some type of sport to them. I publish, below, Rowan’s — let’s be generous — musings on the topic of this dykiest of wife guys, alongside my attempts to decode these missives.
Ellie: Hi Rowan!
Without trying to pitch him, why do you love Niles so much? Is loving Niles different from loving Frasier?
Rowan: Hello! I'm so excited to be repulsive about Niles Crane.
Niles Crane is a character on middling 90s sitcom Frasier and he makes my blood SEETHE. He's the brother of Frasier Crane, who is also, I guess, there on the show Frasier, the son of once-a-cop-always-a-cop Martin Crane, and the pathetic little swain of inscrutable Bri'ish caricature Daphne Moon. I first watched the show with you, Ellie, in a room in St Catz College in Oxford during an otherwise indistinct summer when my brain was just straight up rotting away. My love was total and swift! I was roused! I spent the rest of that summer watching Frasier and eating limes and ignoring the many significant things I needed to talk about with my family. It was pretty neat.
I can't really talk about what I love about Niles Crane, because the answer is I love: him, so instead I'll just gesture towards some things Niles Crane is, to whit:
A limp wrist
A rumpled dress shirt
A waif
A naïf
A Grail knight
Not having a good day
A lesser moon
The only person for whom I think a tonsure would make sense as a haircut
A 'man'
Gay but only in the way that villains and Englishmen were in Hays-Code-Era Hollywood, which is to say, suspiciously
Someone I personally could bully, which is saying a great deal
Passio
Quavering
Get this: a dyke, actually
Hope that answers your question!
Re: is loving Niles different from loving Frasier?, I can only say that it's like when you, Ellie, tried to explain the Monty Hall Problem to me: my brain glances off the concept, which enrages me, like the sun flashing on a magnifying glass, and latches onto the goats behind the two doors. You're talking about, like, I don't know, maths, and I'm thinking, wow. Hope those goats are glutting themselves on a wide array of grains and grasses back there! Hope those goats are just happy to have gotten the call! The Monty Hall Problem is the show Frasier, and Niles is the Goats.
Hope that clears things up!
E: Thanks so much for this!!! That answers so many of my questions so directly and literally, I'm inspired.
Anyway, I'm interested in hearing you describe your favourite Niles Crane Moments and elaborate on the Niles of it all.
R: I enjoy Niles at his most hysterical, pathetic, denuded. There's an episode during the arc of his divorce from his first wife, the never-seen Maris, where he wears a cardigan. I can't find the episode, because googling 'niles frasier sad cardigan' didn't take me places, but I think of that cardigan as the Pathos Cardigan. When I was a kid I didn't really get what empathy was, but there were certain isolated images that would suddenly crack me open and startle me with the 'oh!' of seeing someone in a familiar pain. Like, I remember I was in a park and I saw an old guy sitting on a bench alone and he just looked ruined. Like every inch of his old body, his old clothes, was deserted. And I never knew what people were feeling but I reckoned this man's loneliness entirely, and then I was past him. What I'm saying is sometimes the heart is riveted to a suspended image of a person — old man in park, crucifix hanging in church — and that's what happened with me and Niles and his ratty little Pathos Cardigan. There are other Niles Suspendeds — like, Niles naked in Maris' sensory deprivation tank, Niles hiding under the piano, Niles hyperventilating into a paper bag. These are moments that a) make me baffled as to why no one has cast David Hyde Pierce as Blanche DuBois, not even ONCE; b) kill me substantially. Is Niles like this always? No. Often he's finnicky and rotten and bitchy and snobbish and supercilious and, at one excellent point, literally sabre-rattling. But he SUFFERS, Ellie! He SUFFERS! And what kind of ‘“‘“man”’”’ does that ruin him into???
E: I don't know, Rowan, what kind of “‘“‘“man”’”’” does that ruin him into?
R: OH ELLIE I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED. I'm going to try to explain the kind of shall-we-say 'man' of which I speak. There's a genre of men who are striving so much to be good, but they're after a goodness their world can't accommodate, and so they suffer, and that suffering deforms them into not-quite-men. I find them endlessly compelling. Like, Percival in the Grail Quest. Archetypal virgin twink, raised ignorant of 'the ways of men' (ok) by his mother, passes into this exclusively masculine domain, has to endure his way through becoming the grail-hero, attains the grail by dint of a suffering purity that is, IMO, inextricable from just not really knowing how to be a man — or not knowing how to be a man like that/like them. Or Harry Goodsir (that's his honest-to-God name! Just commit to the bit and call him Harry Imperiled-Virtuous-Masculinity!) in AMC's The Terror. He has this soft-handed soft-lipped courtesy that's almost comically incongruous in the Arctic these men are dying through — it's like a cotillion in the Bermuda Triangle, it doesn't make sense. And so he suffers, and his body becomes a meal, and he sees flowers when he dies. I am loath to include Jesus in this list, but like... it is Jesus! It is, regrettably, also Jesus.
And, moreover, it is Niles Crane. OH he wants to be a Good Man so badly. Unfortunately, however, it appears that the only rulebook to hand when he was trying to discern what that meant was not, say, the butch cop lay-down-the-law masculinity of his father, but like, a Ren Fair/early Disney chivalric conduct guide. To return to Niles's evocative costuming, I've always been struck by how when Niles dresses up as a man (!) it's always in these deeply anachronistic/anatopic modes. Like: pirate! cowboy! flounce-shirted fencer! Cyrano de Bergerac! It's like a child's picture of what A Man Looks Like. Whereas, when Frasier wants to be seen to be a man, he strips off layers — there's his brawny, hairy chest, his booming voice, his inchoate rage, yep, sure looks like a man — Niles heaps on costumes, gestures, affects. And the performance flounders every time. He shoots for Cyrano and ends up more, like, the bodiced fainting comtessa twitching a fan and bleating 'fie! fie!' There's no sleight of hand: he's showing his work, he's trying so hard it's excruciating. The show Frasier, always obsessively concerned with failure, prods you to laugh at these misfires. But I, like God, love a trier, and I keep being moved by Niles's hapless drag, more than I ever expect.
A lot of this pivots around Daphne, whom Niles loves. Daphne is absolutely the victim of some of the show's worst writing. She's fascinating in lots of ways — particularly in relation to the jokes the show makes about her trauma and class, as well as the eternal weirdness of what/when Americans think Britain is — but she spends most of her time operating as Oblivious Torment for Niles. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if a fictional man is ardently, quietly devoted to a fictional woman, I have a hard time reading it as anything other than dykey. Like, I know men can be and have been in love!! But there's something about this anxious, self-abnegating, ruinous attachment that is very... you know......... It makes him into something else, is what I'm saying.
E: At some point we're going to have to create a Canon of Failed Masculinities — I'd like to nominate Tobias from Arrested Developmentfor it. It struck me that one of the reasons he can never quite achieve masculinity is that (as I wrote in my newsletter on Fight Club, coincidentally) masculinity likes to think of itself as unperformed — Judith Butler at one point writes that 'for a "woman" performing masculinity... is always, in effect, to perform a little less, given that femininity is cast as the spectacular gender',1 but Niles only ever performs more, and therefore unavoidably fails. I suppose my actual question — I'm told I should have one of those — is: you call Niles's performance of masculinity 'drag', but is it that he's failing in his performance of masculinity and therefore creating an 'inferior' version, or is he creating something else? If he starts outside of masculinity and can never quite get himself inside of it, where does he end up?
R: I want to answer this by talking about what, for my money, is the show's queerest episode:season 5's 'Room Service'. A plot run-down: Frasier's ex-wife and the show's other unequivocal dyke, Lilith Sternin, comes back into town following her second husband's coming-out and the breakdown of their marriage ('Brian was looking for someone a bit more feminine... and he found him.'). Niles is in the middle of his nightmare divorce from Maris. Frasier, attracted to Lilith's new vulnerability, agonises over seducing her. Meanwhile, Lilith and Niles are thrown together, have sex, are discovered by Frasier, and, in the show's tradition, shenanigans ensue.
Much of Frasier is premised on the Frasier/Niles comparison. Niles wasn't part of the show's original concept: the role was written for David Hyde Pierce because he had an uncanny resemblance to a ten-years-younger Kelsey Grammer. According to DHP the role was sold to him as 'what Frasier would be if he had never gone to Boston and never been exposed to the people at Cheers' — a reference to the Frasier character's origin on that earlier show. So little-brother Niles is conceptualised as this enervated, underdeveloped Frasier, failing not because of life's hard knocks but through lack of exposure to them. He's a copy of a copy, a feebly xerox-ed little guy in a too-large suit. In this schema, Niles' over-performed masculinity necessarily becomes what you describe: an inferior version, a poor relation. As Frasier says, 'I'm a teamster compared to you.'
What I like about 'Room Service' is that this emasculating moment for Frasier — his brother, not him, taking his ex-wife to bed — isn't a rare valorisation of Niles' masculinity. It reads as something closer to a queer exploration of alternative identifications. Lilith, the not-quite-human-woman, and Niles, the not-quite-human-man — to borrow and bastardise a term used early in the show to describe Maris — are both wildly gender-troubled in this episode. Like, look at this scene from the shooting script:
NILES Why did you have to look so damned bewitching all evening?
LILITH Oh, so it was my fault, Mr. Sweet-and-Attentive? Why’d you have to drive me home and walk me to my door?
NILES The way the moonlight bathed your alabaster shoulders –
LILITH Your sensitive and manly touch –
NILES Yours too.
LILITH Take me.
They dive for each other but then pull up short.
LILITH We've got to resist this. It's wrong.
NILES Of course it is. Last night was simply two wounded people acting out of loneliness and confusion.
Obviously, this is hot, and it was binned from the final cut because America is rife with cowards. Confused about WHAT, Niles? Lonely for WHAT? Resisting WHAT?? At this point no one's mentioned Frasier's name, which leaves room for more unspeakable attractions ('Yours too.' 'Take me.') to fizzle through the dialogue. There's also this moment that did make it to screen, when they're frantically trying to explain themselves to Frasier:
LILITH Just listen; the past few days have been THE worst of my life. I have never been less self-assured, or more in need of validation, both as a person and especially as a woman. Niles was feeling the same thing.
NILES Exactly. (realizing) Wait a minute...
MUCH TO THINK ABOUT. This stupid show constantly thematises twentieth-century psychiatry tropes, and I'm not supposed to obsess over a Freudian slip? The flash of recognition, the realization, the walk-back — it's such a deeply queer instant of possibility, and DHP (who is, incidentally, gay) plays it with remarkable sincerity.
I think we see little abortive moments like this all through the show, when Niles' tangles with gender look like they just might lead him someplace else. But sitcom stasis locks in — no one changes, no one learns, and next week Niles is back to anxiously measuring himself against Frasier, copying and slipping and copying and making himself so very unhappy.
E: A Crime that the first quote was cut from the episode, to be honest. I'm interested in your mention of sitcom stasis stepping in here to prevent Niles taking his gender questioning further. While obviously sitcom stasis is a real thing, especially for those core character traits/interactions, Niles does in other respects change quite a bit, between divorcing Maris, getting together with Daphne, and growing to at least tolerate Roz. Why do those things change while his gender tends to stay the same? What effect does their changing have on his gender — especially given that a lot of Niles's development has to do with how he relates to the women in his life?
R: Ok, coming clean — almost nothing I've said thus far applies to late-Frasier Niles. What can I say! I'm a homosexual, not a journalist. It's generally agreed that the show low-key jumps the shark between season 7 and 8, when Daphne and Niles get together — though it gets more assured again in the last couple of seasons. There are many reasons for this — writers' room shakeups, Jane Leeves' maternity leave meaning that her and DHP don't really have space to organically develop the Niles/Daphne relationship on an equal footing (her pregnancy was also explained in-show by the 'fat Daphne' plotline, for which all responsible should be tried at the Hague). In the immortal tradition of decade-long sitcoms, characters bloat and drift out of their original stylings. Frasier, in particular, is drawn bigger and broader, spending increasing amounts of time in thwarted-clown mode, which I only like in little birdseed doses.
But a lot of the strangeness of late Frasier, I think, is due to The Trouble with Niles. The Trouble with Niles is that he stops being lonely. Frasier spent years establishing a character who was bone-deep sad almost all of the time, and then, over the course of season 7's 40-minute finale, he isn't. Like, indulge me momentarily in coming back to the courtly-knight comparison and drawing from the deep well of knowledge I acquired through 2.5 Malory lectures in second year undergrad. The knight lives in the reach towards the beloved, the forever-deferral of favour. The rule is that I want doesn't get, and when I want does get, the story is over. Niles' story doesn't end for four more seasons. There's stasis and there's stasis. Pre-Daphne Niles is running on the spot; post-Daphne Niles judders to a stop, lets his hands hang at his side, looks around, bewildered, at everything he's come to have. Something similar happened with Chandler, another classic gay-but-not-actually '90s yearner, when he got together with Monica on Friends. When characters built to want stop wanting, their energy seeps away, and their sporadic frenzies feel empty.
I do actually like a lot of things about the Niles of this era. He becomes a better brother and a better friend. I love his companionship with Roz (subtextually gay birds of a feather flock together). In the better episodes, there's a softness and a sweetness to him which does feel earned. But there are also some straight-up character misfires. Not least of these is the fact that the show keeps doing jokes about Niles being good at sex with Daphne, when I KNOW for a FACT he is NOT; the very idea that he doesn't have a heaving post-coital weep every time is a rank insult to me as a viewer. More significantly, the lack of internal conflict — wanting — forces the show to pin conflict on forces outside its core cast, mostly in the form of Daphne's working-class English family, who are less fully realised characters and more rejected Dickens side-plots doing overenthusiastic dialect work. This, in turn, energises the pettiest, hollowest aspects of Niles' character. He spends much of the show's finale fretting that his and Daphne's children will take after THOSE OIKS rather than acquiring the delicate palates and finely-turned wrists of the Crane men. I'm not saying sitcom characters are obliged to be 'good' or 'not classist', and God knows there are stupider things about this show, but it's still regrettable that Frasier let Niles lapse out of the fun neuroses by dint of The Love of a Good Woman and left us with this dross.
Does that answer your question? It doesn't, does it. I'll swivel back to the point and say that pre- and post-Daphne Niles have different genders, insofar as one of them is a dyke, and one of them is an errant wife guy. I am fine with both! But only one can be Beloved My Niles.
E: Although I agree that Niles in later seasons is a very different character, I'm interested in the fact that a lot of his more annoying traits in the later seasons were always there — he's always been a snob, for instance — but the whole thing worked, somehow, possibly because of that core of yearning/suffering that it all happened around. His snobbishness spoke to a genuine insecurity and his difficulty relating to his father, etc., but when he's happy and well-adjusted that isn't there anymore. You say that this turns him from dyke to wife guy; but many dykes are wife guys, I'd suggest, and anyway the wife guy is always oriented towards women in a way which, implicitly, always destabilises masculinity. Would you agree with my suggestion that Niles seems to find a way to more stably do... whatever it is he's doing through his connections withwith women, and therefore that what he's doing still isn't quite masculinity? Or am I missing something? And anyway, what is it that he is doing?
R: 'What's he doing? What's he doing??' is precisely the question I asked, gleefully, through 11 seasons of this show at pretty much every one of DHP's line reads, so we're on the same page. The dyke-v-wife-guy distinction is a fine one; you're right that many dykes are wife guys, and many wife guys are dykes (I have certainly been both in my time). But I would say that wife guys who are not also dykes have a certain sleek, smug assuredness that is distinctive. The Wife, to her Guy, is a boast, a lovely mirror (look at my wife! look at me!). You know the Borat-voice 'mywaifffe' that elides 'my' and 'wife' into one long strange subterranean bleat? It's very that — Wife is My as much as she is Wife. And we do see this self-satisfied, proprietary quality in how Niles treats Daphne in the later seasons. I think you've put your finger on it when you say that the faults are the same, but the core is lacking: this smugness has always been part of him, but, previously, it was just one unfortunate byproduct spewing out of the white-hot nucleus of self-hatred that is early Niles.
However, you are also right that there remains much of the 'still-isn't-quite' about late Niles. I want to look at another Episode Case Study here: season 9, ep 3, 'The First Temptation of Daphne'. The basic plot is that Niles has a patient who's convinced she's in love with him due to transference (side note: I find it incredibly funny that this show refuses to acknowledge any psychiatry post-Freud and Jung. There have been four psychiatrists in human history, and two of them are Niles and Frasier Crane). Daphne sees his notes by accident, feels threatened by this woman, and becomes obsessed with figuring out who she is; Niles begs her to drop it because patient confidentiality; Daphne doesn't; shenanigans ensue. So far, so Frazh.
Most of this episode is peak Wife Guy Niles. Daphne is being silly, Niles is being good at his job; he loves her for her devotion, but feels obliged to put her (gently, pat-pat on the head) back in her place. The plot also runs on an implicit parallel between Niles as he was before Daphne loved him back, and Daphne now: Niles was pulling exactly this kind of violating, unethical, I-know-it's-wrong-but-I-love-her shit constantly, particularly in the early seasons. Because of the awkwardness of season 8 and its handling of Jane Leeves' maternity leave, this apparent new maturity gap feels like a pivot for which the groundwork hasn't been fully laid. It's jarring! I don't care for it!
And then matters between them come to a head, and I am smacked roundabout the head with this:
NILES You don't trust me. How could you possibly think there could be somebody else?
DAPHNE Because I was somebody else.
NILES What?
DAPHNE You were married to two other women while you claimed to be in love with me. Now that we're together how can I be sure, really sure, that there won't ever be another "somebody else"?
NILES Because I would never...
He pauses.
NILES Because this time it's different. Our love is different. It's not based on somebody's expectations or... or anything I'm supposed to be. When I was with Maris, or with Mel, I found myself thinking about you. Going about my day or even when I was in a session, I found myself thinking about you. Well, now we're together. I find myself thinking about you. It's not going to stop.
Our love is different. It's not based on somebody's expectations or... or anything I'm supposed to be. You know, like dykes say!
This is the best of Niles and Daphne as a concept. In relation to, and with, her, he becomes more himself. He stops looking in at himself from the outside, minutely assessing how he doesn't measure up. He stops fabricating other lives, he puts himself in the middle of his own. It's like... sitcom-rest, as opposed to sitcom-stasis. I think this idea of becoming-with women does register as queer; I think it's the 'whatever it is he's doing... with women' that you identify. These moments are rare, but I WILL snuffle around for them, like a gay little truffle-pig.
E: That's an immensely sweet line from Niles. It reminds me of a Cameron Awkward-Rich line2 I'm incapable of not bringing up at every opportunity:
Desire, that which causes us to reach for something outside of ourselves, always arises from a wound that we would like the object of our desire to heal. And although desire always exceeds the object, although the wound remains open, we remain attached both because the promise of closure is not broken, merely and perpetually deferred, but also and most importantly because something usable is produced by the attachment.
What Awkward-Rich gets, I think, is that desire is always in a sense about our inadequacy — and for it to be desire, it can never actually be satisfied. Is the issue with late Niles that he stops wanting so visibly, is less insufficient to the task of being who he wants to be? And what do you think it says that he can only really be compelling — and a dyke — if he's unsatisfied, insufficient?
R: I have been thinking about this a lot. Over the course of these exchanges, I've become concerned that I'm positing a vision of being a dyke, both in a Niles-specific context and more generally, that's about lack, lapses, bad wanting, hapless gendering. And I want to stress that these are not the sole constitutive experiences of dykedom! Being a dyke is abundant and stupid and hot and greedy and a million other things all at terrible once! The weedy rank-green fields of dykedom teem with want and satisfaction, reaching and rest, grief and ecstasy! The dyke's cup runneth over! It's honestly pretty great!
However, I guess it's time to, as the kids say, tell on myself, because you're right — that's not what I look for in Beloved My Niles. There may well be people who find it gratifying to watch fictional cis men performing masculinity without hitch or qualm (if this is you, email me,3 I'm fascinated), but I am not among their number. IF I WERE TO put myself on Niles Crane's stupid cod-Freud therapist couch, I might say that there is something.. perhaps... not wholly unrelatable....... in Niles' calamitous swings-and-misses at masculinity, and at happiness as bound up with the attainment of that masculinity. I might say that this sense of watching masculinity from the outside, deforming its gestures, fashioning something else entirely by mistake, doesn't not resonate with my experience. I might say that there is comfort in watching someone who is, in theory if not in practice, a straight cisgender man, flunk out of the gender meant to be his inheritance. Coming back to that wonderful Awkward-Rich quote, I might say that gender is an object of desire as much as anything else, and one of the consolations of desire's tyrannous insufficiency is watching other people in that familiar, impossible posture of reach.
What I might say — what I'm saying — is that this nightmare cathexis I feel in the general direction of Niles is not wholly disinterested. And I'm pissy about late-Frasier Niles, I think, because the more he Gets It Right, the more I lose him in the reach, and the more it's like... ok, I'm just watching a man, I guess. I know I'm serving big 'is this TV show my friend?' energy right now, but again, I am not a scholar or a journalist! I am a homosexual! In love! With character-on-middling-nineties-sitcom-Frasier Niles Crane! Forgive me!!!
Judith Butler, ‘Melancholy gender—refused identification,’ Psychoanalytic Dialogues 5, no. 2 (1995): 176-77. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481889509539059.
Cameron Awkward Rich, ‘Trans, Feminism: Or, Reading like a Depressed Transsexual,’ Signs 42, no. 4 (Summer 2017): 831. https://doi.org/10.1086/690914.
Rowan can be reached at nil******yke@gmail.com.